APPLETON, WIS. — Career achievements, contributions to the betterment of society and volunteer service to Lawrence University will be publicly recognized as part of the college’s annual Reunion Weekend Celebration June 15-17.
More than 900 alumni and guests from 42 states and seven countries, including Australia, China and Indonesia, are expected to return to campus to participate in the weekend-long festivities. Two alumni will be recognized with distinguished achievement awards and eight will be honored with service awards Saturday, June 15 during the annual Reunion Convocation at 10:30 a.m. in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel.
Virginia Danielson, Watertown, Mass., will receive the Lucia R. Briggs Distinguished Achievement Award. Named in honor of the second president of Milwaukee-Downer College, the Briggs award recognizes alumni of more than 15 years for outstanding contributions to, and achievements in, a career field.
A 1971 Lawrence graduate, Danielson has established herself as a world-class ethnomusicologist and library administrator. Regarded as a leading expert in sound-preservation technologies, Danielson is the curator of the Archive of World Music and the Richard F. French Librarian at Harvard University’s Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, a position she has held since 1999.
After earning a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois, Danielson began her career as an archivist in the UI ethnomusicology archives and a cataloging assistant in the music library. She joined the library staff at Harvard in 1987 as a catalog assistant in the Widener Library and was appointed caretaker of the Isham Memorial Library, a special collection of rare books, microforms and manuscripts in 1994.
Pursuing her scholarly interests in music of the Middle East, Danielson spent three years in the mid-1980s living in the Egyptian city of Al-Minya. She later chronicled the life and influence of singer Umm Kulthum, regarded as the Arab world’s most celebrated musical performer of the 20th century, in the 1998 biography, “The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Modern Egyptian Society,” which won the Alan Merriam Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Jennifer Baumgardner, a 1992 Lawrence graduate, will receive the Nathan M. Pusey Young Alumni Distinguished Achievement Award, which recognizes Lawrence alumni of 15 years or less for significant contributions to, and achievements in, a career field. The award honors the 10th and youngest president of Lawrence and an exemplary figure in higher education in the 20th century.
A resident of Brooklyn, N.Y., Baumgardner is one of the nation’s prominent voices in the “third wave of feminism.” Shortly after graduation, she began a five-year stint as the youngest editor at Ms. magazine and has since produced a remarkable body of work. She has co-authored two books, “Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future” in 2000 and “Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism” in 2004. Her latest book, “Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics,” published in February, explores the intersection of bisexuality and feminism.
In addition to her books, Baumgardner has written for many of the nation’s premiere women’s magazines, including Jane, Glamour, Marie Claire, and Elle and also edited a series of feminist classics, beginning with Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch.” She has served on the board of the New York Abortion Access Fund, worked with Planned Parenthood and was the creator of the “I Had an Abortion” t-shirt, which was part of a larger campaign, that included a film of the same name that she produced, to encourage women to talk about their experiences.
The Commonwealth Club of California named Baumgardner one of six “Visionaries for the 21st Century,” noting she had “permanently changed the way people think about feminism.”
Five alumni each will receive the George B. Walter Service to Society Award. Named in honor of Walter, a 1936 graduate, beloved former faculty member and dean of men at Lawrence who believed strongly that every individual can and should make a positive difference in the world, the award recognizes alumni who best exemplify the ideals of a liberal education through socially useful service in their community, the nation or the world.
Since 1993, Duffie Adelson, has served as the executive director of the Merit School of Music in Chicago. Founded in 1979 in response to the elimination of music instruction in Chicago’s elementary schools, Merit brings music education to over 6,500 students of all ages and abilities each year. A music education major at Lawrence who earned her B.M. in 1973, Adelson spent 12 years as a music teacher in three states before joining the Merit School as a part-time instructor in 1982.
In 1986, Adelson stepped in to help the founding director, whose only staff member had just left, and was invited to stay on. Under her leadership, Merit has become a nationally recognized community arts school, known for its innovative partnerships with other organizations, its high-quality, comprehensive music curriculum and its commitment to serving economically disadvantaged students. Adelson has presided over a $19.6 million capital campaign to acquire and renovate the Joy Faith Knapp Music Center, which opened in 2005 and has more than doubled the school’s instructional and performance space.
Her work at Merit has earned Adelson numerous honors, among them the YWCA of Metropolitan Chicago Outstanding Achievement Award in the Arts, the Oprah Winfrey Angel Network “Use Your Life” Award, which was presented on national television and a Distinguished Alumna Award from Michigan’s Interlochen Center for the Arts. Today’s Chicago Woman magazine named Adelson one of its “100 Women Making a Difference.”
She serves on the board of advisors to “Midori and Friends,” a foundation that provides children in underserved New York City public schools with music-education programs, and is a trustee of the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts.
Over the course of the past 50 years, 1957 Lawrence graduate Martin Deppe has played a role in some of the most important movements and moments of recent U.S. history. A United Methodist pastor who served six Chicago-area congregations from 1961 until his retirement in 1999, Deppe’s dedication and devotion to human and civil rights as well as worldwide peace and justice issues echo an early vision of his denomination: “to reform the nation, particularly the Church, and to spread scriptural holiness over the land.”
In 1967, he stood behind Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the signing of a covenant between the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation Breadbasket and the Jewel Tea Company. Having helped negotiate the agreement, Deppe was “midwife” to an event that led a major Chicago chain store move from 4 percent to 12 percent black employment in only three years.
As a member of Clergy and Laity Concerned about the Vietnam War, an organization co-founded by former Lawrence Scarff Professor Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Deppe was part of a delegation that traveled to Paris in 1971 to meet with the North Vietnamese representatives to the peace talks. As the head of the Alliance to End Repression, he led a successful effort that resulted in a federal district court ruling that eliminated the Chicago Police Department’s Subversive Activities Unit.
Active in the Reconciling Congregation Movement, a grass-roots effort for change on lesbian and gay issues in the United Methodist Church, Deppe also served on the strategy team for the election in 1980 of the first woman bishop in any denomination. He has extended his leadership and passion to dozens of organizations seeking social and economic justice, among them the AIDS Pastoral Care Network, the Chicago Leadership Network for the Common Good and the Justice Coalition of Greater Chicago.
Margarita (“Peg”) Thompson Oliver of Pharr, Texas, who earned a bachelor’s degree in drama from Lawrence in 1942, has been described as a “powerful whirlwind” for her work as director, lead teacher and guiding spirit of the Coalition of Literacy Services, Inc., a county-wide, non-governmental program she founded in Hidalgo County, Texas in 1984.
Operating in one of the nation’s poorest counties, where more than 100,000 adults over age 25 — roughly 30 percent of the population — were identified as needing some form of adult education, Oliver’s creation provides adult basic education, literacy and public information. The program is exceptionally noteworthy for its openness and self-paced curriculum: anyone can walk in and each student works at his or her own pace. For much of her 21-year tenure at CLS, Oliver single-handedly taught an estimated 1,000 people per year, often leading as many as ten classes a week.
A Texas transplant who spent nearly 40 years living in Appleton, Oliver was among the first volunteers to work with Hmong refugees on literacy issues when they began arriving in the Fox Valley in the mid-1970s. After relocating to the Rio Grande Valley in 1984, she quickly discovered a dire need for her education, motivation and time and shorting thereafter, the CLS was born. Since retiring in 2005, she has remained in touch with many of her former students, continuing to offer her support. She currently is working with the Bipartisan Education Compromise to help turn poor communities into educated communities.
Thomas Oreck may not be as familiar to the general public as his father, David, the founder and advertising “face” of the family-named company best known for its vacuum cleaners. But as president and chief executive officer of the New Orleans-based Oreck Corporation, the 1973 Lawrence graduate earned national praise for his compassionate response to his employees’ needs in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
When Katrina hit, Oreck’s manufacturing facility in Long Beach, Miss., was severely damaged and the homes of many of its 600 employees were destroyed. Tom Oreck immediately announced that the company would make sure the employees were safe and cared for. He also reassured them they still had jobs and a paycheck. The company provided its employees with housing in mobile units, food, water, generators, fuel and other supplies. Oreck also brought in medical trauma specialists and advisors to help employees with insurance and FEMA claims.
Despite the devastation wrought by Katrina on both of its locations, the Oreck Corporation was the first company to reopen a national headquarters in New Orleans and a plant on the Gulf Coast.
The company set up the Oreck Employees Relief Fund, seeding it with a $500,000 corporate contribution and launched a national donation drive through its Oreck Clean Home Centers across the country. In addition, it donated 1,000 vacuum cleaners to the Salvation Army for distribution to those affected by the storm. The company’s response earned the Oreck family a “Heroes of Katrina” designation by CNN’s “American Morning” program.
Tom Oreck, who became company president in 2000, serves on the board of the Isadore Newman School and the Make-A-Wish Foundation and is a volunteer pilot for Angel Flight. He is a vice-chair of the New Orleans Business Council, an organization made up of the CEOs of the largest local companies and joined with other residents to form Citizens for 1 Great New Orleans, a group active in recovery efforts.
Nancy Rigg is the human embodiment of the adage “out of tragedy came some good.” Through sheer determination and unwavering perseverance, she turned a tragic episode in her own life into a pioneering effort to save the lives of others.
In 1980, Rigg and her fiance, Earl Higgins, were walking near the flood-swollen Los Angeles River when they noticed a child in the turbulent waters. Higgins waded into the torrent to attempt a rescue but was swept downstream along with the child. While the child somehow survived, Higgins disappeared. His remains were recovered nine months later.
In the aftermath, Rigg discovered that 11 different agencies shared jurisdiction over a 30-mile stretch of the river. They could not communicate with each other, the river had never been mapped for rescue locations and none of the area’s first-responders were trained in rescue techniques specific to fast-flowing rivers.
A writer and filmmaker, Rigg unleashed her talents on bringing the issue of river safety to the attention of the public and civic authorities. She wrote op-ed pieces, produced an educational video, “No Way Out,” and even wrote an episode of the popular television show “Baywatch” about swiftwater-rescue techniques. After years of advocacy, her efforts were rewarded in 1992 with the creation of the Multi-Jurisdictional Joint-Agency River Rescue Task Force.
Today, as a direct result of Rigg’s efforts, flood zones in Los Angeles have been mapped, rescue operations are centrally coordinated and the death toll has been reduced from an average of 12-18 per torrential storm to an average of 1-2. Individuals who are swept away now have a fighting chance to be rescued and rescue personnel have the training, equipment, planning and communications capability to effectively coordinate rescue operations and also protect themselves.
Hailed as “the mother of swiftwater rescue,” the 1972 Lawrence graduate and current resident of Camarillo, Calif., has taken her fight far beyond her backyard. In 2000, the day before the 20th anniversary of her fiancé’s death, she testified in Washington, D.C., in front of the first-ever House of Representatives subcommittee hearing on flood-water rescue.
While changes at the federal level have been slow in coming, Rigg claims one small victory. After Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, all eight urban search and rescue teams with swiftwater rescue components from California were deployed by FEMA.
Rigg continues to write for professional fire and rescue journals and hosts an online newsgroup for rescue personnel as well as an online grief-support group.
Ryan Tarpley of Beverly Hills, Calif., will receive The Marshall B. Hulbert Young Alumni Service Award, which recognizes a Lawrence alumnus or alumna of 15 years or less, who has provided significant service to the college. This award honors Hulbert, a 1926 Lawrence graduate known as “Mr. Lawrence,” who served the university in many significant capacities for 54 years.
A 1993 graduate, Tarpley has been active in almost every facet of the Lawrence community, serving as a member of the steering committee for his 10th reunion, and the class gift committee for his 15th cluster reunion in 2007, an admissions volunteer, an Ambassador peer solicitor, a member of the Lawrence University Alumni Association (LUAA) Board of Directors and its executive committee, a member of the Los Angeles regional program committee and the host/coordinator for two Los Angeles alumni activities, including a “Meet Jill Beck” event.
Mary L. Carlson-Mason of Manchester, Mich., and Richard Weber, Cecil, will be presented the Gertrude B. Jupp Outstanding Service Award. The award honors Jupp, a 1918 graduate of Milwaukee-Downer College, who was named M-D Alumna of the Year in 1964 for her long volunteer service to the college. It recognizes Lawrence and Milwaukee-Downer alumni of more than 15 years who have provided outstanding service to the college.
Carlson-Mason, a 1972 Lawrence graduate, has served as steering committee chair and leader of the past two cluster reunions for the Classes of 1971-1973, inspiring the highest attendance at any 30th Reunion in 2002. She also served as chair of the LUAA Communications Committee from 2001-03, helping create and name the online alumni newsletter Lawrence E-News (LENs). She organized friends to attend President Jill Beck’s inauguration in 2005 and regularly hosts other informal gatherings of Lawrentians in her area.
Weber, a 1957 graduate, assumed a leadership role with his 40th and 50th reunion gift committees. In 1997, Lawrence’s Sesquicentennial year, Weber’s class set what was at that time a 40th Reunion alumni participation record of 69.3 percent. Since then he has been at the forefront of efforts to organize another substantial campaign for his class’s 50th reunion gift, facilitating innumerable meetings and conference calls, reaching out to classmates and engaging in behind-the-scenes work whenever needed.
