Looking Back at 2015

RU's Sustainability Plan, adopted 2015
RU’s Sustainability Plan, adopted 2015

This weekend I finished one of my favorite annual writing projects: a comprehensive review of last year’s student and faculty activities and accomplishments in Roosevelt’s Sustainability Studies Program, published on the SUST Blog this morning.

2015 was a notable time of change, transition, and planning: we graduated 11 majors, moved to the College of Arts & Sciences from our longtime home in the College of Professional Studies, hired a new full-time faculty member, welcomed a part-time administrator, helped create the university’s first Strategic Sustainability Plan, held two student symposia and hosted other campus events, engaged in field trips and service learning in our classes, expanded our student internship resources, completed two rounds of departmental strategic planning, launched the Roosevelt Urban Sustainability Lab, and collaborated with the Department of Physical Resources on completing the research for RU’s first STARS assessment report.

I want to sincerely thank all my Roosevelt colleagues and students for all their hard work and enthusiasm on these projects and others. It was an eventful and rewarding year, and I’m hopeful that 2016 will be better yet!

RU Scores Bronze STARS Rating from AASHE: Some Personal Reflections

Last Friday night (Dec. 18th) at 9:30pm, my fellow STARS Reporting Team members and I submitted Roosevelt’s first-ever sustainability assessment report to the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, resulting in our university’s earning a Bronze rating. As noted here on the SUST at RU Blog, this was a big milestone in our ongoing sustainability work as well as the culmination of research that began last January in my first SUST 390 Sustainable Campus special topics class, when 19 undergraduate SUST majors broke into teams to dig up and organize the massive amounts of data required across every aspect of the university functions — from academics to outreach to operations to administration and planning.

RU SustPlan Cover
The Plan!

But while 2015 at Roosevelt was marked by this year-long effort to complete our first STARS self-assessment, the foundation work that made such a project conceivable, let alone feasible, started much earlier. Notably, in 2014 we undertook a major effort to develop a Strategic Sustainability Plan for Roosevelt, which was completed in November 2014, approved by the RU faculty and administration in February 2015, and released in June 2015.

The Plan is road map for the next five years’ worth of sustainability efforts, and we have now fulfilled one of its high-priority short-term goals in completing our first STARS report. This means we have even more data about where we stand as a university and how we need to move forward to improve our efforts in every facet of our operations, from what courses we offer to how we run student orientation to what food we serve in the dining center. The fact that all STARS data from the several hundred colleges and universities who have submitted reports, including our own, is publicly accessible also means that we can learn from what other institutions are doing in order to improve ourselves.

Starting Small, Thinking Big

Radeck MaryBethOne reflection I’ve had in the wake of finishing our STARS report is about how seemingly small efforts can have big impacts. When I trace the origins of our work on this project, one key starting point is the independent study project SUST major Mary Beth Radeck (pictured at left) did in her SUST 395 internship with RU’s Physical Resources Dept in the spring of 2014. Mary Beth researched campus sustainability planning at US colleges and universities, and her final report was an analysis of those plans as well as a fully fleshed-out process and timeline (pdf) for RU to engage in its own sustainability planning process. This proposal was so compelling and well-researched that we simply had to move forward and do it! While I wouldn’t call Mary Beth’s effort “small” by any stretch of the imagination, the fact that such a major initiative of the university began as one undergrad’s research project is testament to the power of a good idea and the value of thinking big.

Room 1
Student presentations in SUST 390 The Sustainable Campus, Earth Day 2015

Similarly, the SUST 390 class (pdf of syllabus) that worked on researching the baseline data we needed to do the STARS report was itself an experiment from the ground up, one for which we had no blueprint — only faith in the power and potential of student researchers to tackle a complex and extremely time-consuming project in a finite amount of time. While we were exploring unknown territory in the course (which frankly added to its inherent excitement, for me), the value here was obvious: students came through with a tremendous effort and they learned an incredible amount about their university and the STARS system in the process.

STARS Bronze logoWhy I’m Happy We Got Bronze

With sustainability rating systems like LEED or STARS, it’s admittedly easy to get caught up in the chase for achieving the highest rating possible. That’s part of the point of such rating systems: to incentivize institutions to earn high ratings that reflect well upon their efforts and burnish their green reputations. Let’s face it: all of us like accolades, right?

But merely focusing on the particular level of an institution’s STARS rating — gold, silver, bronze, etc. — misses the real significance of undergoing this process of self-reflection and institutional assessment. So here are a few reasons why I’m happy with our Bronze rating here in 2015:

  • Just getting to Bronze itself is a big deal. The STARS assessment system is thorough and exacting, and amassing data and evidence to warrant a Bronze-level certification is difficult, not only in terms of what you have to do to get there, but also in the process of documenting those efforts.
  • Notably, many of the STARS-reporting institutions that are at Silver or Gold achieved those designations in their 2nd or 3rd reporting cycles. So the fact that RU did this in our first go-around is a fine thing indeed.
  • Pursuing sustainability at a college or university campus — let alone a town or a city — is a highly complex and always ongoing task. Our Bronze designation is a literal statement that (a) we’ve accomplished a lot so far, and (b) we’ve still got a long way to go. This in itself is great incentive to keep moving forward, not the least because (like the pursuit of scientific knowledge itself) we will never be done.
  • The teamwork and dedication that made our STARS report possible in the first place is inspiring. This might be the biggest payoff of all: the joy and rewards of working together on a worthy project on behalf of our institution.

Giving Thanks

On that last note, I want to thank the fellow members of our STARS Reporting Team (Rebecca Quesnell, Maria Cancilla, Graham Pickren, Brennan Morrow, and Shannon Conway) who undertook this in the fall of 2015 as a collaboration between the Department of Physical Resources and the SUST Program’s new Roosevelt Urban Sustainability Lab; Paul Matthews, Assistant VP for Planning & Operations, for this unflagging leadership of all things sustainable at Roosevelt; and the students in my SUST 390 Sustainable Campus class last spring (Cassidy Avent, Yessenia Balcazar, Maria Cancilla, Shannon Conway**, Colleen Dennis *, Jordan Ewbank*, Courtney Hackler, Kyle Huff, Reece Krishnan, Tom Lewallen**, Melissa Maslowski, Ana Molledo*, Kelsey Norris*, Jennifer Paddack, Rebecca Quesnell*, Emily Rhea, Deidra Sharp, Sera Sousley** and Jesse Williams*.

(*graduated May 2015; ** graduated Dec 2015).

RU Releases Its First-Ever Strategic Sustainability Plan: a Roadmap for the Future

The Plan!
The Plan, at long last!

I’m very pleased to report that the last step of our 2014-15 strategic planning process for the sustainable future of Roosevelt is now complete: the university has officially released its Strategic Sustainability Plan this week. This is not only great news, but also a tribute to the hard work and collective efforts of the students, faculty, administrators, staff, and alumni who drafted the plan in Fall 2014 and shepherded its endorsement and approval by the university’s faculty senate and administrative leadership in Spring 2015.

I want to especially commend SUST major MaryBeth Radeck, who did vital background research on sustainability planning in Spring 2014 for her SUST 395 internship, then managed the planning workshops as well as wrote/edited the plan document in Fall 2014; Paul Matthews and Tom Shelton of Physical Resources, who were co-leaders on the planning process and have supported RU’s sustainability work since 2010; Beeka Quesnell and Mary Rasic, SUST majors and Environmental Sustainability Associates in Physical Resources during 2014-15, who provided tremendous logistical support for the planning workshops; and my students in SUST 390 Sustainable Campus, who took on the initial task of researching baseline data in the Spring 2015 semester for RU’s first STARS assessment, one of the key steps that will help us drive the Plan forward in 2015 and beyond.

Check the full plan out here on the RU Green Campus website, and join the effort to work on its many goals and priority projects. There’s lots to do, so the more folks we have on board, the better!

Welcome to Roosevelt and to Chicago, Dr. Ali Malekzadeh, RU’s President-elect

Ali_Malekzadeh-200pxYesterday I attended a rare event in the history of any university: a reception honoring the formal election of new president. Faculty, staff, administrators, students, alumni, and trustees gathered in the glorious space of Roosevelt’s Murray-Green Library on the 10th floor of the landmark Auditorium Building to welcome Dr. Ali Malekzadeh, Roosevelt’s sixth president, who will take over the leadership of our institution on July 1st, 2015.

One notable thing about yesterday’s reception was that four generations of RU presidents were in attendance: Chuck Middleton, our current president; Ted Gross, who led RU from 1988 to 2002, and was president when I was hired in 1996; and Rolf Weil, who presided from 1964 to 1988. Dr. Weil is very elderly now, but still with it — and it was inspiring to see him obviously enjoying the proceedings. Like him, President-elect Ali (as he kindly insisted on being called, rather than by his full name and title) is a business-oriented lifelong academic, rather than the last two presidents who came from literature and history, respectively.

I got to speak with Dr. Malekzadeh twice, albeit briefly, and found him funny, warm, articulate, charming, and friendly. He seemed very comfortable working a room and schmoozing, and perhaps that is among the many important qualities a president must have. When I identified myself simply as “Mike Bryson, Sustainability Studies,” with no other explanation, he looked at me keenly and said emphatically, “That is the future. We will talk.” I can only guess at his true feelings on the subject of sustainability and higher ed — but his response seemed to imply that on an important fundamental level, he gets it. We will see!

I wish President-elect Malekzadeh all the best in what I hope will be a long and fruitful career for him at Roosevelt as he leads us through a tremendous time of transition and, it must be noted, great financial challenges. His reputed fundraising acumen will be most welcome and is urgently needed.

Selected press articles: Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, and Daily Herald

The “Schaumburg’s Sustainable Future” Project: An Online Convergence of Teaching & Research

JESS journal coverLast month, my article entitled “Schaumburg’s Sustainable Future: Student Research, Social Media, and the ‘Edge City’ Suburb” appeared online (12 Dec 2014) in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Science, the publication of the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences and one of my professional tribes. This anticipates the essay’s print appearance in the journal’s forthcoming special issue on Integrating and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Sustainable Cities and Regions. You can access a pdf of the article here.

During the Fall 2014 semester at Roosevelt University, undergraduate students from two of my Sustainability Studies classes — SUST 210 Sustainable Future (online) and 240 Waste & Consumption (honors) — contributed over 30 blog posts on news and topical developments in urban/suburban sustainability in the Chicago region, thus continuing the site’s blogging tradition when we launched the site as a SUST 210 student research project on Earth Day 2011.

In addition, these classes conducted in-depth research on sustainability efforts and waste-related environmental justice issues in several dozen communities, both locally and across the US. The fruits of this research will be posted in coming weeks to the Community Profiles and Environmental Justice sections of this site, so stay tuned for what will be a significant expansion of the SSF website. To date, the Schaumburg’s Sustainable Future (SSF) project includes 163 blog posts and 100 in-depth essays on a wide range of sustainability issues, problems, and solutions. The vast majority of this content is student-authored, which is a cool demonstration of the value of the site as a learning tool and educational resource.

Members of my SUST 240 Waste & Consumption honors seminar (Fall 2014) on a field trip to Canal Origins Park and Bubbly Creek, Chicago IL (Sept 2014)
Members of my SUST 240 Waste & Consumption honors seminar (Fall 2014) on a field trip to Canal Origins Park and Bubbly Creek, Chicago IL (Sept 2014)

Joliet Kid Makes Good: John C. Houbolt (1919-2014), Space Flight Engineer for Moon Missions

Houbolt being honored at Joliet Memorial Stadium in 1969 soon ofter the successful first moon landing (Herald-News)
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’s A.P. obituary ran in the Joliet Herald-News last week, along with this feature article; yesterday (27 April 2014) the NY Times ran this excellent obituary, which is reprinted below. The Joliet Area Historical Museum in downtown Joliet features an outstanding exhibit on Houbolt’s work and legacy, The Soaring Achievements of John C. Houbolt.

Houbolt explaining his moon landing concept in 1962 (NASA)
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)
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.”

Teaching Climate Change through Literature

A somewhat interesting article from yesterday’s NY Times about literature-and-environment courses that are beginning to address issues of climate change. Unfortunately, the author didn’t know about Prof. Gary Wolfe’s groundbreaking seminar here at Roosevelt this spring, “Sustainability in Film and Fiction,” as that would’ve been a great example to profile here. Here’s the full text of the article:

EUGENE, Ore. — University courses on global warming have become common, and Prof. Stephanie LeMenager’s new class here at the University of Oregon has all the expected, alarming elements: rising oceans, displaced populations, political conflict, endangered animals.

The goal of this class, however, is not to marshal evidence for climate change as a human-caused crisis, or to measure its effects — the reality and severity of it are taken as given — but how to think about it, prepare for it and respond to it. Instead of scientific texts, the class, “The Cultures of Climate Change,” focuses on films, poetry, photography, essays and a heavy dose of the mushrooming subgenre of speculative fiction known as climate fiction, or cli-fi, novels like “Odds Against Tomorrow,” by Nathaniel Rich, and “Solar,” by Ian McEwan.

“Speculative fiction allows a kind of scenario-imagining, not only about the unfolding crisis but also about adaptations and survival strategies,” Professor LeMenager said. “The time isn’t to reflect on the end of the world, but on how to meet it. We want to apply our humanities skills pragmatically to this problem.”

The class reflects a push by universities to meld traditionally separate disciplines; Professor LeMenager joined the university last year to teach both literature and environmental studies.

Her course also shows how broadly most of academia and a younger generation have moved beyond debating global warming to accepting it as one of society’s central challenges. That is especially true in places like Eugene, a verdant and damp city, friendly to the cyclist and inconvenient to the motorist, where ordering coffee in a disposable cup can elicit disapproving looks. Oregon was a pioneer of environmental studies, and Professor LeMenager’s students tend to share her activist bent, eagerly discussing in a recent session the role that the arts and education can play in galvanizing people around an issue.

To some extent, the course is feeding off a larger literary trend. Novels set against a backdrop of ruinous climate change have rapidly gained in number, popularity and critical acclaim over the last few years, works like “The Windup Girl,” by Paolo Bacigalupi; “Finitude,” by Hamish MacDonald; “From Here,” by Daniel Kramb; and “The Carbon Diaries 2015,” by Saci Lloyd. Well-known writers have joined the trend, including Barbara Kingsolver, with “Flight Behavior,” and Mr. McEwan.

And with remarkable speed — Ms. Kingsolver’s and Mr. Rich’s books were published less than a year ago — those works have landed on syllabuses at colleges. They have turned up in courses on literature and on environmental issues, like the one here, or in a similar but broader class, “The Political Ecology of Imagination,” part of a master’s degree program in liberal studies at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

For now, Professor LeMenager’s class is open only to graduate students, with some working on degrees in environmental studies, others in English and one in geography, and it can have the rarefied feel of a literature seminar. Fueled by readings from Susan Sontag and Jacques Derrida, the students discuss the meaning of terms like “spectacle” and “witness,” and debate the drawbacks of cultural media that approach climate change from the developed world’s perspective.

Climate novels fit into a long tradition of speculative fiction that pictures the future after assorted catastrophes. First came external forces like aliens or geological upheaval, and then, in the postwar period, came disasters of our own making.

Novels like “On the Beach,” by Nevil Shute, and “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” by Walter M. Miller Jr., and films like “The Book of Eli,” offered a world after nuclear war. Stephen King’s “The Stand,” Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” and “The Year of the Flood,” and films like “12 Monkeys” and “I Am Legend” imagined the aftermath of biological tampering gone horribly wrong.

“You can argue that that is a dominant theme of postwar fiction, trying to grapple with the fragility of our existence, where the world can end at any time,” Mr. Rich said. Before long, most colleges will “have a course on the contemporary novel and the environment,” he said. “It surprises me that even more writers aren’t engaging with it.”

The climate-change canon dates back at least as far as “The Drowned World,” a 1962 novel by J. G. Ballard with a small but ardent following. “The Population Bomb,” Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 nonfiction best seller, mentions the potential dangers of the greenhouse effect, and the 1973 film “Soylent Green,” best remembered for its grisly vision of a world with too many people and too little food, is set in a hotter future.

The recent climate fiction has characters whose concerns extend well beyond the climate, some of it is set in a present or near future when disaster still seems remote, and it can be deeply satirical in tone. In other words, if the authors are aiming for political consciousness-raising, the effort is more veiled than in novels of earlier times like “The Jungle” or “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

Professor LeMenager’s syllabus includes extensive nonfiction writing and film, alongside the fiction, and she said she had little interest in truly apocalyptic scenarios or those that are scientifically dubious. She does not, for example, show her students “The Day After Tomorrow,” the 2004 film about an ice age caused by global warming that was a huge hit despite being panned by critics and scientists alike, though she says everyone asks her about it.

Stephen Siperstein, one of her students, recalled showing the documentary “Chasing Ice,” about disappearing glaciers, to a class of undergraduates, leaving several of them in tears. Em Jackson talked of leading groups on glacier tours, and the profound effect they had on people. Another student, Shane Hall, noted that people experience the weather, while the notion of climate is a more abstract concept that can often be communicated only through media — from photography to sober scientific articles to futuristic fiction.

“In this sense,” he said, “climate change itself is a form of story we have to tell.”

Pete Seeger, Legendary Musician and Activist, Dies at Age 94

Last night I had trouble sleeping, and found myself tossing and turning in the wee hours. When I got up to get a drink of water hoping to settle myself down, my night owl spouse solemnly greeted me with sad and wistful news. One of our musical heroes, Mr. Pete Seeger, had just passed away at the ripe old age of 94.

Pete Seeger atop the sloop Clearwater, which he used to promote the environmental cleanup of the Hudson River, along which he lived for many years in Beacon, NY (photo: AP)
Pete Seeger atop the sloop Clearwater, which he used to promote the environmental cleanup of the Hudson River,
along which he lived for many years in Beacon, NY (photo: AP)

It’s almost impossible for me to imagine a person who lived life as joyously, as productively, as meaningfully as Mr. Seeger. Chronicler and performer of folk music, advocate for social and environmental justice, celebrant of ordinary life’s victories and sorrows, political activist who stood up to the nasty oppression of McCarthyism — Pete Seeger was these things and many more during his lifetime, during which he never wavered from his ethical convictions and love of music.

For me, he’s best known in our household as “Pete” — as when I say to my two girls, “Hey, let’s listen to some Pete.” We put on a record or CD of his recordings for children, for which he is justly famous; and we sing, dance, and let the song stories he so effortlessly and skillfully wove fill the room. It’s as if he’s sitting there, on one of our old chairs, playing his banjo and singing to us. We love to imagine Pete dropping in at one of our schools here in Joliet and playing some songs for the kids and teachers — something he did hundreds of times at schools all across America during the course of his long and colorful life.

Pete, I never had the great fortune of meeting you; but I’m so glad you gave your music to the world. Thank you! You will be missed but never forgotten.

Jon Pareles, “Pete Seeger, Songwriter and Champion of Folk Music, Dies at 94” (NY Times 28 Jan 2014)

Verlyn Klinkenborg Publishes Final Column for “The Rural Life” in the NY Times

klinkenborgOne of my favorite journalists, commentator and essayist Verlyn Klinkenborg, published the final piece for his long-running column, “The Rural Life,” in today’s New York Times. His wise and observant prose-poems about his small farm and the nature that inhabits it were among the pieces of writing I most relished amid the dreck and disruption contained within the daily news.

Klinkenborg’s artful and well-wrought column will be greatly missed by many, I’m sure. I’m reprinting today’s essay in full here.

Farewell

By

The first Rural Life appeared on the editorial page nearly 16 years ago. This is the last. This seems a good season to leave, with a long winter ahead, the wood stove burning, and plenty of hopes and plans for the coming year. When The Rural Life began, I didn’t imagine that it would last so long or chart so many changes in my life. Nor did I imagine that it would find so many good readers. But it has, and I’m grateful for that.

As for the farm, it will go on much as it has. The horses will stand broadside in the sun or paw the snow looking for last year’s grass. The roosters — two of them now — will breast the bright morning air as always while the hens go about their business. The dogs — two of them now, again — will chase each other through the snow. I’ll be fixing fence and hauling wood and feeding out hay and chopping ice in the horse tank when the power goes out. And I’ll be doing what I’ve always done: watching the way one thought becomes another as I go about the chores.

But what about your farm, the one you’ve pictured while reading The Rural Life all these years? I know, from talking to readers, that it’s far bigger and more orderly than mine. It has fewer rocks and richer soil and fences that somehow magically stay taut. It reflects who you are as surely as my place reflects who I am. And it seems to be just about anywhere, wherever there’s open land and some woods and enough time to walk the fence line. I’ve always wished that I could visit the farm that readers imagine I live on. It sounds like a very nice place.

I am more human for all the animals I’ve lived with since I moved to this farm. Here, I’ve learned almost everything I know about the kinship of all life. The only crops on this farm have been thoughts and feelings and perceptions, which I know you’re raising on your farm, too. Some are annual, some perennial and some are invasive — no question about it.

But perhaps the most important thing I learned here, on these rocky, tree-bound acres, was to look up from my work in the sure knowledge that there was always something worth noticing and that there were nearly always words to suit it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/26/opinion/farewell.html

Film Noir Star and Joliet Native Audrey Totter Dies at Age 95

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.)

Here’s the obituary published by Tina Akouris in Tuesday’s Joliet Herald-News. Also see this excellent write-up in the New York Times.

Audrey Totter
Audrey Totter, 1917-2013

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)
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.