When we look to history, there is much to be learned about human rights. We may find that local and global movements were born from particular events — often traumatic, and with great political, health and environmental impacts. Can the past inspire change for the future through activism and advocacy?
Please join the Roosevelt University community for the Joseph Loundy Human Rights Project’s 2022 Symposium and Luncheon on Wed 11/30 from 11am to 1pm in WB 418 at RU’s Chicago Campus. Distinguished guest panelists will explore the intersection of history, health policy and environmental sustainability, and how each individually and collectively can promote human rights and social justice.
Students will also present work from three related courses in RU’s College of Arts & Sciences: Public Health Issues and Ideas, taught by professor La Vonne Downey; Service and Sustainability, led by professor Mike Bryson; and Transatlantic Perspectives: Representing History and Trauma, co-taught by professors Margaret Rung (RU) and Arnoud-Jan Bijsterveld (Tilburg University, the Netherlands).
Featured Distinguished Panelists:
Mike Beard, global health director for the Better World Campaign
Diana Sierra Becerra, assistant professor of history at University of Massachusetts Amhurst
Gina Ramirez, Midwest outreach leader for the Natural Resources Defense Council, board president of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, and RU alum (MA Sociology ’14)
While Millennials and Gen Zers are leading the way on climate change activism and environmental justice here in 2019, their passion for change and stalwart efforts against seemingly insurmountable barriers are inspired by and built upon the efforts of previous generations of environmental advocates. On such champion — local conservationist, activist, writer, editor, film documentarian, and policymaker Lee Botts (1928-2019) — died this past Saturday in Oak Park, IL.
“Lee Botts was editor of the Herald during the late 1960s implementation of the urban renewal plans,” said Herald Chairman Bruce Sagan, who has owned the newspaper since 1953. “Her objective journalism was a crucial component of the civic discussion during that complex history.”
In 1968, she joined the staff of the Open Lands Project in Chicago. From 1971 to 1975, she was the founding executive director of the Lake Michigan Federation, which is today the Alliance for the Great Lakes. Under Botts’ leadership, the new organization persuaded Mayor Richard J. Daley to have Chicago become the first Great Lakes city to ban phosphates in laundry detergents, led U.S. advocacy for the first binational Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1972, was a key advocate for the landmark federal Clean Water Act of 1972 and played a key role in persuading Congress to ban PCBs via the 1974 Toxic Chemicals Control Act.
After a short stint with the Environmental Protection Agency Region 5 office in Chicago, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to head to the Great Lakes Basin Commission in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1977. After the agency was eliminated from the federal budget, Botts held a research faculty appointment at Northwestern University from 1981 to 1985.
She joined the senior staff of Mayor Harold Washington in 1985, organizing the city’s first-ever Department of the Environment. In 1986, with Washington’s endorsement and support, Botts ran for the board of the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago but lost by 2%.
Botts relocated to Northwest Indiana in 1988, where she became an adjunct professor at a local college and joined various boards and committees. While living in Gary’s Miller Beach neighborhood, she began advocating for an idea she’d first written about a quarter-century earlier: the Indiana Dunes Environmental Learning Center, which she helped found in 1997.
An independent non-profit located within Indiana Dunes National Park, the Dunes Learning Center offers year-round environmental education programs and overnight nature-camp experiences for grade-school students and teachers. Today, nearly 10,000 students come to the center each year from school systems throughout Indiana, Michigan and Illinois. Botts initially chaired the institution’s board of directors.
For many years, Botts suggested that the modern history of the Indiana Dunes region could become an engaging documentary film. With director Patricia Wisniewski, she began working on making “Lee’s dunes film” in 2010, writing the film’s script, conducting many of the interviews, leading the fundraising effort and traveling to promote the project, even after she was no longer able to drive her own car.
“Shifting Sands: On The Path To Sustainability” was released in 2016 and won a regional Emmy Award. To date, it has been broadcast on more than 70 public-television stations, included in several major film festivals and screened by scores of local citizens’ groups and public libraries throughout the states bordering Lake Michigan.
Botts was awarded a citation from the United Nations Environmental Program for making a difference for the global environment in 1987, the 2008 Gerald I. Lamkin Award from the Society of Innovators at Purdue University Northwest and honorary doctorates from Indiana University and Calumet College of St. Joseph. She was inducted into the Indiana Conservation Hall of Fame in 2009.
A person who did any one of the above accomplishments would rightly be lauded for the impact of their work on behalf of people and the environment. The fact that Lee Botts did all this and more — through her own will, dedication, and fierce advocacy as well as her ability to connect and collaborate with others — is nothing short of astounding.
This is a picture of a radical environmentalist: Lee Botts in her backyard at home in Gary, IN (photo provided by Paul Botts, published in the Post-Tribune 6 Oct 2019)
See these sources for more information on Lee Botts:
I was honored to be interviewed for this Chicago Tonight special report on the current status of Bubbly Creek, aka the South Fork of the South Branch of the Chicago River. This was an effort by students in the DePaul University Center for Journalism Integrity and Excellence. Legendary local TV journalist Carol Marin came to my RU office in downtown Chicago, where we chatted about the Creek’s history and present condition while the students filmed us. Take a look, and let me know if anyone can saying “capping the sludge” better than Carol!
Here in my hometown of Joliet IL, we have several architectural gems in the old downtown along the east bank of the Des Plaines River. Prominent among these is the acclaimed Rialto Theatre, which I’ve written about previously in my stint as a citizen journalist for the Joliet Herald-News.
The Rialto Theatre, Joliet IL, c. the late 1920s (Photo: Legends of America)
Often referred to as the “Jewel of Joliet,” the Rialto is one of the most ornate and fantastically splendid theaters in the US that dates from the golden age of movie and vaudeville house construction in the 1920s. It is an inseparable part of Joliet’s civic identity — not to mention one of the things that kept the struggling downtown district from withering away in the post-industrial era.
Given this history, it’s shocking but probably not surprising that when the Rialto was only about 50+ years old, it was nearly demolished to put in a one-square-block parking lot in the late 1970s (a dark time indeed in Joliet’s history when unemployment in the city reached 25%). Fortunately, this travesty of architectural desecration did not happen. This excellent story by Bob Okon of the Herald-News explains why.
Dorothy Mavrich, Credited with Saving Rialto, Dies
By Bob Okon Published: Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2015 6:59 p.m. CST in the Joliet Herald-News
Dorothy Mavrich at the Rialto in 2008 (Shaw Media)
JOLIET – Dorothy Mavrich, who led a grassroots effort to save the Rialto Square Theatre from demolition, died Tuesday afternoon.
Mavrich, 94, decided at a point in the 1970s when the Rialto, now called the “Jewel of Joliet,” appeared headed for demolition that the theater should be saved.
She stood on street corners with a can to collect money and raise awareness, led fundraisers, and persisted in pursuing the Rialto owners to the point that one labeled her a “crackpot.”
Some over the years have disputed whether she got more credit for saving the Rialto than deserved, pointing to former state Rep. LeRoy Van Duyne’s influence in bringing in state money to ultimately close the deal.
But Mavrich is widely seen as the leader of the cause and the person most responsible for preserving the Rialto.
“There’s no doubt that she started the groundswell, the grassroots effort to save the place,” said James Smith, chairman of the Will County Metropolitan Exposition and Auditorium Authority that oversees the Rialto.
“She was a little lady with big ideas,” said Lynne Lichtenauer, a longtime friend who joined the cause early and later became executive director at the Rialto. “If it were not for Dorothy, the Rialto Square Theatre would not be on Chicago Street.”
Lichtenauer was with Mavrich when she died at the Joliet Area Community Hospice home. Mavrich had a stroke last week, Lichtenauer said.
She noted that Mavrich not only worked to save the Rialto, but later led the creation of the Cultural Arts Council of the Joliet Area, which provided more than $400,000 in local funding for the arts.
Mavrich was a piano teacher for 50 years. She taught at the old Joliet Conservatory of Music, located across the street from the Rialto. She told The Herald-News that she was at a concert listening to the Rialto pipe organ when she was inspired to save the theater.
“I thought, ‘My God, I can’t believe they’re going to tear this down for a parking garage,'” she told The Herald-News in 2013 as she was about to receive an award from the Joliet Area Historical Museum.
Mavrich’s persistence was evident in a story about her insistence on seeing Robert Rubens of the Rubens family, which owned the Rialto and whose name is on the sign today. Lichtenauer said Mavrich finally walked into Rubens office when there was no secretary to keep her out.
“She said, ‘I’m Dorothy Mavrich.’ He said, ‘You’re the crackpot everybody keeps telling me about,'” Lichtenauer said.
Eventually Rubens gave his blessing to Mavrich’s preservation effort, Lichtenauer said. And she later helped get the Rubens name back on the Rialto sign.
Mavrich loved telling the story, said Smith, who heard it many times himself.
“She was such a diminutive little lady,” Smith said, “but she was a powerful person.”
The Rialto Square Theatre Foundation, the organization that raises money to support the theater today, issued a statement saying, “Our community has lost a guiding light – Dorothy Mavrich, the lady who saved the Rialto.”
Leonard Dubkin (1905-1972) was a businessman, journalist, naturalist, and nature writer who lived and worked in Chicago.A contemporary of the much more well-known Nelson Algren and Studs Terkel, Dubkin is a long-neglected urban nature writer of the 20th century whose journalism and books provide a unique and fascinating window into Chicago’s environmental history and urban landscape during a period of immense social and biological change in America’s cities.
Dubkin’s life was both humble and extraordinary, rife with early obstacles and replete with fascinating episodes worthy of a melodramatic up-from-his-bootstraps narrative. His early years were marked by poverty and a dogged determination to make something of himself. Dubkin was born in Odessa, Russia, in 1905; his family emigrated soon thereafter to the United States and in 1907 they settled on the near West Side of Chicago, an area of the city that served as a portal for Jewish immigrants, particularly those of Eastern-European ancestry. One of seven children and the oldest boy of the family, young Leonard cultivated an interest in the natural world from the time he was nine years old, and spent a great deal of time exploring various neighborhoods in the city in search of birds, insects, and other wild creatures in the scraps of natural areas within the urban environment he would later recall as some of his “secret places.”[i]
An alley in a Chicago slum, c. 1908 (source: Chicago Historical Society)
Dubkin’s family knew poverty on a daily basis during his early years in Chicago, as did many in their tenement neighborhood characterized by overcrowding and economic hardship. Dubkin’s father was chronically ill with lead poisoning from his work as a housepainter in Russia, and was unable to work during his time in Chicago; his mother kept the family going by taking in sewing work and accepting the help of local Jewish charities. Though he left school before finishing eighth grade so he could work to help support his family, Dubkin nevertheless kept collecting animal specimens, exploring out-of-the-way pockets of urban nature, writing down his observations in a journal, and cultivating an ambition to become a naturalist. He also fought his own battle with a debilitating illness: around the age of 15, he contracted encephalitis and lapsed into a coma that lasted almost a year during which he resided at a sanitarium in nearby Winfield, Illinois. Awakening suddenly to the surprise of doctors and delight of his family, Dubkin built up his strength during a long recovery period by playing tennis — and such was his athleticism that he soon became a ranked player in the city public leagues.
From childhood onward, Dubkin worked a variety of jobs — from cleaning out taverns to driving a cab to starting his own businesses — to support himself and his family, and though a modest and relatively unassuming person in general, he possessed an undeniably entrepreneurial spirit. As a young man and aspiring author determined, in rather romantic fashion, to cultivate the attitude and garner the life experiences he felt were necessary to a writer, he left Chicago and traveled around the country by riding the rails, hobo-style. When he ran short of money, he would stop at a city of some size and drum up work as a reporter for one of the local papers for awhile, before catching another freight train for different pastures. In this way over a period of perhaps two years or so, he wrote briefly for papers such as the Times-Picayune in New Orleans and the Sacramento Bee, honing his journalism skills and soaking up impressions of different places and people. After his return to Chicago, he made the city his home the remainder of his life, despite the fact that his mother and six siblings all relocated to Los Angeles.
Dubkin once lost a job as Chicago Daily News reporter after blowing an assignment to cover a murder story (itself a fascinating and humorous anecdote he would later recount as the “Racine Case” in his two of his books) by watching squirrels in the attic of the primary suspect’s home while the latter returned to the scene of the crime and was caught by police. Ironically, he claimed to be grateful for being set free, as writing about human affairs bored him in comparison to his passion for chronicling the activities of the natural world. Yet the demands of paying the rent kept him hustling after work even as he nurtured his artistic inclinations and fascination with nature. After several months of fruitlessly searching for newspaper work, he started a one-man public relations firm which lasted a few years, and it was through his publicity work for a local radio station that he met actress and his future wife, Muriel Schwartz, at a radio industry party. During the early years of the Great Depression, he capitalized on (and further cemented) his intimate knowledge of Chicago’s streets and neighborhoods by working as a cab driver. In the 1930s, he started yet another business enterprise: a talent directory of Chicago stage and radio actors, which he updated and published yearly up through the mid-1950s.
Undated photo of Dubkin in his office at Lerner Newspapers in Chicago (source: P. Dubkin Yearwood)
Finally, from the late ’50s onward, he worked full-time as a reporter and columnist for Lerner Newspapers, which produced a diverse offering of neighborhood weeklies for various Chicago neighborhoods. This great variety of experiences and jobs exemplifies not just his industriousness and entrepreneurship, but also the scope and depth of his creative energies. While his day jobs limited his natural history and creative writing activities to being after-hours pursuits rather than his primary focus, they provided him a measure of middle-class economic stability and even supplied him with a narrative theme he would explore in several books — the ongoing tension between the impulse to observe and commune with urban nature and the demands of earning a living in modern America.
As his keeping of a childhood nature journal indicates, Dubkin carved out an early identity as a naturalist-writer, and his facility with language earned him a journalism gig as a young teenager when he started writing a weekly nature column in the Saturday children’s page of the Chicago Daily News. Not only did this employment eventually lead to life-long work in journalism as a reporter, columnist, and urban naturalist, it provided the occasion for a transformative meeting between young Dubkin and one of Chicago’s greatest historical figures. As Dubkin recounts, he would take his handwritten drafts to nearby Hull House to type them up, for the staff allowed him to use their office equipment. When one of these times the “head lady” asked him what he was working on, he stunned her by replying he was typing up his articles for the Daily News and showed her a copy of his latest column which he happened to have in his pocket for just such an auspicious occasion.
She read my article, which was about migratory instinct in birds. “Do you always write about nature?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, “I’m going to be a naturalist when I grow up.”
“Don’t you think you need a typewriter to be a naturalist?”
“Sure I do. And some day I’m going to be able to afford to buy one.”
She asked me where I lived, and after I told her she walked away. A few days later a man delivered a package to our house, addressed to me. Inside was a brand new typewriter from the kind lady at Hull House. Her name was Jane Addams. (My Secret Places 17)
Because his formal education was cut short, Dubkin never became a professional scientist as he once fantasized; instead of fretting over this missed opportunity, though, he transformed it into a narrative theme. His writings are peppered with amusing encounters between himself, as the amateur naturalist/narrator, and professional scientists from Chicago-area institutions. The contrasts he drew between the two perspectives illustrate not just his respect for (and, to some degree, insecurity about) the authority of science as arbiter of knowledge, but also his view that institutionalized science could be cold and detached.
Nevertheless, Dubkin was as much enthralled by science as he was by nature itself, and from an early age steeped himself in the writings of naturalists from Darwin to Ernest Thompson Seton. He also held scientists such as Darwin, Mendel, and Einstein in the highest regard — not just for their technical acumen and writing ability, but for their ability to think critically and experimentally, to “come to . . . [nature] with a question, with just the right question, and who have the kind of minds that know how to go about getting an answer” (Natural History of a Yard 55). Consequently, Dubkin always grounded his observations of the natural world in his extensive reading of both popular and technical scientific literature, which he accessed not through formal training but in the diverse collections of Chicago’s public libraries — his substitute for a university experience.
In contrast to his experiences with science, Dubkin’s literary ambitions were much more fully realized and he carved out a singular niche as an urban naturalist-writer. His early dreams of becoming a naturalist and a writer were fulfilled most resoundingly by his string of urban nature writing books, published between 1944 and 1972, which creatively fused autobiography and natural history. These works included The Murmur of Wings (1944), Enchanted Streets (1947), The White Lady (1952), Wolf Point (1953), The Natural History of a Yard (1955), and My Secret Places (1972). Dubkin was a dedicated and prolific writer who kept a daily journal throughout his life; wrote hundreds of letters to family and friends, most notably to his wife, Muriel, who was both his muse and sounding-board; published hundreds of newspaper columns and scores of book reviews; and developed a variety of creative projects that never saw the light of day, including novels and a natural history from the viewpoint of the family dog amusingly entitled “Letters from Pepsi.”
As a journalist, Dubkin worked for several papers penning nature columns over the course of his life, including that youthful gig the Chicago Daily News and a brief stint at the Chicago Tribune that ended abruptly when he offended the Tribune’s publisher, Robert R. McCormick, by impugning the character and motives of life-list-constructing “bird lovers” — one of whom was McCormick’s wife. Later on, from the late 1950s until his death in 1972, he maintained a long-standing position at Lerner Newspapers in Chicago as a news reporter and nature writer; his popular “Birds and Bees” column containing his folksy yet scientifically informed observations on urban nature ran for nearly 30 years, and enjoyed a wide and dedicated readership throughout the city.
Carbon copy of the dust-jacket blurb by Loren Eiseley, c. 1972 (source: P. Dubkin Yearwood)
Once established as an accomplished naturalist-writer, Dubkin was in demand to pen reviews of books by his contemporary nature writers for such venues as the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. He also maintained friendships and regular correspondence with important writers, naturalists, and scientists of his day, from legendary Chicago writer Nelson Algren to biologist and environmental writer Rachel Carson to anthropologist and essayist Loren Eiseley. In fact, it is Eiseley who penned what might be the most eloquent tribute to Dubkin’s skill and craftsmanship as a naturalist-writer. In a 1972 letter to Dubkin he included a carbon copy of a dust jacket blurb for Dubkin’s final book, My Secret Places:
Mr. Dubkin has no parallel as the naturalist of the city and its environs. An able and expert journalist, he has the heart and eye of a child. It is this which convinces those of us lost in adult affairs that there is still truly a hidden place between the last billboard and the viaduct, a place as worthy of preservation as a forest. In such spots a rare human gentleness can sometimes be nurtured. Leonard Dubkin is a graduate of that kind of innocent back lot school which Americans are close to losing forever. His work is not only readable, it is utterly sincere.[ii]
Eiseley concisely and poetically captures here several salient qualities of Dubkin’s perspective on nature and his literary voice. An esteemed member of the scientific establishment (an establishment that both inspired and intimidated Dubkin) and a writer who produced hard-to-categorize yet utterly compelling works that blended natural history, evolutionary theory, philosophy of science, and autobiography, Eiseley recognized not just the singularity of Dubkin’s unique perspective and literary ability but also the value of Dubkin’s lifelong efforts to bring the neglected yet fascinating manifestations of urban nature to light.
Notes
[i] The biographical information in this essay on Dubkin is culled from the author’s interviews with Dubkin’s daughter, Pauline Dubkin Yearwood, as well as from Yearwood’s short essay “Family Memoir: The Urban Nature Lover.”
[ii] This letter is part of the extensive manuscript collection of Dubkin’s writings and correspondence — including letters, journals, newspaper columns, book reviews, book manuscripts, fiction, poetry, and unpublished manuscripts — maintained by Pauline Dubkin Yearwood.
Works Cited
Dubkin, Leonard. Enchanted Streets: The Unlikely Adventures of an Urban Nature Lover. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1947.
—. The Murmur of Wings. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1944.
—. My Secret Places: One Man’s Love Affair with Nature in the City. New York: David McKay, Inc., 1972.
—. The Natural History of a Yard. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1955.
—. Personal papers. Pauline Dubkin Yearwood, Chicago, IL.
—. The White Lady. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952.
—. Wolf Point: An Adventure in History. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1953.
Eiseley, Loren. Letter to Leonard Dubkin. 12 February 1972.
Yearwood, Pauline Dubkin. “Family Memoir: The Urban Nature Lover.” Chicago Jewish History (Fall 2005): 4-5.
—. Personal interview. 15 March and 18 April 2007.
Houbolt being honored at Joliet Memorial Stadium in 1969 soon ofter the successful first moon landing (Herald-News)
Last week a local legend passed away at the ripe old age of 95. A former NASA engineer who played a key role in developing the technology and mission strategy for the Apollo moon landing missions, John C. Houbolt was one of Joliet’s favorite sons — an Iowa-born farm boy who grew up working the land west of Joliet when it was a much smaller city than today; attended Joliet Junior College and the University of Illinois to become a civil engineer; and bucked the NASA bureaucracy in the early ’60s when he knew he possessed a superior approach for the incredibly difficult task of landing a manned spacecraft on the moon.
Houbolt explaining his moon landing concept in 1962 (NASA)
On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy told Congress that the United States should commit to landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade.
The goal caught some top officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration off guard. There was no firm plan for carrying out such a mission. Should they blast straight from Earth in a mammoth rocket? Should they launch a spacecraft into orbit around Earth, then deploy a module to travel from there to the moon?
Debate was intense. The celebrated NASA rocket scientist Wernher von Braun supported the big blast — an idea known as Nova. Others liked the Earth-orbiting option. For both, costs and complications seemed overwhelming.
Then a relatively obscure NASA engineer named John C. Houbolt committed a bold act of insubordination. In November of 1961, in a clear breach of protocol, Dr. Houbolt, a self-described “voice in the wilderness” whose ideas had been rejected by von Braun and others, wrote directly to Robert C. Seamans Jr., the associate administrator of NASA.
“Do we want to go to the moon or not?” asked Dr. Houbolt.
Houbolt at the Univ of IL in Urbana in 2003 (Herald-News)
Since the 1950s, Dr. Houbolt, who was 95 when he died on April 15 in Scarborough, Me., had been arguing for a smaller, lighter and less expensive option — a Chevrolet, not a Cadillac, he liked to say — that was called lunar orbit rendezvous. According to this method, a rocket launched from Earth would send a spacecraft into orbit around the moon that would then deploy another vehicle, known as a “bug” or lunar module, to the lunar surface.
The module would carry two men who, after exploring the moon, would travel in the module back to the orbiting spacecraft and then return to Earth. It, too, was complicated, but it did not require the kind of massive rocketry the other approaches did — technology that did not yet exist.
“Why is Nova, with its ponderous ideas, whether in size, manufacturing, erection, site location, etc., simply just accepted, and why is a much less grandiose scheme involving rendezvous ostracized or put on the defensive?” Dr. Houbolt wrote to Dr. Seamans. “I fully realize that contacting you in this manner is somewhat unorthodox, but the issues at stake are crucial enough to us all that an unusual course is warranted.”
Until then, lunar orbit rendezvous had been dismissed as far-fetched. In 1961, no American had even orbited Earth — John Glenn would do so the next year — and there were broad concerns that the proposed sequence of events posed too many risks. It required multiple vehicles and complicated maneuvers high above the moon’s surface.
“Do not be afraid of this,” Dr. Houbolt urged Dr. Seamans, assuring him that he was not “dealing with a crank.”
Dr. Seamans surprised Dr. Houbolt by listening — and he made sure others at NASA did, too. In early 1962, Joseph F. Shea, a newcomer working as a top assistant to Brainerd Holmes, the head of manned spaceflight at NASA, began looking closely at Dr. Houbolt’s arguments. Dr. Shea soon became an advocate as well. In time, even von Braun came around, and in July 1962 NASA formally adopted lunar orbit rendezvous as its preferred method.
Seven years later, on July 20, 1969, the United States became the first and so far only country to put men on the moon. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins deftly carried out the lunar orbit rendezvous. Armstrong and Aldrin entered the lunar module from the main spacecraft through a hatch so that they could travel the rest of the way to the moon — and back.
“Houston,” Armstrong said as the module landed on the lunar surface, “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
John Cornelius Houbolt was born on April 10, 1919, in Altoona, Iowa, and grew up in Joliet, Ill. His parents were farmers who had emigrated from the Netherlands. He attended Joliet Junior College before transferring to what is now the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 1940 and a master’s in the same subject in 1942. In 1958, while at NASA, he received a doctorate in technical sciences from ETH Zurich, in Switzerland.
He died of complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son-in-law P. Tucker Withington said.
Dr. Houbolt is survived by his wife of 65 years, the former Mary Morris; three daughters, Neil Withington, Joanna Hayes and Julie Winter; a sister, Irene Coonan; and four grandchildren.
In 1942, Dr. Houbolt joined NASA, then called NACA, for the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, as an engineer in the structures research division. He went on to hold numerous positions, including chief of the theoretical mechanics division. In 1963, after the lunar orbit rendezvous was adopted, he left NASA to become a senior executive with Aeronautical Research Associates of Princeton Inc.
He returned to NASA in 1976 as chief aeronautical scientist, retiring in 1985.
Although Dr. Houbolt was not at NASA in 1969, he was invited to witness the moon landing with other agency officials at Mission Control in Houston.
“John,” von Braun told him, “it worked beautifully.”
I’m a big fan of obituaries, and always read them with great fascination. This week there was a dandy story of an elegant lady from my hometown of Joliet who passed away at the ripe old age of 95. Despite being fan of film noir, I had not known that noted femme fatale Audrey Totter was a Joliet native.
Totter was born 3 years after my paternal grandmother, Millie Bryson; they very well may have seen each other as students at Joliet Township High School. (I’ll have to check Gram’s senior yearbook for clues.)
Joliet native Audrey Totter, a radio actress who became a movie star by playing femme fatales in 1940s film noir, including “Lady in the Lake,” has died. She was 95.
Totter’s daughter, Mea Lane, reported that her mother died Thursday at a Los Angeles hospital after recently having suffered a stroke.
Totter was born Dec. 20, 1917 and began her acting career in radio in the later 1930s. She was signed to a movie contract with MGM starting in 1944.
She had her debut in “Main Street After Dark” in 1945. After landing a small part in “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” Totter went on to a series of roles as a tough-talking, scheming blonde.
With Ray Milland in “Alias Nick Bea” (1949)
Her breakthrough came with “Lady in the Lake,” the 1947 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s detective story. She also appeared in the thriller “The Unsuspected” and the boxing drama “The Set-Up.”
After retiring to raise a family, Totter resurfaced on television in 1954 and appeared in several television series, including the role of Nurse Wilcox on “Medical Center” from 1972-76.
Her brother, Joliet resident George Totter, 90, has a favorite story to tell about his older sister. He said she tried out for the senior play at at Joliet [Township] High School (now Central), but the teacher in charge of the play didn’t think she could pull it off.
“He had a favorite student whom he wanted to get that role,” George Totter said in a telephone interview. “When Audrey came back for a visit years later, she went back to the school and that same teacher saw her.”
Totter said the teacher took Audrey into his classroom and introduced her, saying, “I always knew she’d be a star.”
“She told me when she heard that she almost vomited in the classroom,” George Totter said.
He said his sister met a doctor in Korea, Leo Fred, “while she was performing for the troops (with the USO), and they met again when they were in Los Angeles and got married.”
The couple were married for 42 years until Fred’s death in 1995.
This week the New York Timesfeatures a “retro report” on Love Canal, one of the most infamous environmental disasters in US history and the incident that spurred the creation of the EPA’s Superfund program.
Far from a closed book, the legacy and implications of Love Canal are still playing out. Of great significance in the history of the American environmental justice movement, Love Canal also demonstrates the difficulty and complexity involved in scientifically assessing the health impacts of environmental toxins on a relatively small population.
The above map is one of the many images collected in the online resource, Lessons of Love Canal, developed in 2003 by the Boston University School of Public Health. As noted in the site’s introduction:
Many community groups around the U.S. request health studies to examine associations between environmental contamination and perceived health problems. Love Canal and other community battles have taught us that how studies are conducted and by whom is crucial to deriving useful and credible information. At the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH), we push for community concerns and insights to be part of the study process from the beginning to the end.
Some Love Canal studies have become models for the way we do community environmental health studies today. We hope this collection of lessons learned over three decades of controversy at Love Canal represents initial steps toward building a resource for future community-based studies.
Recent reports in the popular media would have it that the humanities are embattled: waning in popularity among students, deemed irrelevant by the general public, and viewed by legislators as expendable luxuries in today’s rapidly changing higher education environment. In truth, though, the humanities in general — and the environmental arts and humanities in particular — have never been more important and necessary, both to the academy and within the culture at large.
First, a bold claim: the arts and humanities, broadly conceived, are the most exciting and diverse sources of creativity, intellectual speculation, and cultural critique we have. Together with the empirical methods of the physical and biological sciences, as well as the critical tools of the social and behavioral sciences, the arts and humanities do a great deal more than provide us with amusing diversions or a well-rounded college education. They literally define us as a species. They embody the best of our capacities as human beings.
Just as importantly, the three Es of sustainability — Ecology, Economy, and Equity — dictate a vital role for the environmental arts and humanities in envisioning and working toward a more sustainable future for humanity as well as for the millions of fellow species on our beautiful yet vulnerable planet. Thought-provoking ideas, artwork, architecture, poetry, stories, historical accounts, ethical frameworks, theater, music, theology, and films are necessary complements to the production of ecological data and development of progressive environmental policy.
Why? Because ideas and vision matter. Compelling narratives, whether literary or visual, can bring scientific facts to life and change hearts and minds. Ethics must guide our thinking to ensure that social equity and environmental justice are not marginalized or ignored in the pursuit of the next great clean energy source or wastewater treatment process or organic food production system. Environmental and economic sustainability thus cannot be achieved without the full participation and engagement of the arts and humanities.
Consider just one issue: climate change, arguably our most pressing and seemingly intractable global problem. Decades of compelling scientific evidence on global warming, glacial retreat, increasing severe storm frequency, rising ocean levels, and more have not yet produced the sea change in values and priorities needed to create effective national climate change mitigation laws. Neither have the voluminous policy analysis, political lobbying, and other efforts by social scientists and activists.
Science and policy do matter, of course. But they are not enough. This is where the environmental arts and humanities — those areas of inquiry and creative expression concerned with the natural environment and our place in it — come into play, not in opposition to the empirical findings and systematic methodologies of the natural and social sciences, but in concert with them.
In a truly sustainable society, an ethic of stewardship would reside in each individual as well as be a pervasive value within the community. Such an ethos, though, is seldom adopted in a fully rational way based upon mere apprehension of scientific data. It must be embodied and inspired by stories, arresting images, powerful metaphors, enduring questions; it should be felt as well as comprehended. It is not surprising, then, that the scientist-writers I have researched and greatly admire — Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Loren Eiseley; and in the present day, E. O. Wilson, Sandra Steingraber, and others — articulate this synthesis in their work.
Influenced by these and other artists, writers, and scientists, my own journey as a scholar and teacher have affirmed for me the capacity for art, storytelling, history, music, and poetry to enrich and energize the conversations we must have about environmental science and policy. All of these endeavors, properly integrated, can help us work toward the long-term sustainability of our planet.
Today in Joliet, while picking up a prescription after dropping my daughter off at school, I ran into a friend from my Jr. High days. Lori and I both worked at Plainfield Road Pharmacy back in the 1980s, when the late Don Reiter was the head pharmacist. It got us both thinking of the “old days” of working for Don at a quintessential neighborhood drugstore in the age when every part of town still had one. This article appeared as an op-ed in the Joliet Herald-News in July 2009.
Donald Reiter, my former boss, seemingly knew everyone in town. A Joliet native and longtime pharmacist who co-founded Joliet Prescriptions Shops, Don worked up until the last two weeks of his life and had a personality to match his boundless energy. Tough, funny, demanding, and fair, he was a good man to work for.
Back in the early 1960s, he hired my father fresh out of pharmacy school, and with several others they formed a business partnership that would last decades. When I was in high school, Don employed me at Plainfield Road Pharmacy stocking shelves, running the register, making deliveries, even pulling weeds around the building. It was a job in which you had to do pretty much everything (except fill the actual prescriptions), and do it right quick.
One Sunday morning during my senior year, I was scheduled to open the store. It was my duty on Sundays to arrive early to stuff newspapers with the inserts so they’d be ready for our crack-of-dawn regulars. But that day, I inexplicably overslept.
Around 8:15am, my mother received a terse phone call from Don, who asked her “where Michael was” in saltier language than I can reproduce here. Instantly alert and nerves jangling, I tore down Dawes Avenue on my bike to the store, where I found all the newspapers neatly stacked inside. Don had done my job, of course, and as I slunk back to the pharmacy counter to apologize, he fixed me with a unsmiling gaze.
“Nice of you to make it,” he said sarcastically. He didn’t lecture me, though, probably because he realized I was already thoroughly humiliated.
Later that week while working on a college scholarship application, I discovered ruefully that it required a recommendation from my current employer (Don, of course). On my next scheduled day it took me a couple of hours to screw up the courage to approach him. Without a word, he took the form I proffered, and I hastily resumed my menial labors.
That evening as we closed up, Don muttered, “Oh, got something for you here,” and slipped me a letter. Later than night, I read it: full of praise, it was an eloquent one-page masterpiece on pharmacy letterhead banged out on his old typewriter. He’d done it on the spot, in between filling prescriptions, while I had toiled uneasily wondering about my fate.
Yes, I got the scholarship — though in retrospect that seems trivial. What I remember now is that letter, and what it said about the man who wrote it.
