A sampling of media clippings about Lawrence University, its faculty, students, and alumni from Spring 1997 and Summer 1997. For more clippings, check out the Lawrence in the News index page.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee
September 9, 1997
Headline: Lawrence is set to honor sports pioneer Heimbach. She blazed trail
well before Title IX was passed
Byline: Tom Flaherty
Excerpt: From 1919-1960, (Althea) Heimbach coached young women in everything
from archery to field hockey at Milwaukee Downer College, a former women's
college on Milwaukee's East Side. Heimbach retired in 1960, and Milwaukee
Downer College merged with Appleton's Lawrence College in 1964 to become
Lawrence University. Heimbach, who died in Texas in 1992 at the age of
97, will be honored Oct. 4, when she will be inducted into the Lawrence
athletic hall of fame. Heimbach's biggest fame came from a sport in which the
competition was strictly on campus. In 1933, she started coaching rowing, which
quickly became the favorite sport at the school. By 1938, nearly one-third of
the student body was trying out for crew.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee
September 5, 1997
Headline: Lawrence's Olson puts team goals first
Byline: Tom Flaherty
Excerpt: In a way, Brad Olson was looking forward to taking that first big hit.
Olson's shoulder felt fine when Lawrence University's football team
started practicing last month. The shoulder separation he had suffered last
Oct. 19 was just a bad memory. Olson, a senior from Appleton, was on a pace to
break the NCAA Division III record of 6,125 yards rushing overall when he was
injured in Lawrence's seventh game last season. After leading all Division III
ball carriers with 1,760 yards as a sophomore, he entered the 1996 season with
3,111 yards in two seasons. The injury ended that record run at 3,976 yards. He
would need to rush for 2,149 yards in his senior season to erase the name of
Carey Bender of Coe College from the Division III record book. Olson hasn't
spent a lot of time thinking about the missed opportunity. The 6-foot-1,
220-pound fullback is within sniffing distance of two other records. He is just
466 yards short of the Lawrence record of 4,442 and 816 yards short of the
Wisconsin collegiate record of 4,792 set in 1990-'93.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee
August 26, 1997
Headline: Russell Flom, 94, spent his career in paper industry. Lawrence
University graduate served school for years as trustee
Byline: Eldon Knoche
Excerpt: Russell C. Flom spent his career in the paper industry and retired in
1964 as vice president and assistant general manager of the Marathon Division
of American Can Co. After that, he served four years as the first president of
the Washington-based Paperboard Packaging Council. In addition to his
leadership in numerous national trade organizations, he served as a trustee at
Appleton's Lawrence University for 18 years between 1938 and 1976.
Twenty-one of his relatives, including his late wife, four children and their
spouses and five grandchildren, attended Lawrence.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee
August 22, 1997
Excerpt: The University of Wisconsin-Madison was named the eighth-best public
school in the nation and several schools in the UW system also earned top
ratings in a U.S. News & World Report ranking released Thursday. Other
Wisconsin schools with high ranks in the guide include Lawrence
University in Appleton, which ranked 40th in the best liberal arts colleges
category.
Capital Times, Madison
August 19, 1997
Headline: Native son captures top fiction prize
Byline: Doug Moe
Excerpt: A Madison native has won first place in one of the country's most
prestigious short story contests. Peter Rudy won $5,000 for his story about a
TV anchor who buys a toupee, ''Lessons My Hair Has Taught Me,'' one of 1,700
entrants in the 1997 Nelson Algren Awards for Short Fiction. The awards are
sponsored by the Chicago Tribune. After graduating from Lawrence University
in Appleton, Rudy worked as a writer for Madison television producer John
Roach. Though now in San Francisco, where he works as copy writer for a small
ad agency, Rudy has retained his Madison ties and earlier this year profiled
local NHL referee Dan Schachte for Madison Magazine.
Star Tribune, Minneapolis
July 15, 1997
Headline: Raymond Herzog, former chairman of 3M, dies at 81
Excerpt: Raymond H. Herzog, 81, former president and chairman of the 3M Co. in
Maplewood, died of cancer Saturday at his home in Pine Tree Hills, Minn. Herzog
retired in 1980 after 40 years with the company. He started as a quality
control inspector. He was president from 1970 to 1975 and chief operating
officer starting in 1973. He was a member of the board of directors from 1965
to 1985, serving as chairman in 1975. Although he was an outspoken critic of
what he called government "intervention" in business affairs, he was considered
a strong candidate to be secretary of commerce for Presidents Jimmy Carter and
Ronald Reagan. He was raised in Appleton, Wis., where he earned a bachelor's
degree from Lawrence University. He was a board member of Deluxe Corp.,
Jim Walter Corp., Northwest Airlines, U.S. Steel Corp., General Motors Corp.,
and West Point Pepperell Inc., a trustee of the Mayo Foundation and an emeritus
trustee of Lawrence.
Atlantic News-Telegraph, Atlantic, Iowa
July 11, 1997
Headline: Steffen named Luce Scholar at Lawrence University
Excerpt: Leta Steffen has been named Lawrence University's first Clare Boothe Luce Scholar. Among Lawrence's most prestigious honors, the merit-based award is given as recognition of being the top female science major in the sophomore class. The Clare Boothe Luce program was established at Lawrence to encourage women of talent to achieve their potential in the sciences. According to a recent national study, Lawrence ranked in the top seven percent of all four-year institutions as a baccalaureate source of natural science doctorates earned by women, ranking even with the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania."
Door County Advocate, Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin
July 3, 1997
Editorial
Headline: Retreat lives up to university's goals
Byline: Chan Harris
Excerpt: Björklunden, Lawrence University's retreat at Baileys Harbor, continues to prove that it is one of Door County's significant assets. Last week the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, a Christian activist, led a class titled "Credo: This I Believe." We were able to attend an informal evening session and found ourselves in awe over Coffin's reasoning and silver tongue. So in awe that we read one of his books a few days later. Thanks, Lawrence, it was an evening worthy of the university's mission.
Star Tribune, Minneapolis
June 29, 1997
Headline: The most important investment was kids
Byline: Mary Eckardt, The Sheboygan Press
Excerpt: At age 50, Hugh F. Denison walked away from a lucrative job to work with kids on a regular basis. He's been performing what some consider miracles ever since. When he approached Junior Achievement in Milwaukee to volunteer his services as a teacher there were two things he wanted to accomplish with kids. His mission: to make kids feel better about themselves, and to teach what business is all about. He does five one-hour weekly sessions for each class - and he has 12 classes. After graduating from high school in 1964, Denison went on to Lawrence University in Appleton. He was in the Navy and also in the process of becoming a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (he'd have been in Bill Clinton's class) when he was sent to Vietnam. When his tour of duty was up, he got on a plane bound for Travis Air Force Base and promised himself: "I'm never going to have a bad day again as long as I live." Denison also vowed to pay back for coming home alive. He has kept both promises. After Vietnam, he worked as a contractor for the next 13 years and then joined the Milwaukee Co., the largest independent stock brokerage firm in Wisconsin. In 1998 the company was sold, and Denison became co-owner of Heartland Advisors, a subsidiary of the firm. He was with his son, Ross, at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., when Denison's two promises came back to him. On the plane back to Milwaukee, he decided to teach kids ''the values I hold dear.'' Denison talked to his wife and ''fame, fortune and glamour were put aside.'' The next Monday he gathered his partners at work and told them of his decision and that he'd be retiring in nine months, on his 50th birthday, in April 1996, to teach youngsters.
[The article also appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal.]
Chronicle of Higher Education, Washington, D.C.
June 27, 1997
Byline: Humanities courses that work
Byline: Paul Cohen, Director of Freshman Studies; Tim Spurgin, Associate
Professor of English; and Franklin Doeringer, Professor of History, Lawrence
University, Appleton, Wis.
Excerpt: To the Editor: Your account of the latest debates at Stanford -- and,
in particular, your treatment of the "peep-show approach" encouraged by a
reliance on snippets from "great texts" -- couldn't help but remind us of
recent revisions in the program for first-year students at Lawrence
University. Having persisted in one form or another since 1945, Freshman
Studies is a two-term course that runs on but a single track. Designed to
promote the ideal of the liberally educated generalist, Freshman Studies takes
in works and instructors from every discipline. At any given moment, a
physicist might be teaching Things Fall Apart; an oboist, Einstein; or an
anthropologist, The Marriage of Figaro. That is not to suggest that we at
Lawrence haven't undergone our own agonies of transformation; yet, as the smoke
clears, we have come to agree on a few key points. First, we don't want any
"peep shows" here. We will continue to assign complete works, and we will
continue to discuss them as thoroughly as possible. If 10 minutes constitutes
"some time" in the Stanford Cultures, Ideas, and Values program, then we
are perhaps unusual in asking our students to begin their college careers by
immersing themselves (for as long as three weeks) in a work like Plato's The
Republic. After engaging the entire campus for a year in town-hall meetings,
opinion surveys, and "democracy walls," we have agreed to abandon chronology --
thereby avoiding debates over whose history Freshman Studies should pretend to
chronologize -- in favor of a skills-building approach.
Wisconsin State Journal, Madison
June 15, 1997
Headline: Kohl fans want him closer to home
Byline: Jeff Mayers, State Government Reporter
Excerpt: The idea of a governor's race could be growing on Herb Kohl. Kohl, the popular mainstream Democratic U.S. senator from Milwaukee, was confronted by media at the annual state party convention Saturday with the repeated question: "Will you run for governor next year?" But several longtime Democratic strategists still think a Kohl candidacy for governor is a longshot. "I have no reason to believe he's going run," said Democratic National Committeeman Larry Longley, a political science professor at Lawrence University, "but a lot of people would love for him to do it."
Chicago Tribune, Chicago
June 15, 1997
Headline: Another old-timer
Byline: Richard Warch, President, Lawrence University
Excerpt: In reading the 150th Anniversary Commemorative Edition, I was struck
by the parallels between the founding of a newspaper and the founding of a
college. Lawrence University, also founded in 1847 and in the midst of a sesquicentennial celebration (though, as our charter was signed on Jan. 15, we predated the founding of the Chicago Tribune by nearly five months!) congratulates you on your illustrious history. We are a liberal arts college with a conservatory of music, and we are nearly 200 miles north of the Windy City. But with more than 2,000 alumni and 12 percent of our current student body from your city, we consider Chicago to be something of a Lawrence stronghold.
Lakeland Times, Minocqua, Wisconsin
June 13, 1997
Headline: Lawrence University honors John Eckardt
Excerpt: John Eckardt, an English teacher at Minocqua's Lakeland Union High School, will be honored at Lawrence University's 148th commencement as one of the state's outstanding educators. Established in 1985, Lawrence's outstanding teacher award annually recognizes two Wisconsin secondary school teachers for excellence in and out of the classroom. Nominated by Lawrence seniors, the teachers are selected for their abilities to communicate their subject effectively and create a sense of excitement in the classroom. Earlier this year, Eckardt received the Excellent Educator award from the Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth.
Duluth News-Tribune, Duluth, Minnesota
June 1, 1997
Headline: Success!
Excerpt: Matthew Livingston, a 1993 Duluth East graduate, was a member of the Lawrence University (Appleton, Wis.) saxophone quartet that received first-place honors in a national competition sponsored by the Music Teachers National Association. A soprano saxophonist, Livingston helped Lawrence win the MTNA's chamber music competition. He will study in the Masters of Music in Classical Performance program at the New England Conservatory in Boston.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee
May 1, 1997
Headline: Leader conquered century's crises
Byline: Knight-Ridder News Service, Cox News Service
Excerpt: Friday, President Clinton and a crowd expected to number around
10,000 will dedicate the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, a 71/2-acre
expanse of four outdoor "rooms" of gray-pink carnelian granite,
highlighted with statues, sculptures, flowers, trees and waterfalls. The
$48 million memorial is intended to be a place to reflect on how FDR and
the nation overcame two great crises of this century, the Depression and
World War II. But like FDR, his memorial is not without controversies.
The most contentious of those is over how much the memorial should deal
with Roosevelt's paralysis after being stricken by poliomyelitis in
1921. There also is some debate about whether FDR deserves to be in the
memorialized company of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and
Jefferson. Some historians say that controversy has dwindled over the
decades. "If there are criteria for such a memorial, Roosevelt would
certainly meet them," said Richard Harrison, a historian of the FDR
presidency and dean of faculty at Appleton's Lawrence University.
"His dedication to what is now called positive government revolutionized
the American political process and effectively changed interpretation of
the Constitution."
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee
May 1, 1997
Headline: McCarthy's name his primary legacy. Senator remembered 40 years after
his death
Byline: The Associated Press
Excerpt: Forty years after his death, the legacy of Wisconsin's most notorious
political figure, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, lives on in a single word: McCarthyism.
"It's become a very vital word in our language," said Sarah McClendon, a
veteran political reporter. However, college and high school textbooks now
treat McCarthy as part of Cold War history. "The 18- to 20-year-old has no
memory going back before President Bush," said Martin Gruberg, longtime
political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Larry
Longley, political science professor at Lawrence University in
Appleton, agreed. "After 40 years students don't have much knowledge of him.
He's basically unknown to most students at Lawrence," Longley said.
The Hill, Washington, D.C.
April 30, 1997
Headline: Silence proves golden for Rep. DeGette aide
Byline: John Wagley, Jr.
Excerpt: Rep. Diana DeGette's (D-Colo.) L.D., Libby Mullin, says the two weeks
she spent in silent reflection in a Tibetan monastery last month helped her
realize the importance of thinking before you speak. "It would especially
benefit people inside the Beltway," adds the 1990 Lawrence University graduate. She was Rep. Peter Deutsch's (D-Fla.) L.D. for two years and also
spent a year and a half as an L.A. for former Rep. Leslie Byrne (D-Va.).
San Jose Mercury News, San Jose
April 27, 1997
Headline: Memorial sparks debate over Roosevelt's stature, statue
Byline: Knight-Ridder News Service, Cox News Service
Excerpt: Franklin Delano Roosevelt said he wanted a simple memorial ''about the
size of my desk.'' He's getting one that sprawls across 7.5 acres, costs $48
million, and features waterfalls, bronze statues and enough granite to
construct a 80-story building. On Friday, President Clinton will dedicate the
FDR Memorial beside the Tidal Basin, honoring a Democratic predecessor who gave
hope to a downtrodden populace during the Great Depression and led a determined
nation toward victory in World War II. There is some debate about whether FDR
deserves to be in the memorialized company of George Washington, Abraham
Lincoln and Jefferson. Some historians say that controversy has dwindled over
the decades. "If there are criteria for such a memorial, Roosevelt would
certainly meet them," said Richard Harrison, a historian of the FDR presidency
and dean of faculty at Appleton's Lawrence University. "His dedication
to what is now called positive government revolutionized the American political
process and effectively changed interpretation of the Constitution."
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee
March 30, 1997
Headline: Busy costume designer keeps stages in stitches
Headline: Damien Jaques
Excerpt Karin Simonson Kopischke has been something of a whirling dervish in
Milwaukee since February. Two shows she designed were in rehearsals
simultaneously, and she could be seen darting across Kilbourn Ave. between
First Stage Milwaukee in the Marcus Center and the Milwaukee Repertory Theater
in the Milwaukee Center. All of this comes on the heels of Simonson Kopischke
winning a Joseph Jefferson Award last November for her design of the
Shakespeare Repertory Company's production of "Richard III." The prestigious
Jefferson is Chicago's equivalent of a Tony Award. Simonson Kopischke did not
set out to be a costume designer, but her broad background has served her well
in the profession. Simonson Kopischke began with community theater acting
roles with such Waukesha County groups as the Sunset Playhouse and Waukesha
Civic Theatre and she continued to act in college, at Lawrence
University, where she had a double major in music and art. During those
years she started dabbling in costume work.
The Idaho Statesman, Boise
March 26, 1997
Headline: Boise senior chosen for national physics workshop
Excerpt: Matthew Lane, a senior at Boise High, was among 24 students selected
nationwide to participate in a weekend physics workshop at Lawrence
University in Appleton, Wisc. The two-day workshop explored laser physics,
chaos and liquid crystals. Lane attended lecture and laboratory sessions and
received hands-on experience with a variety of lasers, an x-ray diffractometer
and computation/graphics equipment. Lane was chosen for his strong performance
in high school physics, chemistry, math, computing and scientific
extracurricular programs.