REUNION NOTEBOOK
Seen, Heard, Overheard
photos by Sally McCay
The weekend before Reunion, the Burlington Free Press plugged Belizbeha’s reunion/Discover Jazz Festival concert at the Flynn. Shauna (Antoniuc) Anderson ’00 was among the alumni band members quoted in the story: “Everyone is always game to play, so it just took off from there. I was hoping for maybe something small then Kyle (Thompson, aka “Fattie B.”) took the reins, and here we are playing the gosh darn Flynn! Awesome!”
Well, Shauna was right. It was awesome, perhaps even something stronger than gosh darn awesome. The classes of ’94 and ’99 threw their support behind the effort to bring back the nineties by reuniting one of the great bands of the era. From the sound of the shouts from the audience, a good number of alumni were in the house for the joyous show, on their feet from the downbeat—just like old times.
Diane Weiss Mufson ’59 celebrated her fiftieth Reunion and kept up a longstanding tradition on her return to Burlington. Starting with her fifth Reunion, Mufson and her husband, who live in Huntington, West Virginia, have always taken favorite professor Marion Brown Thorpe ’38 out to lunch. Of Thorpe, Mufson says: “We all want to be like her at ninety-three.”
John Sama ’84, (below) longtime director of the Living/Learning Center, celebrated his twenty-fifth Reunion and some very deep UVM roots. Sama shared the weekend with his aunt Sally Humphrey Jaynes ’59, who was marking her fiftieth Reunion. Both alumni, Sama says, owe their UVM connection to Jaynes’s father/Sama’s great uncle, who was Bingham J. Humphrey ’27. Humphrey was a former chair of the UVM Board of Trustees and a very active alumnus. Humphrey, in fact, was chair of the UVM board when the bonding documents for Living/Learning were signed.
Though Dr. James Betts ’69, MD ’73 long ago moved to California, where he is surgeon-in-chief at Oakland Children’s Hospital, his Vermont roots are deep and he hasn’t let distance keep him from compiling a long record of service to the university. In a “Voices of Vermont” talk, Betts offered a glimpse of his volunteer work advancing UVM’s two capital campaigns and his current service on the Board of Trustees. He also looked back to his early years in Bennington, Vermont. Betts remembered when a young doctor named Don Shea, fresh out of UVM Medical School, class of 1956, moved in across the street. “I saw him go out every day with his little black bag to make house calls. He’d come back twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours later,” Betts recalled. A curious kid, Betts asked Shea for details of what he did all day and liked the sound of it. The future doctor made his college choice early, too. “UVM for me wasn’t a fall back, not a first choice of others—it was where I was going to come,” Betts said.
Eric Lipton ’87, who was on campus to accept a 2009 Alumni Achievement Award, gave a talk in which he shared experiences and insights from his work as a reporter for The New York Times. Lipton is based in the Times’s Washington, D.C. bureau, where his current focus is the financial crisis. While Lipton is a regular visitor to the halls of power at the Treasury Department (tourist tip: he says it’s one of D.C.’s most underrated buildings), he’s also making frequent flights to the South, Midwest, and West—the areas of the country hardest hit by recession. The Times, of course, faces financial challenges of its own, and Lipton noted that he recently had his first unpaid furlough day. “I worked anyway,” he said. “I’m lucky to have this unbelievable front- row seat at the game. It’s a real privilege, and sometimes a burden. It can drive me crazy, the feeling that I can’t do enough to take advantage of that seat.”
At the Taste of Vermont dinner, Gladys Severance ’49 recounted the days when she and husband Malcolm (’49) were dorm parents in Converse Hall when it was all women. They moved in when their first child was ten weeks old. She told a tale of sprinting up the many flights of stairs in pursuit of girls dangling undergarments out of top floor windows as enticements to the “panty raiders” below. At the fiftieth class reception, she and Malcolm were reunited with several of the women (possibly panty danglers) they shepherded back at Converse.
It’s not easy sharing a stage with a world-class adventurer. But after receiving his Distinguished Service Award, Chico Lager ’75, poked a little bit of fun at a previous acceptance speech by Jan Reynolds ’78. Lager opened his remarks with a comment about how Jan neglected to mention (after recounting a few of her worldly adventures) that in Chico’s time at UVM he had summitted the Williams Hall fire escape “without oxygen and with beer!”
And on a more serious note, after receiving a standing ovation, Herb Brown ‘57 said that his Alumni Achievement Award was the “finest honor he had ever received.” Nice to hear from a guy with an NBA Championship ring.
ONLINE EXTRA
VIDEO: REUNION HIGHLIGHTS
[DEVELOPMENT]
photo by Sally McCay
LISMAN FUND GOING STRONG
When former UVM Board of Trustees chairman Bruce Lisman ’69 was looking for a way to honor his father, Irving Lisman ’34, for his eightieth birthday back in 1993, he settled on a scholarship as the appropriate venue. The Irving Lisman Scholarship Fund made its first awards in 1994 and is now celebrating its fifteenth anniversary. Established by the Lisman family and members of the Phi Sigma Delta fraternity and other UVM alumni who have benefited from Irving’s friendship, advice, and assistance, the Irving Lisman Scholarship has helped numerous UVM students to meet their educational and career objectives over the years, as the quotes on this page attest.
The Lisman Scholarship Fund targets an interesting group of students. Lisman Scholars are “deserving students who have graduated from a Vermont high school (or received equivalent training, education, or certification in Vermont) with a preference for non-traditional students (those students who did not follow a conventional high-school-to-college path).”
The Lisman family has deep roots in Vermont and Burlington, hence the focus on aiding Vermonters. As to the preference for helping non-traditional students, Lillian Lisman, Irving’s wife, points out that Irving was himself a non-traditional-age student himself many years ago when he went back to school to receive his certification to teach following World War II.
The endowed part of the fund (there is also a current operating component) now stands at more than $1.1 million. In the 2009-2010 academic year, thirty-three students will be receiving $3,000 or more in Irving Lisman scholarships, for a total of $102,000 in aid to non-traditional students. Since the fund’s inception, 226 UVM students have received a total of $858,471 in
Lisman scholarships.
Students do not apply for Lisman but are selected by the university, and the notification of their selection invariably comes as a very pleasant surprise.
Offering scholarship opportunities to deserving UVM students “is probably the most satisfying and enjoyable things we do as a family,” says Lillian Lisman.
“That is one of the high points for us,” she says of the annual luncheon the Lismans have with the scholarship recipients. “It’s a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling.”
“I promise you we’ve all gotten more out this than any of the students have,” says Bruce Lisman. “I think it’s a very good thing. If we can keep that endowment growing, we’ll be able to help even more students.”
One of the things that Lillian and Irving always emphasize to the students is that “this is not just a gift. It comes with an obligation to give back to the university and to other students at some point in the future. Scholarships should grow.”
Student Quotes
“The aid which you have given me has been far more than mere monetary assistance; it has been a warm, and much-needed affirmation that non-traditional, late-blooming students such as myself have a place here at UVM and in the academic community at large. I cannot thank you enough.”
“As a non-traditional student, I am also supporting two children and having to fund my education through loans puts an additional burden on my small family. This will allow me to work regular hours and still be able to spend time with my children.”
“I recently made the change from working as a carpenter to returning to school for a degree in mechanical engineering. It is my goal to use my innate mechanical ability to help reduce the human footprint on our world through the development of efficient technologies.”
[PLANNED GIVING]
Frank Livak '41
Profiles in Giving
Service & Scholarship
University of Vermont benefactor Frank Howard Livak, ’41,’48, G’51,’59, who gave so generously to the university over many years and whose name appears prominently in the Dudley H. Davis Center and on athletic scholarships, died April 8, 2009, in Fort Mill, South Carolina. He was ninety.
The profile that follows was originally published in the summer 2006 issue of Vermont Quarterly.
Talking about himself is obviously not among his favorite pastimes. But with a little coaxing, Frank Livak ’41 may put modesty aside just long enough to reveal a glimpse of an extraordinary lifetime of service and scholarship.
The son of Russian immigrants, Livak grew up on the dairy farm his parents bought in Rutland, Vermont, in 1918. Like so many of his contemporaries, he spent summers and much of his time before and after school working for a local farmer for $1 per day. His fortunes improved considerably when he accepted a job at the UVM farm paying thirty-five cents per hour, and thus was formed a bond that continues to this day. Livak enrolled as a student at UVM, earning the first of his four UVM degrees in 1941.
World War II interrupted any plans he may have had to return to Rutland. Then came one of those unplanned detours that can change the contours of a life. His superiors in the military recognized that his facility with language, having grown up with Russian-speaking parents, could make him a valuable asset. They enrolled him in a year-long language program at Stanford University, and he returned to the war theater fluent in no fewer than six languages. Because of that, “I was one of the first to cross into Germany after the Battle of the Bulge,” he says.
Upon his return to Vermont after the war, he enrolled once again at the University of Vermont, earning a bachelor’s degree in commerce and economics and master’s degrees in agricultural economics and in educational counseling. It was the latter field that became his ultimate calling. After teaching at the high school and college levels for a number of years, including four years teaching economics at UVM, he accepted a position with the Vermont Department of Education as a researcher and statistician. He retired after a twenty-year career with the Connecticut Department of Education and now resides in South Carolina. “I said I could take the weather anywhere as long as I didn’t have to shovel it,” he laughs.
Livak attended his 65th class reunion this spring and has been a generous benefactor to UVM over the past two years. He has established scholarships to honor the memories of his mother, Helen M. Livak, and his wife of many years, Mildred S. Livak. He has contributed to a planned track facility (he was a standout in cross-country during his UVM days), and made an estate provision for UVM athletic facilities in his will. And he recently announced a gift to name the Frank H. Livak ’41 and Mildred S. Livak Conference Room and Livak Fireplace Lounge in the new Dudley H. Davis Center.
Livak says that his four degrees from the university opened the doors to a wide choice of well-paid and rewarding occupations. His recent support, he says, is just his way of saying “thank you.”
The Office of Planned Giving
411 Main Street, Burlington, Vermont 05401
Voice: (802) 656-9535, Toll-free voice: (888) 458-8691
Website: alumni.uvm.edu/plannedgiving
Email: Becky Arnold at plannedgiving@uvm.edu
[ALUMNI FOCUS]
PETER SANDERS ’92
A LIFE FOUND
Horacio Pietragalla struggled. As a young man he was coming to terms with a radically redefined identity. He had discovered that the couple who had raised him as their child were not, in fact, his parents. His true parents were long dead, casualties of state-driven terrorism in Argentina’s Dirty War, 1976-1983. And this family he had called his own throughout his childhood? Were they saviors who had delivered him from the fate of his biological parents or were they complicit in the military brutality that had killed his mother and father and buried his own heritage?
The Disappeared, the debut documentary film by Peter Sanders ’92, offers few easy answers. Through the lens of the personal, Pietragalla’s search for self, Sanders penetrates the political, a dark, controversial seven years in Argentina’s history when tens of thousands of citizens “disappeared” in an era of state-sponsored violence.
Sanders’s film has earned critical praise, appeared on the History Channel, won the “2007 Best Documentary” award at the Documentary and Fiction Festival of Hollywood, and received the blessing of Netflix. Sanders returned to his alma mater in March for a UVM screening of the film before traveling to Washington, D.C., where an event at the Argentine embassy honored his work as director/producer of The Disappeared.
Filmmaker’s Path
While Horacio Pietragalla grappled with his identity in The Disappeared, Peter Sanders was at his own turning point during the making of the film. “This is my identity piece because I got to become who I wanted to become as a person through this movie,” Sanders says. “I had struggled with so many different careers, and I saw this as my chance to get on the radar and be seen as a professional filmmaker.”
Given his family’s distinction in cinema—six relatives have earned Academy Awards, including Sanders’s late father, Denis Sanders, who won the Oscar for Best Short Subject in 1955 with A Time Out of War and Best Documentary in 1970 for Czechoslovakia 1968—one might assume filmmaking would have been his first stop. But Sanders’s career would prove to be one of those winding paths in which the turns make perfect sense when viewed from the final destination.
A history major at UVM, Sanders credits the discipline with building the foundation for the journalistic direction his career eventually took. But immediately after graduation he was determined to be an actor, studied at the Stella Adler Conservatory in New York, and carved out a career with eight years of steady work in commercials, television, film, and off-Broadway. (He was “the face of Mercedes-Benz” for several years; “Sex and the City” fans might recognize him as a bartender and Samantha’s love interest in one episode.)
By age thirty, Sanders says he was “distraught with acting,” done with the quest for the big break, and turned to work in television news. He was a local reporter in Montana and Louisiana before setting his sights on a graduate degree in broadcast journalism from New York University in hopes the credential would help him move into a larger television market.
Working as a freelancer in April 2003, Sanders traveled to Buenos Aires to cover an economic summit. Bigger news broke when Argentina’s president Nestor Kirchner announced he would lift the pardon of generals from the Dirty War era and retry military cases. “I knew it would mean something,” Sanders says. “Cases would reopen, digging would start, excavations of the 30,000 people who died. I knew that there were going to be real results coming out, people would start finding their real families again.”
The story idea scarcely sparked, Sanders opened the newspaper and read about a disappeared child who had just emerged: Case #84, Horacio Pietragalla. Quickly contacting him, Sanders talked the young man into sitting down for an interview, two-hours of tape that would be the seed of a project that would consume years.
Sanders initially thought he might have a five-minute spot to peddle to CNN. But the story in its rough form would be his ticket into NYU graduate school and a critical step on the path back to the profession in his blood.
“It was definitely a huge turning point in my life,” Sanders says. “Do you do short-form, two-minute packages, the hustle and bustle of the newsroom every day… or do you work one long story, unpeel the onion until you get at what is really happening in that human being’s life?”
Risk and Reward
While Sanders was committed to making documentaries, his commitment to The Disappeared as a complete subject took longer. As he had opportunities to return to Argentina, he dug deeper into the story, earned more time with Pietragalla, his biological and adoptive families, advocates for the disappeared, and even military leaders of the era. From hundreds of hours of tape, he became convinced that his five-minute piece had the legs for thirty minutes, and that the thirty minutes could ripen into a full-length documentary.
The story of Peter Sanders and the making of The Disappeared has a certain “right place, right time” ring. What’s more, it was especially the right time in Sanders’s life. “I was not mature enough to be a filmmaker until my mid-thirties,” he says. “I could not give it the kind of reverence and the kind of passion that it takes.”
Still, there were numerous times when Sanders wondered what he’d gotten himself into—a life and death, personal and political story of international scope—for his first film. “I was so over my head. But because it does have high stakes, it allowed me to get on the radar as a filmmaker,” Sanders says. “If I had worked on a documentary on cow tipping for a year, I don’t think we’d be having this conversation.”
Thomas Weaver