Around the Oval

The Sky’s the Limit

The Aqua satellite (image courtesy of NASA)

Forestry Professor Steve Running and his NASA-affiliated Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group have had two things to crow about in the last few months. Aqua, a satellite carrying UM-designed software, was launched into orbit in May. A month later Running was inducted as a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, an honor bestowed on preeminent scientists from around the world.

Running was one of forty-one scientists selected for the honor this year. “These awards normally go to scientists at the big research universities like Princeton, Stanford, and Berkeley,” Running says. “This honor does show that we can do world-class research here at UM and be recognized for it.” AGU is the largest earth science research society in the world, with more than 38,000 members in 117 countries.

Steve Running

The Aqua satellite, which carries software developed by Running’s UM group, joins the Terra spacecraft launched in December 1999. Just as Terra was designed to measure Earth’s soil, vegetation, and related indicators, Aqua measures rainfall, snow, sea ice, temperature, humidity, vegetation, soil moisture, and clouds. The size of a small bus, the Aqua satellite is bundled with six instruments, one of them the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, software designed in Running’s lab and used in different configurations in both satellites. Terra and Aqua are part of NASA’s long-term coordinated study of changes in the global environment.

Running reports that the satellites will orbit the Earth at different times, providing different types of data to researchers at NASA and his UM lab. Aura, the third major Earth Observing System satellite, is scheduled to launch in 2004.

High Honors

UM’s Broadcast Media Center is on a roll, with staff members winning several awards in regional and national broadcast competitions this spring, chief among them graduate Maggie Carey for her documentary Sun River Homestead. The program, produced for KUFM-TV, won an Emmy Award in the cultural/historical category for the Northwest Region. The award was bestowed at a June ceremony in Seattle.

Sun River Homestead traces the lives of three sisters who came to Montana in the early 1900s and lived in the Sun River Valley. Media center producer John Twiggs and UM radio-TV Assistant Professor Ray Ekness contributed to the documentary.

Producer Gus Chambers was honored again for his public service announcement created as a response to September 11. The thirty-second television spot, titled A University Stands, extolls a university’s role in troubed times. Chambers won a national gold award from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. Chambers also won a gold award for the spot from the national Admissions Marketing Report.

Greetings from the President

In this issue of the Montanan, you will discover a captivating combination of features designed to inform and entertain. Missoula has changed wonderfully since the latter part of the nineteenth century when the Montana Legislature chartered The University of Montana as a “seminary of higher learning.”

In a survey of readers, we found that many alumni wanted to know about changes in the Missoula community. This issue is a response to that interest. Change undoubtedly came at a much more rapid rate after the middle of the twentieth century than during the early years. As the community has changed, so has the University.

The University has prided itself on its involvement in and with the larger Missoula community. I think you will find that the case as you read this informative issue. Change frequently puts us off, since we rarely find it comfortable to adjust to new arrangements and requirements. Creatures of habit, we react negatively when pressed to accommodate unwanted intrusions upon our familiar spaces. One feature story offers a more humorous look at the typical responses to these sometimes daunting challenges. Surely we all benefit from a perspective that allows us to enjoy a hearty laugh at our own expense.

As Missoula develops in response to the new influences of the twenty-first century, so will the University. During my days here as a nontraditional student in the early 1960s, I doubt that any of my counterparts would have anticipated a time when students would have very nice housing adjacent to a golf course. Yet that is the case today. Moreover, the University has in the planning phase another attractive student housing project that will enable us to serve more students while also responding to the changing needs of the Missoula community. We have long recognized the imperative to work collaboratively to the benefit of the entire community.

Finally, this issue—as those that follow—offers a special feature on one of our alumni. We have heard from the readers that the alumni focus has become one of the most attractive of the magazine’s new initiatives. It certainly makes good sense to inform as many readers as possible about the accomplishments of people who began their illustrious and interesting careers with us here at UM. For every University is its faculty, staff, and graduates.

George M. Dennison ’62
President

Goodbye to a Friend

Rosemary Gallagher

Rosemary Gallagher, a friend to UM as well as to countless individuals and organizations in western Montana, died July 6 in her Missoula home. Her husband William preceded her in death in 1995.

For many years the Gallaghers owned the prosperous Westmont Tractor business, the Caterpillar dealership for western Montana and eastern Idaho. A firm belief in civic responsibility propelled them into charitable giving on a large scale.

The couple will be best remembered at UM through the William and Rosemary Gallagher Building for the School of Business Administration that bears their names. They provided a $1 million donation through UM’s 1993 Capital Campaign to jump-start construction of the $15 million building. William was a 1925 graduate of UM’s business school and Rosemary, the daughter of a banker, had business in her blood.

The Gallaghers provided other donations to UM and started several scholarships for students.

The couple made substantial gifts to Missoula’s Community Medical Center, United Way, and local schools and youth organizations. The Gallagher Western Montana Charitable Foundation, directed by a board of community leaders, will continue their charitable largess.

“Rosemary and Bill Gallagher took a strong supporting, but usually private, role in virtually every beneficial organization in Missoula during the past fifty years,” says UM President George Dennison. “They made contributions of their time, energy, and resources because they cared—not for publicity. In fact, they rarely allowed publicity for their contributions.

“Rosemary—as well as Bill—loved life, enjoyed it to the fullest and had a deep and abiding interest in people. Always feisty and deeply committed in terms of her values, Rosemary invested much of her energy and resources to assist young people. The Gallaghers, as a couple, exemplified the meaning of abiding by the ‘habits of the heart’ to create a decent society.”

Business School Dean Larry Gianchetta remembers his weekly Saturday meeting with Rosemary: “We would go for a long ride in my car. We would begin and end our drive by going around the Gallagher Building. She loved the building and the learning environment it provides to students. Every February fourteenth, we would bring Rosemary into the building to observe and visit with students, faculty, and staff. We all looked forward to Valentine’s Day as we knew we would be blessed with a visit from the sweetheart of the business school—Rosemary Gallagher.”

UM’s ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’

Mary Clapp 1940

Along-lost manuscript of UM history has been recovered and donated to the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library. For UM history buffs and archive librarians, the emergence of this never-published history is something like finding the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Narrative of Montana State University, 1893-1935 was written by Mary Brennan Clapp, a longtime UM faculty member and wife of President Charles Clapp, who led UM from 1921 to 1935, dying in office at the age of 51. (UM was known as Montana State University from 1935 to 1965.)

“Researchers have been looking for this work for years,” says UM archivist Jodi Allison-Bunnell. “We knew it had been written, but we never knew what happened to it until recently.”

The manuscript covers UM’s beginnings and the terms of its first five presidents. Two copies of the work—each about 450 pages on onion skin paper—were supplied to UM by Clapp’s descendants. Mary’s handwritten notes are still legible in the margins, and one version is marked “corrected copy.” Both are copies of an original manuscript that has disappeared.

Clapp’s grandson, John Hagens, an economist living in West Chester, Pennsylvania, came across the manuscript last January while visiting his mother (Clapp’s daughter), Lucie Hagens, in Los Angeles. “There were two manuscripts that surfaced,” he says. “They had been in my mother’s and aunt’s (Peggy Smurr of Turlock, California) closets for close to forty years. It was very interesting to me: A lot of the University’s problems back then weren’t dissimilar from the ones today, and there was a lot to be learned. Returning this to the University seemed like the right thing to do.”

So Hagens, who worked in the Carter White House during the late 1970s, e-mailed UM President George Dennison about donating the work. Dennison, himself a historian, encouraged Hagens to contact the campus library. The rest is, as they say, history.

Mary Clapp grew up in the prairie town of Devils Lake, North Dakota, and earned a master’s degree from the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, where she taught in the English department. She moved with her husband to Missoula in 1921 when he was named UM president.

President Clapp helped guide UM through the lean Depression years—at one point taking a 20 percent pay cut along with the faculty even after his own budget committee suggested he be exempt. His untimely death in 1935—there were no pensions in those days—left his wife alone with eight children. So she moved from the president’s house into a home on Eddy Avenue and went back to work, joining UM’s English faculty until the mid-1950s.

Clapp worked on her campus history for more than a decade after UM President James McCain (1945-50) asked her to prepare it. But, according to Allison-Bunnell, when Clapp finished the history around 1961, she was told there was no money available to print it; the work was unpublished when she died in 1965. Her manuscript was largely forgotten after another work, The University of Montana: A History by H.G. Merriam, was published in 1969. Merriam’s book deals in a much briefer fashion with the years 1893 to 1935, the years Clapp concentrated on.

Hagens said his grandmother was a fine writer. She published a book of original poetry, and a Montana poetry contest was named in her honor. Clapp certainly wasn’t afraid of using language with a certain flair. For example, when describing the Missoula the first UM president encountered in 1895, she wrote, “It has pretty good board walks—though their square nails are slightly sprung in places and often catch on the finishing braid of the long skirts of the ladies.” A passage about the land chosen for the University describes the UM campus in winter as “the playground for Hellgate blizzards.”

The manuscript is rife with interesting tidbits. Clapp writes how the home of Judge Hiram Knowles was remembered for its beautiful parties and that Mark Twain had been a guest there. She mentions how the first UM students only had to be fourteen years old and that the average weight for players on the first football team was 151 pounds. A tale is told about how on April 29, 1907, in the middle of the night, “marauders” bound a security guard and stole the hands from the Main Hall clock. The hands were later “brought back in a wagon by a driver who gave no name and waited for no thanks.”

Clapp didn’t shy from controversy. She writes how the first president, Oscar Craig (1895-1908), didn’t get along with Professor Morton J. Elrod, the founder of the Flathead Lake Biological Station, and didn’t recommend him for re-employment. Craig’s successor, Clyde Duniway (1908-12), later decided the dismissal was “cold blooded and even scandalous” and rehired Elrod, who is known as a beloved professor and one of the most prominent figures in UM’s history. Clapp writes that Duniway himself was fired later by the state Board of Education, probably because of a flap over the hiring of law school faculty.

She devotes a large section to economics Professor Louis Levine, who was suspended by the state education chancellor in 1919 for publishing a study that concluded the mining industry wasn’t paying its fair share of taxes. His academic freedom trampled upon, Levine was later reinstated with back pay after an investigation.

Of course the most detailed section of Clapp’s history is devoted to her husband’s years as president. She tells how, because of deep-rooted antagonisms that had developed at UM, her husband delayed his inauguration for a year, hoping he could foster some sort of harmony among the faculty, administration, and various departments. He didn’t want to “spend the best years of his life on a grumbling volcano,” she wrote. It seems he was able to bring the factions together. Clapp stayed on as president until his death thirteen years later and holds the record as UM’s longest-serving president. President Dennison is closing in on that record, with his twelve-year rein. History in the making.

- Cary Shimek

Not a Lot of Hot Air

In June Montana’s Flathead Lake and Glacier National Park became the setting for high-level discussions of global warming. Fifty scientists and dignitaries from China, Korea, Japan, and the United States gathered to tackle the hot topic during UM’s Fifth Mansfield Pacific Retreat, Melting Mountains: Climate Change in the Asia-Pacific Region.

Phil West, UM Mansfield Professor of Modern Asian Affairs, chats with Yang Jiechi, Chinese ambassador to the United States.

Held at venues in and around Bigfork and Glacier, the event allowed attendees to learn about and discuss the contentious international issue in a relaxed, informal setting. The retreat was organized by UM’s Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center and the Washington, D.C.-based Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs, which work to improve relations between Asia and America.

Participants saw the effects of global warming firsthand in Glacier National Park on Going-to-the-Sun Road. “We were given a very graphic presentation about how much the glaciers have shrunk,” says Joanna Shelton, interim director of the UM center. “Climate change affects everyone on Earth. It’s hard to imagine a more important topic.” There also was time for a little fun. She said that at the top of the pass some of the Asian guests did what many people do when they first encounter snow—they had a snowball fight. “The retreat went very well,” she says. “We had overwhelmingly positive feedback from the participants, with many saying they learned a lot.”

The high-profile guests included the Chinese and Korean ambassadors to the United States, as well as Jiang Zehui, the president of the Chinese Academy of Forestry, and the sister of Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Those attending witnessed presentations by some of the world’s pioneering global-change scientists, such as Charles Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Tom Wigley of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, and UM’s Steve Running, whose department has designed software for NASA environmental monitoring satellites.

Other speakers hailed from government agencies, environmental groups, and the forest-products industry. Informal debate was encouraged between presentations, with headsets used to provide language translation. Participants mulled over a variety of possible strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

Gordon Flake, executive director of the Washington, D.C. Mansfield Center, said the clear air of western Montana fosters clear thoughts. “There’s a real advantage to having diplomatic meetings outside of Washington, Tokyo, Beijing, and the capitals because it removes a lot of the distractions that are present in those cities. It also helps people get away from the national-interest type of thinking, and helps people come up with ideas of more mutual interest.”

The 1996 and 1998 Mansfield Retreats also were held in western Montana. The 1997 retreat was in Beijing, and the 2000 event took place in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan. The 2003 retreat, tentatively planned to address the topic of economics and the environment, will be held in Korea.

- Cary Shimek

Death of the Yearbook

Sentinel student annuals cover two shelves in the Mansfield Library’s archives and Special Collections reading room, their colorful covers sandwiching pages of black and white photographs, drawings, names, poetry—and memories—of generations of UM students.

Want to find photographs of students, faculty, buildings on campus, programs, UM traditions, important events? If you want that information for the years 1905 to 1972 or 1987 to1989, you’re in luck—it’s in the annuals. The volumes from the 1910s and 1920s are thin, filled with detailed articles, quotes, and photos from each class member, even details about the growing faculty. The ones from the 1950s and 1960s are fat, filled with photographs of dances and Homecoming royalty, hopeful young faces framed by neat haircuts.

Need information for other years? Tough luck. No annuals were published for 1973 to 1986 or since 1990. Thousands of students, hundreds of faculty, and uncountable events, transitions, and traditions are recorded in other places—university publications and office records, the Montana Kaimin—but not in the easily searched yearbook. A vital storehouse of campus memory has gone by the wayside.

UM isn’t alone in this trend. At college and university campuses across the country, yearbooks are disappearing in the face of rising costs, declining sales, and decreased student interest. There’s also the opposite trend. Linda Puntney, the yearbook adviser at Kansas State University and executive director of the National Journalism Education Association, says that many schools are calling and e-mailing her for advice on how to resurrect their annuals. Calls have come in from large schools, as well as smaller campuses.

Puntney feels that the decline is over and that yearbooks are coming back. The tragedy of September 11, in particular, has revived interest in traditions such as yearbooks. She adds that interest in yearbooks tends to be cyclical.

According to Gary Lundgren, marketing manager at Jostens, overall yearbook sales remain steady at college and university campuses, although many schools are no longer producing them. “Yearbooks on college campuses really need a champion,” says Mark Cassutt, manager of corporate communications for Jostens, the country’s leading publisher of high school, college, and university yearbooks. The campuses who still have an annual yearbook tend to have an adviser or permanent staff member who provides continuity and keeps the interest high, Cassutt says.

Putting together a yearbook that truly represents all parts of a campus is a big job, even at a medium-sized campus like UM. It’s a challenge to track down all of the students for portraits—not to mention all the student organizations, stage productions, sports teams, and the like. And if the University can get those pictures, a good part of the cost to produce the yearbook won’t be covered by sales and advertisements.

Some campuses have gone to CD-ROM or video annuals that are cheaper and less time-consuming to produce. Marquette University, for instance, last published a paper annual in 1996, then went to a CD-ROM multimedia yearbook. Other campuses produce the CD-ROM as an accessory to a paper annual. CD-ROMs may be cheaper to produce, but it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to read them as easily as we read the first Sentinel 98 years later. Technology changes rapidly, and it’s a rare individual who maintains old machines and software to read old media.

Memories of the recent past at UM may remain locked in hearts and minds, shared in fleeting moments at reunions and other occasions, but not neatly bound between book covers. Or perhaps the yearbook will rise again, ready to hold memories for the future. - Jodi Allison-Bunnell, UM archivist

Admirable Alums

Six Distinguished Alumni Awards will be presented at the 2002 Homecoming Singing on the Steps September 20. Recipients are: Monsignor Anthony M. Brown, Ed.D. ’58, Butte; John W. Jutila ’53, M.A. ’54, Bozeman; Nancy Fields O’Connor ’51, Malibu, California; William G. “Bill” Papesh ’65, Spokane, Washington; Marilyn Shope Peterson ’57, Seeley Lake; and Robert J. Swan ’71, M.A. ’72, Box Elder.

Clarification: A story on UM’s new Fitness and Recreation Center in the Spring 2002 Montanan erroneously stated alumni receive a discounted fee. Only faculty and staff receive a discount. The fee for an alumni user is $45 a month; memberships are available only to UM faculty, staff, and alumni.