Dear Subscribers,

I am resending the Antiochian Spring 2026 once again to ensure the proper treatment of the work of this issue’s authors. Please forgive me for the extra email - I hope you will feel rewarded by the access to the articles.

Jessie Herr, substack editor in training

Making the Sale

Attracting today’s students to Antioch takes a grasp of online marketing—with videos, a streamlined admissions process, government financial aid, and supportive networks. This year, it’s working. By Jesse Herr ’63. Read the article.

The Financial Aid-Recruitment Nexus

In a Q&A, Director of Financial Aid Alina Olson tells David Southern ’76 how Antioch matches prospective students with available benefits. Read the article.

Talent Scout

A D.C.-based recruiter, with a little help from friends and alumni, finds future Antiochians among Job Corps trainees. Read the article.

On Campus

From the College President’s Desk

A message to alumni from Antioch President Jane Fernandes. Click here.

Settling In

The 2025-2026 incoming class finds community at Antioch. By Franchesca Smith Read the article.

Community, the Third ‘C’

Creating a community that students want to participate in attracts new students, motivates them to return after a co-op, and encourages them to stay until graduation. By David Southern. Read the article.

Power to the People

A team of alumni, faculty, and students has published the history and how-to’s of Antioch Community Government. Read the article.

Songs from the Stacks

The Glen Forest water cure, by Scott Sanders. Read the artichttps://antiochian.antiochcollege.edu/p/songs-from-the-stacks-b4a?r=ci5x6le.

Alumni

A Reunion in John Ronsheim’s Italy

Alumni of the Antioch College Chorus experience anew the sensual delights of their 10 week tour with Antioch’s irrepressible music professor in 1975. Read the 4-part article

Sailing Back: Mexico, Hawaii to California

The long overdue story of sailing Tao Neutrino back to The Bay Area. By Donn Denman. Read the article.

Reunion 2026

You’re invited to the FEAST by Shannon McCarville, Alumni Affairs Director. Read the article.

Also: Class Notes, Chapter Activities, and Obituaries

See the Full Table of Contents

Making the Sale

Attracting today’s students to Antioch takes a grasp of online marketing—with videos, a streamlined admissions process, government financial aid, and supportive networks. This year, it’s working. By Jesse Herr ’63. Read the article.

The Financial Aid-Recruitment Nexus

In a Q&A, Director of Financial Aid Alina Olson tells David Southern ’76 how Antioch matches prospective students with available benefits. Read the article.

Talent Scout

A D.C.-based recruiter, with a little help from friends and alumni, finds future Antiochians among Job Corps trainees. Read the article.

On Campus

From the College President’s Desk

A message to alumni from Antioch President Jane Fernandes. Click here.

Settling In

The 2025-2026 incoming class finds community at Antioch. By Franchesca Smith Read the article.

Community, the Third ‘C’

Creating a community that students want to participate in attracts new students, motivates them to return after a co-op, and encourages them to stay until graduation. By David Southern. Read the article.

Power to the People

A team of alumni, faculty, and students has published the history and how-to’s of Antioch Community Government. Read the article.

Songs from the Stacks

The Glen Forest water cure, by Scott Sanders. Read the artichttps://antiochian.antiochcollege.edu/p/songs-from-the-stacks-b4a?r=ci5x6le.

Alumni

A Reunion in John Ronsheim’s Italy

Alumni of the Antioch College Chorus experience anew the sensual delights of their 10 week tour with Antioch’s irrepressible music professor in 1975. Read the 4-part article

Sailing Back: Mexico, Hawaii to California

The long overdue story of sailing Tao Neutrino back to The Bay Area. By Donn Denman. Read the article.

Reunion 2026

You’re invited to the FEAST by Shannon McCarville, Alumni Affairs Director. Read the article.

Also: Class Notes, Chapter Activities, and Obituaries

See the Full Table of Contents

Open The Antiochian site here.

Click on selected articles below:

College President’s Message

It’s been “a season of meaningful momentum,” Jane Fernandes writes.

Features

Making the Sale

Dean of Admissions Shane Creepingbear tells Jessie Herr ’63 how technology has transformed recruitment and admissions.

The Financial Aid-Recruitment Nexus

In a Q&A with David Southern ’76, Director of Financial Aid Alina Olson explains the ways Antioch matches prospective students with available benefits.

Talent Scout

A D.C.-based recruiter, with a little help from friends and alumni, finds future Antiochians among Job Corps trainees.

Antioch’s Biological Sciences and Henry Federighi

Combining student research, top-notch facilities, and Co-op, Antioch built a strong record in the mid-20th century of sending graduates on to careers in medicine and science. By Bernard Guyer ’65

On Campus

Community, the Third ‘C’

Creating a community that students want to participate in attracts new students, motivates them to return after a Co-op, and encourages them to stay until graduation. By David Southern ’76

Power to the People

A team of alumni, faculty, and students has published the history and how-to’s of Antioch Community Government.

Settling In

The newest class finds community at Antioch, by Franchesca Smith.

Memories and Reflections

The Antioch College Chorus Reunion in La Morra, Italy

• Introduction

• Day 1: Pascoli di Amaltea Farm in Mombarcaro, by Sherri Roberts

• Day 2: Barbaresco Wine Tasting Tour, by Polly Young

• Day 3: Return to La Morra, by Roger Stigliano

The long overdue story of sailing the Pacific aboard the Tao Neutrino,

by Donn Denman ’79

Reunion 2026

Alumni Affairs Director Shannon McCarville invites us to “gather around the table in celebration.”

Chapter Activities

Montreal: Robert Goldsmith ’76 hosted a gathering of Canadian and Vermont alumni.

Australia: Lincoln Kerr ’86 hosted Antiochians at an event in Melbourne.

Philadelphia: Alumni produced quilt panels signifying equality, justice, and questioning.

Class Notes

Architect Peter Jacobs ’61 was awarded the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal.

Cleveland Magazine named Amanda Cole ’05 a Community Leader of the Year for 2025.

Custom Made Woman tells the story of folk and bluegrass musician Alice Gerrard ’58.

Lydia Dean Pilcher ’80 served on New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Arts and Culture Transition Committee.

An art exhibit featured work by Emily Noelle Lambert ’97.

Tim Klass ’71 reports all signs are positive following his proton therapy for liver cancer.

Columns

Songs from the Stacks by Scott Sanders

In Memoriam

Obituaries of Antiochians who recently passed.

July 16–19, the Antioch College community will gather once again for Reunion 2026: Antioch Feast. It’s more than a weekend—it’s an invitation to reconnect, reflect, and rediscover what it means to be an Antiochian. At its heart, this year’s Reunion is built around a simple but powerful idea: to gather around the table in celebration; sharing food and ideas in the same place that helped shape us all those years ago.

This year’s theme draws inspiration from the College’s microfarm, where soil, seeds, and stewardship come together as a living metaphor for community. It’s a reminder that what we cultivate—on the land and with each other—matters. Food brings people together. Whether your cafeteria was a “quonseteria,” you called caf food “chunks,” had “Pizza with Bob,” or preferred late night bagels at the C-Shop, we’ve all had the experience of memorable conversations over shared meals with Antiochians.

This summer you’ll have the chance to rekindle friendships with classmates you haven’t seen in decades. You might sit down at a table with strangers who quickly become something else entirely. Perhaps you’ll realize the ideas, values, and questions that brought you to Antioch are still alive—and still evolving.

For 2026 we’re especially excited to honor the milestone years, the Class of 1976’s 50th Reunion and the Class of 2001’s 25th Reunion, alongside many others celebrating across the decades. But no matter your class year—or even if you didn’t finish your degree—if Antioch is part of your story, you belong at this table.

The schedule this year is filled with campus tours, presentations, social hours, panels, award ceremonies, interactive workshops, and the College Address. There will be a bonfire, folk dance, wine tasting, community art fair, and Cabaret Horace, and, of course, DIV Dance! We’ll also be livestreaming additional events this year, so more people can join in the festivities from afar.

This Reunion, you can expect delicious meals, long conversations, spontaneous moments of joy, and the kind of connections that only happen when people with a common spirit gather in the same (special) place. Whether you come with friends, family, or on your own, you’ll find a place here. Because this isn’t just an event—it’s a community in motion.

This July, come back to Yellow Springs. Bring your stories, your curiosity, your appetite—for food, for conversation, and connection with each other. Pull up a chair, fill up your glass, and dig into this celebration of the Antiochian spirit.

The Antioch admissions process nowadays has a lot in common with small-business entrepreneurship. The college must be nimble and innovative in its marketing, flexible in dealing with customers—that is, students—and alert to new opportunities.

It’s a lot to keep up with, but the pieces are falling into place with the help of online marketing tools combining data analytics and videos, a streamlined admissions process, recruitment partners, and refined messaging, says Admissions Dean Shane Creepingbear ‘08. Winter admissions of 23 this year were the highest ever, and Antioch is progressing toward its enrollment goal of 175 total students this fall, in keeping with the school’s 175th anniversary.

Companies that use data analytics to match colleges with likely applicants can serve as a force multiplier for small admissions offices like Antioch’s. One that Creepingbear is most enthusiastic about is Niche.com. Founded as College Prowler by two Carnegie Mellon business students in 2002, the company has evolved from a publisher of college guidebooks into a digital company that helps schools market themselves to potential students based on information collected about users of its website.

“Niche gathers between 60 and 70 points of data on these students to get a sense of what these students are interested in,” Creepingbear explains. “They’re looking at things like cultural fit, programs, cost, location, and based on how the student fills out their profile, Niche would then recommend schools that fit their profile in some way or another.”

The first thing prospective students learn about Antioch on Niche’s website is, “This school offers Direct Admissions!” To use that feature, students will enter certain data, such as their grade point average, that a college needs to assess a student’s eligibility. If these data fit the college’s entrance requirements, the student will be told when they inquire about Antioch or refer to Antioch, “Congratulations—you’re eligible.” The student is then directed to a “next steps” form and is asked to submit other information, including a high school transcript. “Once we get all that information, I confirm that everything’s accurate, that they are meeting our requirements, and then I can process their decision manually,” Creepingbear says.

Direct Admit, which is also offered on College Board and the Common Application platforms, “kind of inserts them a little bit further down into our funnel,” Creepingbear says. It offers another key advantage: weeding out students who aren’t serious about applying. On average, students only submit Direct Admit forms to three schools, he says. “So now our counselors don’t have to spend time begging these students to complete their application or start their application or please meet with us to learn more about Antioch.”

As of January, Antioch had already admitted 450 students, a big increase over the same period last year. [See the associated article about this year’s incoming class.] “These students are engaged. They’re emailing us, sending us their FAFSAs,” he says, referring to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form. On receiving this, the college calculates how much financial aid a student will receive, and how much their family will have to contribute.

While unable to afford the full tuition scholarships given to the first entering class after the college reopened, Antioch can still offer a generous financial aid package to most applicants who need it, allowing them to graduate with minimal or limited debt. The neediest students are eligible for federal Pell Grants. As part of the federal Work College program, all residential students will get an on-campus job, with the proceeds going toward tuition and fees, and can opt to work additional hours for pay.

It’s a fact of life that Antioch must sell itself to students, instead of the other way around. The college admits 82 percent of applicants, and has to work for them. Central to its marketing strategy in recent years was affordability, and the college counted on a certain number of Pell-eligible students, who brought with them a reliable federal income stream. The college is now broadening its marketing approach. It signed up last year with the Atlanta-based tech firm StudentBridge to produce videos—or what Creepingbear calls a “digital viewbook”—about the college. “Those are huge, huge for us,” he says. Students who discover Antioch on Niche “can click over to these really well done videos (and) to our more enhanced website.”

One result may be an increase in more affluent students. Through Niche, “we’re seeing applications come in from what I would consider wealthy school districts, private school attendees,” Creepingbear says. The college also focuses recruitment particularly on Ohio and nearby metropolitan areas of Pittsburgh and Detroit. Ohio offers its own financial support: the need-based Ohio College Opportunity Grant, as well as an Ohio STEM grant, for which some Antioch students have qualified.

Ohio community colleges have become an increasingly important source of transfer students. In the last two years, Antioch has reached articulation agreements with four of these schools--Clark State, Sinclair, Columbus State, and Edison State—that provide a pathway into a four-year degree program. Marketing to their students “is a little bit trickier,” according to Creepingbear. These students typically are in associate-degree programs geared to a specialized career path, and are being asked to explore liberal arts. “It’s always that initial interaction, getting their attention, that’s the hard part. Once we have it, they get it. You know, they see the value, they understand the difference.”

This regional focus hasn’t stopped Antioch from teaming up with partners to cast a wider geographical net when that can be helpful. One such partner is John Capozzi, of Washington, D.C., the son of an Antioch alumnus, who has recruited a number of Job Corps graduates for the college from around the country. (See associated article.) Creepingbear has also worked with the Job Corps and the IDEA (Individuals Dedicated to Excellence and Achievement) public schools, a network of college-prep charter schools in Texas begun by Teach for America veterans. He is excited about a new partner, Bottom Line, which provides personalized guidance for first-generation and low-income students before and during college. The nonprofit recently started an Ohio branch. “We brought all of their counselors to campus a couple weeks ago for a campus tour to meet folks. They’re just completely smitten with Antioch,” Creepingbear says.

A tense period for the admissions staff is the time between when an acceptance letter goes out with a financial aid offer and a student’s decision to come. Of the students admitted for 2026, the college set a goal of getting 65, or 14.4 percent, to enroll. This year, Antioch launched a quick fundraising campaign to defray the $450 deposit as a welcome gesture. In doing so, it runs the risk that some students may commit to enroll and then not show up.

Creepingbear will be helped getting to the fall enrollment finish line by two new counselors, who are also fellow Antiochians: Zoe Ritzhaupt ’20 and June Wonn ’22(?) “They’re coming back with some energy and excitement to do this work.”

AO: I am. And it’s been like that for a very long time. Of course, I’m part of the admissions team. Shane (Creepingbear, director of admissions) is my boss. But yeah, I’m the only one here. And I think in a smaller school like this, just having one financial aid administrator is sufficient. But financial aid is a lot about reporting as well as packaging student aid. Our small school requires just as much reporting as a huge school because the requirements are all the same. I think that’s where the bulk of my work is: reporting requirements and doing financial aid audits. I probably do around 20 reports a year, and they are all very, very specific, but each is just different enough to require a lot of time.

DS: So, you are responsible for the Federal reporting requirements on ethnic breakdown gender or whatever in terms of incoming students, or is that done somewhere else in admissions?

AO: Usually when we work on a report, it includes a lot of different items. It will have parts for the registrar and institutional research, as well as me. The government will want to know the gender, race, how many students are brand new to college and how many transfers, how many students’ parents have gone to college but never graduated versus students whose parents actually graduated. And that’s very specific. They want to know all of that. And then the federal work-study program requires a lot of reporting as well. They’re seeing how many students are working, and there are specific requirements, like students have to work in specific jobs for the community. We all kind of get together usually or we get assigned our specific areas of the report. There is also a financial aid audit, which is a huge deep dive into everything, basically — anything from transcripts to disbursements of loans to the (students’) FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) submissions. So that takes the bulk of our time. I just finished with last year’s report.

DS: Can you walk me through the process of how financial aid works? Do students apply to the school and then they ask about financial aid at that time? Does that come through the federal financial aid application, FAFSA or what? How do students find out about financial aid?

AO: Right, so there are a few ways. We are actually in the process right now of admitting new students for 2026, 2027. The process starts as early as October of the year prior. For example, as soon as they apply, they are advised to do the FAFSAs for the following year. Once they’re admitted, and I have the FAFSA, I can produce a financial aid award letter for them.

There’s another way, and one which I’m dealing with now. On the FAFSA application, students can list up to 20 schools they want their FAFSA to be sent to. We receive maybe 300 FAFSA submissions for students who never actually applied to Antioch College. I receive all the FAFSA submissions that list Antioch and then I go and check to see if the students applied, whether they were admitted, or are in the process of being admitted. The majority of them are not in our system at all. They’ve never applied. And the reason some of them do that is because they want to see their potential financial aid awards before they even apply. Because for them money is an issue or they’re just thinking that.

What I do with these students is create an estimated financial award letter. And the good thing about FAFSA is that it gives you plenty of information to go on. It gives you the state they’re from. It will tell me if they’re Pell-eligible or not. And then if they’re from Ohio, I can see if they qualify for an Ohio College Opportunity Grant. I can basically get a pretty good idea for them what their cost will be. What I do is send each of them a letter with an estimated financial award amount saying, “Hey, here’s the estimated award amount, please apply right here.” And from that they can take a serious look at Antioch. We actually just began doing this since I started in the middle of the 2023-24 year. We’ve had a few new students (as a result). For ‘24, ‘25, I’ve been doing that as well.

For prospective students who didn’t apply but just added Antioch to their list, they get their award letter and they realize, “Okay, I can do this. I can afford this.” And then they look at the school and they end up applying. Some schools don’t require FAFSA applications, but we require it because we get so much information that we will need for reporting. If they’re a first-time student, we get all this information (from the FAFSA) that tells us what they need. Some students who don’t believe they will qualify for any Federal aid might still benefit, no matter how wealthy their parents are. For example, they’re still qualified for unsubsidized loans. And then if they’re an Ohio student, they can actually qualify for a Choose Ohio First scholarship, which has no, need-based criteria.

DS: What do you look at first when you get a student’s FAFSA application?

AO: Pell would be our first. It’s assigned by the FAFSA, so there’s nothing we have to determine. When I pull the FAFSA in, it will tell me how much Pell they’re getting. I look at their, what’s called student aid index, which used to be called “expected family contribution.” FAFSA takes into account whether the applicant is independent or dependent. If they’re a dependent student, which is under the age of 24, then it considers their parents’ income, how many people they have living in their home, and how many of them are in college. And then it determines what the family contribution needs to be. If the family income is $30,000 or less, they would be Pell-eligible for $7,395 a year right now. As family income goes up, the size of the Pell grants declines. If the family can contribute, then a calculation is made as to how much. I look at these calculations and then see what other money is available, such as sub loans. they can receive $3,500 on a subsidized loan and unsubsidized loans of $2,000. So that’s basically all the funding that they would have without paying us from their pocket.

DS: And those are loans from banks or those are loans from where?

AO: No, those are all federal loans. Subsidized loans are where you don’t have to pay any interest or the government pays interest until six months after graduation. So that’s the most favorable one. The unsubsidized loan is one where interest starts accumulating as soon as the student takes out the loan, but the interest is about 6.1%. So obviously better than credit cards.

I have worked with a couple of companies to see if there are student loans from private banks, like Bank of America. And I was kind of shocked that first you have to have a cosigner. A student can’t just get the loan, no matter what their credit rating is. You have to have a cosigner and then the interest rate is still 21% on those, which is like, why are they even calling them student loans?

Publicly, you hear about people who have hundreds of thousand dollars in student loans. This is because schools used to be able to do what were called Perkins loans, where they would lend the money to students. It’s also based on a government program, but then the students would have to pay us. Students were able to take out a lot more to pay for school. Now this $5,500 a year of subsidized loans is basically a cap of what you can do without going to outside sources. Usually for full Pell students, we try to keep this limit to their subsidized loans, because the idea is we still try to make it affordable because a lot of those students would not be able to attend college because they have no funds. They’re still responsible for paying something because obviously we don’t want to give away education. Consequently, their cost may be comprised of a Pell grant, and then they usually will qualify for a Federal Supplemental Education Opportunity Grant (FSEOG) of $100 to $4,000 per year, and the $5,500 of loans.

For the FSEOG, the college gets a lump sum a year assigned to us by the federal government. And we split it however we want to students with full Pell or mostly full Pell grants. This would usually be around $1,000 per student. With our last incoming class almost 89% full Pell, this split is getting a little lower. I think it was like $530 per student.

Some of these funds the college has to match. For example, with the Ohio College Opportunity Grant, we have to match, I believe, 50%. For an Ohio College Opportunity Grant of $5,000 per student per year, the college has to match it with $2,500.

Choose Ohio First (COF) has to be matched at 100%. That’s the STEM one in Ohio. The Federal Works College amount that we receive has to be matched at 100% as well.

As we grow our student population and we require more grants from federal or state sources, we will need to make sure that we have enough money to match. For calculating aid, I take the Pell or whatever they have and I take the FSEOG. If they’re an Ohio resident and qualify for any Ohio grants, I’ll add that. I’ll add their loan amount. And then for the rest, we will try to match it with the donor funding. We do have donor scholarships that are really helpful, and if they qualify, I’ll add that in. Much of the donor funding is based on need. And beyond those sources we try and cover the rest.

DS: I wanted to ask you a question on scholarships. I know there are two alumni science scholarships for around $30,000. How do those kinds of scholarships work?

AO: The idea is to provide the scholarship for four years, or however long they last and take into consideration any stipulations with the scholarship. If the student leaves, then you can transfer it over. And we do have those two students right now who are receiving the alumni science scholarship, and we try to keep it for them. Now, if there is a change — for example, if they go from being a Pell student to being completely not Pell — then sometimes we’ll either not give them that scholarship or we’ll try to keep it the same. If they don’t have a need, then we could switch it.

DS: Thank you, Alina. I think we’ve covered a lot of territory, and it’s been very enlightening. I really appreciate you sharing all this information.

John Capozzi began recruiting prospective students for Antioch after he got a call from Daris Riley, a former IT intern of his in the Washington D.C. government. Unhappy at the University of the District of Columbia and living at home, Riley thought about going away to college, but had no money. Capozzi mentioned an Antioch scholarship endowed in 1997 by his father, who attended the school as an Army Specialized Training Corps cadet during World War II, and persuaded Riley to apply. While he didn’t qualify for the scholarship, earmarked for northern New Jersey students, Riley enrolled anyway, getting through with a Pell grant and on-campus and co-op IT jobs. He chose to major in art, indulging a passion for graffiti, designed a video game for his senior project, and graduated in 2024.

Buoyed by the chance to help a college his father spoke of fondly, Capozzi has by now steered some 20 students to Antioch. Reaching out in particular to Pell-eligible, first-generation college students, he pitches the school as a value proposition: Combining Pell grants, paid co-ops, and added on-campus work from Antioch’s federal Work College status, needy students can complete their undergraduate education with little if any debt.

Capozzi, who left government three years ago to start a tech-focused headhunter firm with his son, Hans, charges Antioch a modest hourly rate for his outreach efforts. Payments are drawn from the $116,000 Capozzi Family Endowed Scholarship Fund created by the elder Capozzi, who wrote that his two semesters at the college were “long enough to make me a lifelong Antioch convert and supporter.”

A number of applicants have been found at centers run by Job Corps, the federal residential job-training program for low-income young people aged 16 to 24.

“I was in a job fair at some college and this guy came up to me and he said, ‘I’m from the Job Corps,’” Capozzi recalled. “He’s like, ‘Our counselor brought us. There’s eight of us here. And I want to go to college. That’s why I came to this job fair.’” The group had come from the Potomac Job Corps Center in Washington, so Capozzi went there and talked about Antioch. Out of that visit, “I got three people.” Capozzi said. “Two of them are going to graduate.”

Begun in 1964 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Job Corps draws 40,000 to 60,000 enrollees per year, and has survived several attempts to phase it out or abolish it. The Trump administration shut down all 100-plus centers across the country earlier this year, but a federal judge ordered them re-opened. The administration is appealing.

This year’s Job Corps cohort is the largest ever at Antioch: Several students took up the college’s offer of an accelerated admissions process when their center in Phoenix, Arizona closed in June, in between the Trump shutdown and the subsequent court-ordered reopening. Antioch issued a fundraising appeal to help cover the new students’ summer expenses.

While designed to provide career technical training, Job Corps maintains an educational component. Enrollees can earn a high school equivalency diploma, and some centers form relationships with local community colleges to expand their training options. Gaining admission to a degree-granting college is one of three outcomes, along with securing a full-time job and joining the military, that Job Corps counts as successful completion of its standard nine-month training course.

Capozzi typically works with Job Corps centers’ Career Transition Services counsellors. He offers to conduct virtual presentations for individual counsellors or visit a center, as he has done in Georgia and Florida. When he hasn’t been able visit a center himself, Shubham Tiwari, IT director at Capozzi’s company, C Associates, has stepped in. At other times, Capozzi has received help from friends in a network built from years of work in Democratic politics. (He’s a past shadow U.S. representative, an elected Washington D.C. official who advocates for District of Columbia statehood.)

Once someone expresses interest in Antioch, Capozzi follows up. “They fill out a form, and then I pretty much call them relentlessly,” he said. He reminds applicants: “You’ve got to do your FAFSA form, you’ve got to get your high school diploma, and you’ve got to fill out the academic application.”

The arrival of the Arizona contingent followed visits by Tiwari over three consecutive days to speak with trainees at the Phoenix Job Corps center about Antioch. “I ended up having deeper conversations with the students about what a bachelor’s degree truly means, its long-term value, and the opportunities it can unlock,” Tiwari related in an email. “We discussed how college differs from Job Corps, not just academically, but in the level of exposure, independence, and growth it offers. Many students were unaware of how a bachelor’s degree could widen their career path, improve earning potential, and position them for leadership roles.”

One of those Tiwari won over was Esmerelda Herrera, 19. After several months at Antioch, she’s now considering career options beyond being a medical assistant, the focus of her Job Corps training. Interviewed by WYSO’s Kathryn Mobley, she added: “I love the green. Coming from Phoenix where it’s just desert and concrete, having lawns, trees, leaves, it’s very nice.”

Since most Job Corps recruits come to Antioch having completed their training, they have already demonstrated that they can commit to a goal and then accomplish it, said Shane Creepingbear, Antioch’s director of admissions. “So they have that sort of drive and follow through already built into their character.”

Accustomed to a highly structured training program, not all Job Corps enrollees are a good fit for Antioch’s freer lifestyle and design-your-own major curriculum. The young man who approached Capozzi at the Washington job fair, for instance, “had some issues at the school” and dropped out after two years.

Capozzi said he’s received enthusiastic support from Antioch’s president, Jane Fernandes, who visited two Washington-area Job Corps centers last May and also joined members of the Job Corps alumni organization in a video seminar for about 40 CTS counsellors.

Several Antioch alumni have contacted Capozzi and volunteered to help. One is 2000 grad Rebecca Van Wyck, who took four hours off from her research management job at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska, Anchorage to meet with a dozen Job Corps trainees at their center in Palmer, an hour’s drive away. Those in the room “were thinking about what would happen after Job Corps,” and spoke of either advanced technical training or college. One asked if he’d be allowed to ride a skateboard on campus. Yes, Van Wyck assured him. Another wondered if Antioch would accept a major combining computer programming, art, and mechanics. Van Wyck mentioned a faculty member who might be an ideal mentor.

Capozzi would like to get more alumni involved: “I think I tell a pretty compelling story. But if you’re an alumni, it’s different. You know, I think you can really explain why (someone should come to Antioch) and what you got from it. Describe co-op experiences.”

Riley, whose mother died not long after he entered Antioch, set his sights on graduating to honor her memory. He has stayed in Yellow Springs, commuting to a $23-an-hour job as an IT contractor upgrading computer systems for Kettering Health hospitals. In his spare time, he’s building music production skills. He and Capozzi have kept in contact. Riley noted appreciatively that Capozzi had come to his graduation.

Pictured is the August 26, 1949 marriage of Alexander Mercer1 (my HFHS biology teacher) faculty mentor to the enriched biology curriculum and life-long advisor and friend to Bessie D. Moore, a 1946 Antioch biology graduate, at the Universalist Unitarian Church in Detroit. The small, bearded, bespectacled, avuncular gentleman in the pew just to the right is Henry Federighi- the “Chief”-head of the Biology Department at Antioch College, and the architect of the program that was instrumental to all of our successes. Ours is the story of how one key faculty member at a small liberal arts college in Ohio shaped the futures of a generation of scientists and medical doctors.

The research question

As a medical student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in the late 1960s, I was aware that there were many Antioch graduates among both the students and faculty. At times I wondered why that was the case but never looked into it. When I joined the Antioch College Science Advancement Board in 2007, with the goal of helping the College to rebuild a seriously deteriorated program, however, I decided to go through the Alumni Directory and count the number of medical doctors and PhD scientists among the alumni. The task was easier, in general, for the MDs than for the PhDs since the exact field of doctoral work was often not specified. I was amazed at the record of such a small college in producing medical and science graduates. The research question became “what accounts for the strong record of Antioch in sending graduates on to careers in medicine and science?” But, again, it wasn’t until I began to prepare my acceptance remarks for receiving the Horace Mann Award in 2018 that I seriously began to think about undertaking an archival research project to understand this history and the role of Henry Federighi, concluding that he was the architect of the program. I am grateful to Scott Sanders and the Antiochiana archives for enabling me to do this project.

The early history of science education at Antioch; a brief review

Like many successful efforts, the Antioch College science program was built on the earlier achievements of the College, under the leadership of Arthur Morgan, President of Antioch from 1920 to 1936. This early history is chronicled in Burton Clark’s book, The Distinctive College- Antioch, Reed, Swarthmore.2 Clark builds the case that Morgan’s aim for Antioch was a “well proportioned education” alternating classroom study with applied work in industrial and research settings, thereby operationalizing the Co-operative education concept. An additional asset was the construction of a state-of-the-art Science Building in 1929; an Antioch College publication from the 1930s describes these foundations.34

“Antioch is fortunate in having one of the most efficiently arranged and completely equipped science buildings that may be found on any college campus.” The building was a gift of the industrialist and philanthropist Charles F. Kettering, a founder of the General Motors, in Dayton OH. Kettering located his own foundation to study photosynthesis in the building, adding yet more opportunities for student research in the program.

In addition, science education was integrally linked to the Co-operative education program developed during the 1920s. College documents from the 1960s highlight the expansion of job opportunities that students were able to take in medicine, science and industry. In some cases, Co-op jobs may have been the gateway to graduate school admission.

Finally, the College’s early science education documents all emphasize the importance of student research, both through Co-op experiences and on-campus, course-related research projects and papers. The ability to carry out self-directed scientific research was essential to the curriculum.

Henry Federighi at Antioch

Henry Federighi was hand-picked by Morgan and appointed as a new assistant professor of biology at Antioch on May 29, 1929. The hiring of a faculty member in biology had been discussed at a joint meeting of the Executive Council and the Trustees on December 17, 1928.5 Federighi came with an excellent academic background: undergraduate BS degree in biology from Rutgers (1923), MA at Harvard (1924) PhD in biology from Harvard (1926), and three years of experience as a biologist at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (1926-29). At the time of Federighi’s appointment, the head of the biology program at Antioch College was O.L. Inman, who had also received his PhD in biology at Harvard (1921). In 1930, Inman became the Director of the C.F. Kettering Institute that was located on the top floor of the Science Building; he was focused on the study of chlorophyll and photosynthesis but continued to teach some courses in the College.6

Federighi’s first few years were not distinguished. A discussion recorded in the Adcil (Administrative Council) minutes (1931-32) raised criticisms about his “loyalty” and “personal standards”. Mr. Inman “felt that Federighi was lazy but that he had good relations with his students.” “It was decided that Mr. (Arthur) Morgan would see Mr. Federighi again and tell him of all of the criticism. If he can change, he will be kept another year.”7

By 1933, the Adcil minutes note that “[Federighi] was doing a fairly good job of teaching … and that it would not be wise to let [him] go at present. The issue was deferred until a later time.”8 A year later, on March 10, 1934, the Adcil minutes reported that his salary was raised to $2750, and on March 12, 1934 Federighi was promoted to associate professor. It is not clear what happened to bring about the change in his standing. One might speculate that the move of Mr. Inman away from the department gave Federighi more opportunity, responsibility and autonomy.

In 1939, Federighi was promoted to professor of biology, becoming the principal administrator and course instructor of the biology program. In the college catalogue, he is identified as the head of the Science department and is the principal instructor of the major biology courses and the pre-medical program.9

Federighi served in these roles through to his retirement at the end of the 1959-60 academic year. He was granted a well deserved leave, went to Hawaii for a year’s sabbatical, but died suddenly of a heart attack on November 30, 1960.10

The pre-medical program at Antioch

The 1934-35 Antioch College Catalogue contains the first description of the “pre-medicine course”.11 It is a bare-bone description with a short list of required biology and chemistry courses. Federighi is not listed as an instructor or administrator of the program.

The 1937-38 College Catalogue, however, contains a much-expanded 4-page description of the pre-medical “course” which is much more like a program description. Numerous courses and instructors are now listed, with Henry Federighi teaching, or co-teaching, most of them. They include General Biology, the introductory course where Federighi joins Mr. Inman and Mr. Nosker; Genetics and Eugenics is taught by Inman; Bacteriology, Federighi; Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates, Federighi; Principles of Physiology, Federighi; General Embryology, Federighi; Entomology, not specified; and Special Elective Studies, Inman, Nosker, Federighi and Rothemund.12

By 1938, the College published a Bulletin designed to give concise and up-to-date information about the program to high school advisors. The pamphlet titled “Science at Antioch” lays out a philosophy of science as a key element of a liberal arts education, linking it to experiences through the Co-op program, research projects and the opportunities to learn scientific research methods in the modern Science Building.13

Thus, within 6-7 years of joining the Antioch faculty, Henry Federighi became the principal instructor of most of the biology courses that led to biomedical graduate education, including pre-medicine. Later College catalogues have even more extensive descriptions of the Antioch curriculum for those preparing for future careers in the biomedical sciences and professions. It should be emphasized, however, that throughout this period, the biomedical program always included more than college course work; it incorporated Co-operative education opportunities to work in real-world medical settings, research opportunities including those at the college and through Co-operative jobs, and, although not explicitly stated, the life-long mentorship of Henry Federighi. Somewhere through these years, students began to call him the “Chief”!

Program development and medical school enrollments:

While the development of the program is easy to document from College publications, actual growth of student enrollments and graduations is harder to assess. Chief Federighi kept personal, hand-written records of the graduates who went on to medical schools, although it is not clear how complete these records are. Between 1930 and 1959, he recorded data for 111 graduates enrolling in 31 medical schools; nearly half of all those graduates enrolled at three schools: 19 at Western Reserve, 18 at Rochester, and 14 at Harvard. The Harvard enrollments occurred primarily during the 30s.

Federighi’s record of Antioch College graduates attending medical school 1930—59

Enrollments began slowly as the program developed in the 1930s with 1-2 graduates entering medical school per year. Enrollments spiked during the war years with 35 enrollments in the 5 years from 1940 to 44. Finally medical school enrollments stabilized during the 1950s at 4-5 per year.

Federighi’s Leadership and Mentorship

Although published four years after his retirement, a 1964 College Bulletin boasts about the achievements of the science program, clearly reflecting Federighi’s influence over the previous 30 years:

“National studies repeatedly show Antioch to be one of a handful of American colleges that are pre-eminent in producing scholars and that have a contagious intellectual climate. Students come to Antioch capable: 75 per cent of them are in the top quarter of their secondary school classes. They gain substantially in knowledge at Antioch: over the past 5 years, Antioch science and engineering seniors have averaged well above the national mean for seniors taking the Advanced Tests of the Graduate Record Examination (Table I). And three-fourths of those majoring in science and engineering at Antioch go on to advanced study at graduate and professional schools all over the country, usually on scholarships (Table II).14

Federighi’s leadership of the Biology/Pre-medicine program is further demonstrated through the evidence of his ongoing monitoring of the status of Antioch graduates in national statistics for exam scores, admission rates to graduate schools and success in their programs. [AAMC data on MCAT scores]

The Federighi archive files have numerous copies of reports from the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC), comparisons of Antioch grads’ performance as measured against other colleges, particularly those in Ohio, and other assessments. Table III, also from the AAMC, is based on a nine-year period, 1930-38 and covers all colleges with ten or more students in the freshman classes of U.S. medical schools. The data show numbers of students and, in percentages, those who completed the first year with a clear record, those who failed, and those who withdrew for some reason other than poor scholarship, such as lack of financial support, illness, personal issues, etc.

Federighi’s personal mentorship style can best be assessed through the dozens of letters in his files, many handwritten, to and from the Biology/Pre-med graduates at various stages of their career development trajectories and personal life decisions; doubtless there were even more that didn’t make it into the archives. He sent out regular questionnaires to the graduates asking for details of family life events, academic achievements and career decisions.15 It’s no accident that Federighi attended the wedding of his student, Bessie D. Moore, even if it meant traveling to Detroit. He clearly loved and cared about his students and their families.

Federighi’s relationships with Medical Schools

Again, the evidence for how Federighi built the relationships that promoted the admission of Antioch students into medical schools is indirect and anecdotal. We’ve already shown that the Antioch graduates were strong candidates and came with excellent academic credentials and work experience. But, Federighi also paved their way by developing strong relations to the medical schools. In the archives, we found two communications with Dean George H. Whipple at Rochester, suggesting that they had an understanding about the Antioch applicants to Rochester and communicated personally. He may have carried on correspondences with the deans of several other key medical schools about his graduating students, but I was not able to locate any of these.

Case study: University of Rochester and Antioch College

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Ruth Lawrence (nee Anderson), a lively 90-year-old, respected pediatrician on the faculty of the University of Rochester. I remember her from the time that I was a medical student in the late 1960s. She graduated from Antioch in 1945 and despite an excellent academic record had difficulty being accepted into medical schools. That might be explained, in part, by the general bias against women at American medical schools, but also by the timing of her application when men were beginning to return from serving in WWII and reclaiming their positions in medical schools. Federighi suggested she visit Rochester. When she went to see Dean George H. Whipple (which must have been quite intimidating), he commented that he had received a strong recommendation letter from Federighi and accepted her into Rochester on the spot! Clearly, such a decision must have been built on a strong relationship of trust between the two leaders.

I visited Rochester’s Miner Library and reviewed the content of some of the numerous boxes of Dean Whipple’s correspondence from that period. Unfortunately I found no communications with Federighi or any file containing Antioch letters. I was told that when the Whipple archive was set up, many of the “routine” Dean’s Office correspondence was discarded. I had found two letters between them in the Antioch records, both about specific Antioch student applicants to Rochester; there must have been others.

Combined list of Antioch-Rochester students

Conclusions

The goal of this historical review was to understand how Henry Federighi crafted the ideas that built the Antioch Science/Medicine program. My personal dream was to find in the archives a program proposal, plan, concept paper or other kind of blue print document that explicitly laid out the program strategies. But either such a document was never written or never recorded in the Adcil minutes and thus never survived. There is a possibility that the overall structure of the program simply emerged in a step-wise fashion without such a concept paper. In either case, the circumstantial evidence supports the conclusion that Federighi was the architect and builder of this program.

Guyer Photos of Rochester Co-op jobs:

One answer to this question can be found in the area of community. One of the strengths of a residential liberal arts college like Antioch is the opportunity to build and shape a community and culture that students want to join. Antioch acknowledges the importance of this mission by including it in the three “C”s of Classroom, Coop, and Community. An essential element of this last item is the role of Community Governance. As explained in the college’s website, “Community Governance (CG) has played a vital social and educational role at Antioch College since the early 1930’s. As a “laboratory for democracy,” Community Governance acts as a pedagogical tool by giving those who partake in it the skills necessary to effect change in the world. This pedagogy is a core part of Antioch’s historical curriculum. Community Council, College Council, and Community Meeting are three keys to CG at Antioch.”

Active participation in community governance can provide students training in the areas of effective communication, team collaboration, conflict resolution, leadership, and managing diverse viewpoints to arrive at problem solutions. Few schools offer practical training in these areas, but they are skills employers are increasingly looking for when screening new job applicants. Consequently, a vibrant Community Governance program is an essential learning opportunity for today’s students.

Besides the governance program, the college has undertaken other initiatives to foster community such as the first-year program of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s when incoming students were separated into preceptorial groups of 15 students with upper class advisors tied to a faculty member and housed together for their first year. For students, this shared experience of closely living and studying together resulted in deeper friendships, and greater individual growth and maturity. This kind of learning doesn’t occur in non-residential educational settings such as community colleges, online classes, and short-term certificate programs.

For a college like Antioch, the reach of community extends beyond the physical campus. Recent surveys have shown that students want more connections with alumni and mentors for networking, career advice, and job leads, but that institutions are falling short on facilitating these connections. Antioch has a diverse and talented alumni network. Providing the resources to connect students with this network, such as with an online alumni directory, is an important means for leveraging a vibrant and supportive community that extends beyond the college campus.

Building and nurturing a community provides student training and life experience as valuable for future success as education in the classroom and on co-op. Successfully creating a community that students want to join, and are eager to participate in, benefits Antioch by: attracting new students, motivating students to return to campus after a co-op, and encouraging them to pursue their study program to completion. It is part of the solution for reducing the student drop-out rates that have historically challenged the school.

For all these reasons, Antioch’s focus on community building and the resulting learning opportunities involved can help the college achieve a recruiting and retention advantage in today’s competitive environment.

— David Southern, class of 1976 davidl.southern@gmail.com, is an Antioch College Trustee and a finance executive with over 40 years of experience supporting biopharmaceutical and technology companies. He has worked for both private venture-funded and public companies and is currently consulting for two early-stage companies founded by UC Berkeley scientists. He is the author of the book Business Apocalypse and the Evolution of Today’s Organizations and is currently working on a memoir about life in San Francisco during the turbulent 1970s and 80s.

In years past, he served as Treasurer and Board Member for Community Educational Services, an organization providing services to immigrant youth in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Current interests include observing the rapidly evolving business environment and exploring how academic institutions can prepare students for success in a world that is characterized as increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. He hopes to apply his insights to helping Antioch create a model for the future of education. During the COVID pandemic, he walked all the streets of San Francisco.

“[In Business Apocalypse,] David Southern has beautifully described the world we must be preparing our students to engage with. A new era requiring different skills and attitudes than those supporting successful careers in the past.”

Dr. Jane Fernandes, President, Antioch College

A professionally produced 48-page magazine, the Guide recounts the history of Community Government (CG), the philosophy behind it, as well as recurrent efforts to improve it. Describing CG as “a central part of Antioch’s identity,” the authors aim to show “what community governance was intended to do, what it has done in the past, what it means for a community to self-govern, and what Community Government (CG) can accomplish now.” While written for current students, it makes for worthwhile reading by college history buffs and alumni who are still trying to figure the place out.

The Guide acknowledges early on that “Community at Antioch can sometimes be frustrating and amorphous,” and “should not be exclusively conflated with harmony and good feelings.” Nor should CG ”be conflated with the administration, or the institution, as sometimes–or even often–the community conflicts with both.”

Although initiated by students in the 1920s, CG was never the same as student government, found at many liberal-arts colleges, that grants undergraduates control of a limited number of non-academic activities. “At Antioch, Community Government was developed both as a way for students, faculty, and staff to equitably and democratically share power and represent their needs with the administration, and as a pedagogical tool to provide a hands-on, lived experience of democratic community management,” the Guide says.

CG’s beginning roughly coincided with the birth of an independent campus newspaper, the Blaze, which in 1925 quoted then-President Arthur Morgan as saying he was inclined to favor “a community government elected by the student and faculty at large with student and faculty representations.”

Power-sharing between students and faculty was not always easy, as evidenced by a student demand in 1941 “that faculty-only committees be abolished and all committees contain some student reps, including admissions and tenure review.” How much power the CG had in relation to the administration was also uncertain, although the formation in 1940 of an elected Administrative Council (Adcil), in addition to the Community Council (Comcil) gave students and faculty decision-making powers and a voice in actually running the college.

While illuminating, the history section, listing milestones by selected year, shows the authors’ apparent struggle to penetrate the “amorphous” decision-making and nail down what actually happened, and when. There’s a three-decade gap after 1942, picking up with the six-week student strike of 1973, when CG broke down.

From 1975, when the Administrative Council was replaced by an advisory body—though still abbreviated as Adcil—CG’s clout diminishes. The trend lasted through the period when the Yellow Springs campus became one unit within Antioch University. CG suffered a decisive blow in 2001, when, the Guide tells us: “The University takes control of the College’s budget, undermining AdCil’s ‘power of the purse.’ Increasing outside control of the College’s administrative functions coincided with a decline in enrollment and undermining of Community Government.” CG still hasn’t fully recovered; the Community Council performs an advisory role.

Several participants in the Guide‘s preparation served as elected community managers, a role the publication describes as holding “a wide variety of responsibilities, some of which were practical and some of which were more symbolic.” It serves “to guide the campus through the inevitable intermittent crises (internal and external).” An implementer of decisions made by others, the community manager must rely heavily on persuasion. The Guide says, “The Community Manager works to build strong relationships with every campus constituency, supports the efforts of, and ensures the critical functioning of the CG’s elected bodies and their symbiotic ecology.”

Students who participate in CG will probably get a taste of what former President Algo Henderson and co-author Dorothy Hall called “the American search for utopia,” of which Antioch was a part. The Guide adds: “There’s a key detail that many have discovered about utopias, however — they’re never finished.”

In an idealistic vein, the Guide quotes another deceased president, Bob Devine ’67, as saying “the college’s shared governance was not the strategy for running the college and administering it: it was a pedagogical strategy.” Students who participated in CG might find his comment patronizing. To be sure, all of college is a learning experience, but students who got elected to those jobs-- the good ones, at any rate--saw them as more than that, and their voters probably did as well. They were there to fix things and make change happen. If today’s students bring that same attitude into CG now, it’s a sure bet some alumni will cheer them on.

The Guide was researched and written by the CG Institutional Memory Working Group of the Antioch College Alumni Board. That group was Liz Flyntz ‘02, Angel Nalubega ‘18, and Soleil Sykes ‘18. Additional archival research by faculty member Natalie Suzelis. Layout and design by Liz Flyntz. Additional contributions by Scott Sanders, student El Mele, Jane Foreman ‘17 and Coco Gagnet ‘18.

The Guide can be found here https://archive.org/details/antiochcommunitygovernmentsurvivalguide

“I’m looking forward to learning more about my future career in immigration law. I’m especially interested in understanding how the field operates and what goes on behind the scenes as lawyers work to support and advocate for individuals and families in need. I want to better understand the process and the impact this work has on real people’s lives,” said Leira Orante, first-year student interested in studying immigration law.

Antioch College welcomed 42 new students to campus this fall.

About 80 percent of the fall incoming class was Pell-eligible and a quarter of students were first generation college students, signaling Antioch remains committed to being a college that is not only quality, but also accessible to anyone who wants to pursue higher education.

“What my favorite thing about Antioch is how inviting everyone is and how easily accessible everything is. The staff and students have been really inviting, coming from a chaotic Job Corps, this is pretty much a vacation for me. It has been super easy to settle into things, this place has made me feel like I belong more than anywhere else,” said new student Ayden McClain who is interested in studying writing.

A variety of states were also represented by the fall class with 40 percent of students being from Ohio and 11 states represented overall.

This winter marked the largest incoming winter class since reopening, indicating a strong upward trend in overall enrollment as the College works toward the goal of 175 total students. Twenty-one new students were admitted this winter. The previous largest winter class was 8.

Not only are students looking forward to their co-op’s and academics, they are also finding their favorite spaces on campus. For Orante it’s the Wellness Center and for McClain it’s South Hall lounge.

“It helps me clear my mind when I feel stress but it also helps me move my body and stay healthy,” Orante said.

“My favorite spot on campus has to be south hall third floor lounge, it’s where I get to chill out and get work done, its super quiet and cozy. If I get overwhelmed or overstimulated I sit on the couch to get my brain and mind up to speed,” McClain said.

“Also A (Work Program Manage, A Tassy) has a coffee machine and a coffee bar, I am heavily addicted to coffee. If I could I would drink a gallon or more a day.”

One of our beloved chorus members, Charlie Doering ’77, a gifted math and physics professor at University of Michigan, had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and his 65th birthday was approaching.

Wouldn’t it be poignant timing, Laurie suggested, to gather together on Zoom, toast Charlie on his birthday and reminisce about the phenomenal experience we shared on our study term abroad? Maybe we could even sing along to our old recording of Johannes Ockeghem’s Missa Prolationum?

For the uninitiated, let’s back up - say nearly 50 years - and explain: What was this unique Antioch experience that bound us together over time?

In 1972, John Ronsheim, Professor of Music at Antioch College (from 1967-1990) — a visionary, eccentric, impish, brilliant twelve-tone composer with a passion for 15th Century Flemish Renaissance choral music — had an idea, one that made liberal use of Antioch’s propensity for freestyle education. “Almost every time I rehearsed the chorus,” he would later write, “I threw out the sentence, ‘We should perform these works in the places where they were first performed in Europe’.”

John would ultimately will this ambitious statement into existence; and he would not stop there. He envisaged a fully accredited academic term abroad with students touring multiple countries while studying art, food and wine; and, of course, singing — in churches small and large, after long lunches at vintners’ estates and in fields where the grapes were grown.

As his biographer/archivist Don Giller ’73 said, “What came out of all this was the ENORMOUS work John forced upon himself to turn [ his idea ] into a workable reality -- the trips to Europe beforehand to set up dates for vineyard tours and cathedral performances, hotel/hostel and restaurant reservations, the bus to cart everyone, the hundreds of letters he sent out, all in English, French, and Italian. The never-ending bureaucratic strings to untangle…”

Thus, thanks to the vision and determination of one Antioch professor, on June 25, 1973 the first Antioch College Chorus Tour left for Europe for a summer term abroad.

Then, two short years later, John was at it again. Only this time he had his initial successes and missteps upon which to build, the contacts in Europe he had established, and lessons learned from the first go-round.

He fleshed out a new itinerary with a more regimented course load (“twice or thrice the level of intensity and information,” he would say.) And with the logistical support of Antioch Education Abroad in Yellow Springs and France (Dominique Grossard - John’s essential intermediary to everything French) to plot out daily lodging and travel, etc., he rehearsed his eager charges in Kelly Hall in the Main Building on campus for nearly a year, culminating with an intensive summer quarter, in preparation for a journey that would have lasting impact on our lives.

So on September 29, 1975, after singing an inaugural mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on 5th Avenue, the second Antioch Chorus European Tour embarked from New York City to Paris.

For the next 10 weeks, 60 of us traveled together on a bus through France, Belgium, and Italy. We studied Medieval, Renaissance and contemporary art; earned physical science credits for studying viticulture, including countless hours visiting vineyards and wine cellars while tasting and evaluating exquisite French and Italian wines; let our music serve as ambassador through performances that were planned or, occasionally, joyously spontaneous; but most remarkably, on each Saturday or Sunday, we sang Ockeghem’s mass in Latin in virtually every iconic cathedral in Europe, including Notre Dame, Chartres, Reims, Basilica Di San Marco in Venice, and the Duomo in Firenze.

When John and his wife Eileen lived in Europe from 1956-1962, he experienced an awakening not afforded most Americans at a time when even television had barely penetrated their view of the outside world. As he pursued his study of musical composition (concentrating much of his time in Mallorca and in Florence with his mentor, twelve-tone composer Luigi Dallapiccola), he became captivated by a distinctly “European” aesthetic - a way of living that was integrally connected to the culture and the land (“terroir”.)

Throughout our tour, then, he made it his mission to pry open our senses to the unprocessed, unfiltered beauty of food, wine, art and music, while coaxing us to receive these gifts consciously (“This was given to us,” he would say. “We didn’t take it. It was given to us!”) - recognizing the skill, integrity and, most importantly, soul that went into their creation.

He wanted to share in delights he himself had discovered as a younger man abroad and, in Laurie’s words, “transmit to us that which had brought him fully alive.” As 18 to 21 year olds, not yet worldly nor wise, we were all in!

John Ronsheim became our spirit-guide, tempting us with the sweet taste of aged balsamic vinegar poured onto the back of our hands, the earthy aroma of a fresh truffle shaved over a bowl of warm toothsome risotto, the sounds of cathedral bells ringing in the hollows of an ancient village, the rich ruby iridescent tint of a vintage Bordeaux swirling around the crystalline edges of a wine glass, the come-hither gaze of Donatello’s David under his rakish cap, and the stunning, impossible beauty of interlocking polyphonic melodic motifs, that would reach a crescendo as our voices, pure and untrained, joined in sonic-oneness.

These and too many more astonishing moments were the indelible experiences we were blessed to share.

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

So when that fateful Zoom call/reunion rolled around, and we celebrated what would be Charlie’s final birthday with anecdotes, stories, songs and laughter about our unique time together as young students abroad - out of those stories and subsequent Zooms one particular memory emerged: La Morra, Italy.

La Morra was hardly the only small village we had journeyed through, but it was the only “off the beaten path” hamlet that had warmly invited us - with open, hospitable arms - to stop, settle a moment, and smell the Barolo.

What seared its allure into our collective memories was the unforgettable meal, studded with fresh truffles, in Gian Bovio’s Belvedere Ristorante; the beauty of a Medieval hillside village perched on top of cascading terraced vineyards; the charm of our hosts and the adorable school children with whom we exchanged song (“peeking out from the corners of the church like living cherubs”, Roger Stigliano ‘77 exclaimed); and the kindness of the townspeople who housed all 60 of us for two special days. Yes, there were no hotels or pensiones in La Morra - but, astoundingly, John found a way for all of us to be welcomed individually into the humble homes of Lamorresi.

Sharing these memories via Zoom had another effect that none of us anticipated. We were still in the confining days of COVID lockdowns, and armchair traveling was an essential pastime. We were all becoming restless and longed for some imagined goal or destination to lean into when the world opened up again.

La Morra, and a reunion of the 1975 chorus to take place there, became that goal.

Swept up in a nostalgic urge to go exploring again, I was the first to present this proposition to others. Laurie White, a family therapist and filmmaker from Ann Arbor, and Roger Stigliano, a lawyer and filmmaker residing in L.A., were quick to jump on board; followed by Shannon Edwards ’78, a retired theatre professor who had led multiple student trips abroad, and Rick Ray ’75, the unofficial chorus archivist and historian who had organized the only Yellow Springs reunion of both chorus tours in 1996, a year before John’s unexpected death. And finally, Jeff Treistman ’76 and Polly Young ‘79, who had hosted the last “in person” (West Coast) chorus reunion at their wine-centric Seattle cafe in 1998 (and who still had connections to wine producers in the Piemonte region) joined in the fray.

Together we formed an ad-hoc “Steering Committee,” that would labor and stumble over the next four years, searching for a way to make this La Morra reunion happen, while gaining new appreciation for John Ronsheim all over again - recognizing how absurdly hard it is to organize a three-day tour, let alone a three-month one!

In these ensuing years we would also learn that while La Morra and four other adjacent hillside villages had been declared “UNESCO World Heritage Sites” and would physically appear to us as we mostly remembered them, the entire Langhe region had since become a magnet for Gastro-Tourism, due to its outstanding wines and the International Truffle Festival drawing thousands to the central town of Alba annually.

Undaunted, we enlisted the services of a local tour guide, Silvia Aprato of Tasting Tours, to create a two-day itinerary of wine tasting and dining, customized to reflect the type of activities we would have experienced as students, and culminating with our return to La Morra. We vowed to brush up on our Ockeghem, Dufay, and Dunstable. And at the request of some, I added an extra day up front to visit a “Slow Food” goat and sheep farm in the high hills, Alta Langhe, where organic cheeses were handmade.

The Steering Committee agreed on several parameters: The reunion needed to be affordable; it would happen in the fall at the beginning of truffle hunting season; and the year would be 2025 - exactly 50 years after we first stepped foot in La Morra.

When the program finally came together, these are the other chorus members who signed on: Adam Haas ’77, Richard Robinson ‘77, John Pacht ‘76, Michael Kerner ’76, Joanna Gerngross Hediger ‘79, Susanne Johnson ’76 and Mark Trexler ’78. Mark’s wife, Laura Kosloff ’79, along with various other partners and spouses, brought our number to 22.

The date was set. On the week of October 6th, 2025, we would all meet up at Hotel I Castelli in the town of Alba, a few kilometers away from La Morra, to begin our good old fashioned Antioch Adventure.

Read day one

——- Sherri Roberts ’78 (sherri@sherri-roberts.com) is a jazz singer who has resided, in very un-Antiochian fashion, within the same four block radius of San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district since she left Yellow Springs in the summer of ’79.

On October 31, 1975, fifty-six students from Antioch College, all members of the European Tour Chorus, visited a goat farm in the commune of Chinon in France’s Loire Valley. As one of those students being led on an exhilarating, intensive, and (often times) exhausting study term by the irrepressible music professor John Ronsheim, what I actually remember of that day so many decades later is, at best, spotty.

No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember seeing the aforementioned goats! But what slowly emerges in the craggy recesses of my memory – like a photo from one of those ’70’s era Polaroid cameras that develops incrementally from nothingness, then sharpens impatiently into focus – is hardly a visual image at all. It’s the taste… my first ever taste of goat cheese, molded into logs or pyramids, some of it covered in ash: creamy, fresh, yet distinctly tangy, though pungent and oozing as it was aged.

This tug of memory, both sensual and profound, was the irresistible force that pulled some of us back, fifty years later, to another seemingly unassuming stop on our packed travel itinerary – La Morra, Italy, and the fertile agricultural region of the Langhe, now renowned for wine and truffles.

While I can’t say for sure, I’m fairly certain I was not the only goat cheese neophyte in our expansive group back then. So many of us had never encountered any of the experiences that John Ronsheim had mapped out for us, every waking hour of every day, on our ten week study term abroad.

If we had been to Europe before (and I had not) we still would not have been compelled to open our ears to learning complex yet beautiful 15th Century choral music, our eyes to the minute details in the art and architecture that stretched back centuries, our noses to the bouquet of French and Italian wines that even devoted connoisseurs might not have had the privilege of enjoying – and our taste buds to the subtly different flavor notes of that wine, that goat cheese.

To be clear, the reason we were there at all was to travel Europe singing the works of Ockeghem, Dunstable, and Dufay. But this was a fully accredited Antioch academic term in need of a balanced curriculum, and the broadly conceived course syllabus for “Taste Perception”, with a major emphasis on the study of viticulture, would earn us five credits in Physical Science in addition to our credits in art and music.

“Tasting”, we would learn, engaged the sensors of the tongue ( sweet, sour, salty and bitter) as well as the olfactory senses. To do it “perceptively” involved extreme discernment.

And what were we told, time and again, was responsible for the nuanced layers of flavor in the foods and wines we were sampling for the first time?

“It’s the sirrl, people!!!!,” John would demonstrably exclaim. Yes the soil, (or “sirrl” as he would say with his oddly provincial Cadiz, Ohioan pronunciation.) We would learn that soil, or what the French call “terroir”— with its unique microbes and minerals dictated by its place of origin— is the foundation of earth’s abundance and lends identifiable distinction to everything we would taste.

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

So it was certainly fitting that on a pleasantly temperate recent autumn morning, seven of those 56 students, now half a century older — Roger Stigliano ‘77, Laurie White ‘77, Jeff Treistman ‘76, Polly Young ‘79, Shannon Edwards ‘78, Mark Trexler ’78, and myself ’78 included; plus Susanne Johnson ’76, who went on the first chorus trip in ’73 — along with partners and spouses (including Mark’s wife, Laura Kosloff ’79), boarded a chartered mini-bus in front of their hotel in Alba, Italy, and set off on an excursion to Pascoli di Amaltea, an organic goat and sheep farm up in the hills, for a cheese tasting and tour.

It was a prelude, requested by some of us who craved a little something extra, to a reunion that would officially start the following day and would culminate with a nostalgic return to the village of La Morra.

But on this day, Tuesday October 7th, 2025, we started our leisurely hour’s drive to the southernmost stretch of the province of Cuneo, past lush green fields, village houses, and vineyards that had just been harvested of their ripened grapes, up to the high country – the Alta Langhe – where the soil and terrain were far more conducive to raising sheep, goats, and cattle and rendering their milk into exceptional regional cheeses – than making wine.

Bruno, our affable driver, impressed us by maneuvering out of tight squeezes more than a few times that day. As we looked out our windows, the pastoral scenery speeding by, it was easy to daydream of our time as young students traversing France and Italy in a much larger bus, driven by a much more acerbic – yet equally smooth at steering an oversized vehicle – Gauloise-smoking Pierre. But when we eased into comfortable banter and sharing memories of years past – the dreams snapped into present tense, and our short journey felt reassuringly familiar in both its intention and its warm camaraderie.

Before long we reached our destination, turned down a short dirt driveway and were welcomed by the friendly barking of Dixie and Brina, two older herding dogs relishing their recent retirement from their real job and their new pastime as “bus greeters.” Around the corner walked Arianna, who with her husband Alessandro ran the farm completely on their own, supplementing their income by offering tours to small groups such as ours.

Like us, Arianna was also an alumna – not of Antioch, but of the influential Slow Food movement which began on the Steps of Rome in 1986. A McDonald’s scheduled to open there fueled protests across Europe against fast food abomination and rallied a clarion cry to grow and make food the ancestral, or “slow” way.

This philosophy married so well to everything John Ronsheim had endeavored to teach us. (“Fast food, fast music – It’s all the same,” he once said, dismissing the expediency of pop culture. “It prevents growth, prevents depth!”) We felt like we had come home.

This movement’s headquarters eventually settled in the town of Bra, not far from our base in Alba – and Arianna and her husband carried the ethos of their work there to this beautiful rural outpost up the mountain. This meant that their farming and livestock husbandry practices were not just organic, but “regenerative.” They viewed themselves as stewards of the land as well as farmstead cheesemakers.

As our group, brimming with curiosity, strolled up the path to view sheep grazing below, she pointed out the different fenced corrals dividing their field and explained how the sheep were not allowed to rotate from one corral to the next without first finishing every blade of grass available to them. This meant eating even bitter and less palatable grasses that they would otherwise avoid, like children forced to eat their vegetables!

A sustainable practice such as this allowed the grazed meadows to “regenerate” holistically, retaining all the ecological diversity in that blessed soil – in turn giving the milk from these sheep and goats a sense of place and its unique taste, which would shift ever so subtlety with the change of each season.

We walked from the overlook back to the farmhouse to be given a tour of the cheesemaking facilities. Once inside, we peered through a glass door to the kitchen, noting the high level of sanitation that was required to produce their raw, or unpasteurized, cheeses; then on to the pantry where enticing rounds of cheese sat on racks drying and aging; and finally to their beautifully appointed rustic dining room for our much anticipated tasting.

In the center of this small stonewalled room were thirteen green-backed wicker chairs set around a long oak dining table. At each place setting was a plate of small cheese wedges, arranged carefully around the edges like the hours of a formaggio clock! Each bite we took, in the proper order, was described by Arianna. There were goat and sheep single milk cheeses, such as the traditional round Tuma di Pecora delle Langhe; blends of the two; and samples of the same cheese, young and then aged – just like the French goat cheeses of varied maturation we tasted so long ago.

Dishes of goat sausage and home pickled vegetables followed, washed down with glasses of organic hard cider, brewed from apples harvested from trees that encircled the grazing fields. The denouement of our little feast was a dish of fresh goat ricotta drizzled with wildflower honey gathered from beehives on the farm. Delizioso!!!

We departed sated and contented, in stomach and in heart, some of us carrying jars of fresh honey or rounds of cheese. We then boarded our bus for a short drive up to the top of the hill and the Village of Mombarcaro.

Mombarcaro rests on the highest peak of the Langhe, which, on a clear day like this one, held vistas of the Italian Alps in the distance, and if you squinted hard enough – the Ligurian Sea on the horizon. We didn’t linger too long, but enjoyed grabbing a cappuccino, wandering through the lovely cobblestoned streets and taking in the outstanding views before heading back down the mountain.

However, one more stop along the way to Alba was in order. Polly had read about the Big Bench art installations that first appeared on hillsides nearby in the Piedmont region and spread to towns across Europe. This Instagram ready phenomenon placed Big Benches in scenic locations, and Bruno knew just the location to drive us to. Sure enough, just like he had promised, down a little path rested a giant bench overlooking a ridge. And of course we were all compelled to climb on to take the requisite photo.

So here we sat on this Big Bench, which due to its outsized proportions created an illusion of us scrunched together like diminutive children – just as we suddenly felt we were again. A busload of kids, wandering through Europe and having the time of our lives.

This first day served as a delightful amuse bouche. A touchstone to our past and to the life-long lessons John Ronsheim imparted to us. When he would say: “We don’t use our senses with enough consciousness,” he was challenging us to observe deeply all that we see, hear and taste. That day, at Pascoli di Amaltea, and on the hilltop of Mambarcaro, we knew we did exactly that.

We returned to our hotel and couldn’t wait to see the rest of our chorus-mates who were arriving that evening; and to discover what new impressions we would glean from our surroundings, what new memories we could make all over again. Together.

Continue reading: Day Two

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— Sherri Roberts ‘78 (sherri@sherri-roberts.com) is a jazz singer who has resided, in very un-Antiochian fashion, within the same four block radius of San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district since she left Yellow Springs, Ohio in the summer of ’79.

— If you are traveling in the Piedmont region of Italy and are interested in arranging a tasting tour of Pascoli di Almaltea farm, you can contact Arianna directly at hello@pascolidiamaltea.it or you can follow them on Instagram or Facebook.

By Polly Young

Our full group of 22 finally gathered on yet another sunny, crisp morning outside the revolving doors of the Hotel I Castelli with hugs, smiles and introductions – some of the Antiochians seeing each other again for the first time in nearly 50 years. Our guide Silvia ushered us on to the bus – state of the art and a third the size of the monster that carried students, faculty and staff around Europe for those three astonishing months in the fall of 1975. With our congenial, born-and-raised in Piemonte, wine expert at the mic – lecturing, laughing and shushing us – we were transported once again in time to those days on the bus, with John Ronsheim our own expert, shouting his insights and wisdom, sans microphone, to be heard.

Silvia refreshed our knowledge of what John had so fervently emphasized – that it is the geological quality of the soil, the terra, that creates the nuances of difference in the same variety of grapes grown perhaps several hill districts away from each other and transforms through human skill and artistry the fruit into the hyper-localized and unique wines of the region. We drove through the steep hills covered every inch by vineyards, to the nearby town of Barbaresco, namesake and center of production of the fine red wine made from the noble nebbiolo grape and companion wine to the more robust Barolo. In her commentary on the history of wine and food traditions of the Langhe hills, and in anticipation of the fresh white truffles that we were to have later with our lunch, Silvia informed us that the Piemontese never have Barolo, the king of nebbiolo wine, with truffles, because one never has two divas present at the same event. You do not want one to overshadow the other!

Our arrival at the cooperative winery, Produttori del Barabaresco, was met with winery guide and tasting leader Michela, a young woman following in her mother’s footsteps as a grower and member of the oldest agro/industrial coop in Italy, founded in the 1800’s and revived in its current form in the 1950’s. Exclusively growing and vinting nebbiolo grapes, they are especially known for their single vineyard riserva Barbarescos as well as their less complex but still delicious Barbaresco Classico and Nebbiolo delle Langhe.

After our tour of the winery and formal private tasting of two Barbarescos and a Langhe Nebbiolo we made our way outside of town to the almost hidden on a hillside, Ristorante Rabayà, for pranzo, our main midday meal. Seated outdoors together at one long table under a grape arbor looking out over vineyards, we shared bread and wine, some of us including a shaving of newly foraged white truffles on the pasta course, filling the air with their pungent and indescribable aroma of earth and fungus. We shared stories of our families and travels and memories of Antioch as the food and wine became the catalyst for fellowship and community and the enjoyment of the art of life, just as John had emphasized to us during our intensive studies of music, fine art, cuisine and wine.

Carrying the after-glow of our morning experiences with us, we were soon delighted with the rustic beauty of our next stop – the medieval hill town of Neive, visible across the valley from Barbaresco and the location of more wineries and wine sellers. The views of the Langhe hills were stunning and one could easily see why the south facing vineyards would produce the ripest and highest quality grapes for the making of the best Barbaresco.

We returned to Alba by the quickest route possible, giving us time to rest and reflect before our only chance to try rehearsing the sections of our ‘75 tour repertoire that we had chosen to perhaps sing in La Morra the next day if the opportunity presented itself. Our efforts to find an acoustically suitable location and reserve it before arriving in Alba had failed, partially because of the International Truffle Festival taking place from early October through December and partly because the nature of our request was difficult to convey (in both English and Italian) bringing to mind the monumental undertaking the original tour planning must have been for John and the AEA (Antioch Education Abroad) department! Fortunately, the local host of several of us who were not staying at the hotel, came through by asking a friend to keep a small 18th century church in the historic city center open just for us and fully available past its normal public hours.

We chose the choir section behind the main altar, cued up the recording of the ‘75 chorus as a potential aid and then realized how awkward it was to situate ourselves and get ready to sing some of the most complex choral music ever written – without a leader. Without John. It was hard. We were awful. Every one of us struggled to find our best voice and tune to each other. So the volume was turned up just enough on the recording and we had the uncanny sensation of singing along with our younger selves – the small church resonating with the polyphonic, other-worldly beauty of Ockeghem and Dunstable. We left hoping that if we did indeed have a chance to sing in the church in La Morra the next day we would do it justice. Then we split up into the night, just like we often did during our original tour, some to rest, some to wander the town, some to find pizza or fried porcini mushrooms and continue the conversations of the day around the warmth of a communal table.

Continue reading: Day Three

Domenico drove us toward the village of Serralunga d’Alba, one of the eleven wine villages of Barolo. Silvia named the specific vineyards we were passing and commented on the nature of the wines they produced.

In Serralunga, we toured the Massolino family winery, making Barolo since 1896. We were led through the cellars, with their casks taller than us, and past clay amphorae, no different than those used by the ancient Greeks. We watched the bottling and labeling process, and ended the tour in their tasting room, where we sampled a selection of Langhe Nebbiolo and Barolo.

We then drove to La Morra, parked outside the village, and walked up into the center.

This was, for most of us, a place we had not seen since November 1975. Back then, we were fifty-six college students. There were no hotels in the village then, except for the Hotel Belvedere, which had only a couple of rooms. So John Ronsheim had arranged for townspeople to put us up for two nights. A different family took in each of us — it was like staying with warm and welcoming Italian relatives!

That first night, we sang mass at San Martino, one of La Morra’s Baroque churches. Surprisingly, for a Wednesday evening, the church was full, with entire families there to hear us sing. Babies crying, mothers admonishing children, children scampering around giggling. It was like a Fellini film — so much irrepressible life spirit!

After mass, we all had dinner at the extraordinary Ristorante Belvedere in the Hotel, with a dining room perched over the valley below. On our way in, John stood at the doorway with fistfuls of white truffles we were about to eat. “Smell these, people!”

We had two wonderful meals at the Belvedere prepared by the chef/owner, GianFranco Bovio. With our meals we drank local wines representing the best vintners of the region, including the last remaining bottles of an outstanding 1971 vintage Barolo by Paolo Cordero di Montezemolo.

Back to our October 9, 2025 return to La Morra. Earlier this year, we had invited Signor Bovio’s granddaughter, Elisa Boschiazzo, to join us for lunch, along with the town historian, Armando Gambera.

Silvia led us up the narrow “main street” of La Morra to the restaurant More e Macine. We entered our dining room to find Elisa, a gorgeous 23-year-old, already there. And Armando Gambera. Accompanying him was Marialuisa Ascheri, mayor of La Morra, and a man who was the deputy mayor, along with the son of winemaker Paolo Cordero.

At each place setting on our tables was a commemorative booklet. This booklet was created by Signor Gambera, who we discovered had helped John bring us to La Morra in 1975 when he was just 26 and head of the cultural organization Pro Loco. In the booklet were photos of the chorus singing mass in San Martino, Armando and John conferring, GianFranco Bovio and his mother in the kitchen of their restaurant — and their famous crema caramello, which we all remembered to this day! He was helped in creating this beautiful gesture by the Bovio family, the Cordero family and the mayor of La Morra. This thoughtful ceremonial welcome came as a complete surprise to us. We were all stunned and very moved, some of us to tears.

We asked Armando Gambera to tell us the story of how our professor John had come to bring such a large group of students to such a small Italian village. In his telling, translated from Italian by our guide Silvia, we came to understand not just what La Morra had meant to us, but what we had meant to La Morra.

In his mind, and those of the darling school children we met and the families we stayed with, we were exotic American students who were touring the continent, performing in the grandest cathedrals ever constructed, in the most cosmopolitan cities of Europe… and yet we chose to veer off that path, to a town tourists from other countries had rarely ventured, to sing at their humble church and celebrate their food and wine.

It had never occurred to us until that moment that we left the same indelible impression on them that they left on us.

After a wonderful lunch at More e Macine, capped off by two superb magnums of 2015 Barolo generously gifted to us by the Bovio family winery, Mayor Ascheri led us to San Martino. There in the chapel we sang a bit of the Ockeghem mass we had sung there in 1975 — along with a sweet alleluia that one of us had learned from schoolchildren in La Morra during that same visit. Everyone, both Americans and Lamorresi, were very moved.

The 1975 Antioch College European Chorus Tour alumni in the same La Morra elementary schoolyard as the archival photograph above, 50 years later.

Standing in the town’s main piazza, taking commemorative group photos in front of the now shuttered Hotel Belvedere, we made a pledge with Armando and the mayor to return in five years. We hope to help celebrate the Belvedere’s reclamation into La Morra’s new cultural center, complete with its own new restaurant serving the provincial cuisine of the Langhe — as well as celebrate, as Armando put it, friendship between peoples, brotherhood, peace and high culture.

Finally it was time to board the bus back to Alba. There we said our good-byes to the wonderful Silvia and headed off to a farewell dinner at a casual restaurant in Alba.

And in the morning, it was over and we all went our separate ways — with more than a few tears discretely shed. As La Morra had rung in our memories for fifty years, our return there will ring for the rest of our lives.

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I shut off the engine and let the current gently slide us under the bridge, from the open Pacific into San Francisco Bay. Above us the sights and sounds of traffic crossing the Golden Gate bridge became louder and louder, and soon we were beneath the shadow of the bridge.

Traffic, a sound we have not heard for a month, was above us!

Welcome to the San Francisco Bay Area, you are now leaving the opening Pacific Ocean.

We’d started the day in the early morning light gazing towards the Farallon Islands as they emerged from the mist. Our shore crew texted — demanding photos.

I offhandedly snapped this shot, only to realize later that it was darn good — another happy accident at sea.

Land, at last! And wildlife comes along with it, seals swimming happily past our boat and a million birds overhead.

It had not been an easy crossing. We had to sail around a no-wind area known as The Pacific High. This is also where all that garbage circulates in the North Pacific Garbage patch.

One morning we woke up in a complete calm. The sea was like glass. I started taking photos, and everytime I pointed my phone there was another amazing picture.

Rainbows

Our first piece of trash

This ball floated by. It looked like a basketball, but was probably a fish net float.

Rewind to our departure, I was very glad I’d scrubbed the bottom of the boat.

Donn in his wetsuit on Kawaii before scrubbing the bottom of Tao Neutrino

On our last day in Hawaii I used my AirBuddy to dive under the boat for an hour and scrub all the scum off of the hull, so we would slide smoothly when the wind is light.

The crew made sure all our solar was working. We had loaded up on fuel, both diesel for the engine and food for ourselves. We knew there was a chance we’d need to motor a lot, and we didn’t run out of energy. The diesel engine can generate electricity, but it’s better to generate it from the sun. And if we ran out of everything, we could just drift … but we would need to eat!

And eat we did!

Sean caught a Dorodo, and although I hated watching it die, I did enjoy eating it.

After about two weeks going around the high we hit the prevailing westerly winds. This gave us a quick ride all the way back to the mainland.

Unfortunately the wind causes my little boat to heal over on its side quite a bit, and the Pacific swell would wash over the side of the boat repeatedly.

Something was leaking, because the water was above the floorboards in the head (bathroom), and our bunks were getting wet.

The boat moved a lot, both pitching forward and back, but mostly rolling from side to side. Occasionally the waves would collude to cause a real lurch throwing us and everything across the cabin. During one of these lurches our inside dining table broke! Luckily nobody got hurt, even though it landed in Sean’s lap. We picked it up and moved it into the storage area.

After almost a month at sea we were really looking forward to being on dry land.

The crew saw the Golden Gate growing larger as we approached.

I turned off the motor as we glided under the bridge.

Our “shore crew” had followed our journey via modern media, and now their boats came into view.

Here’s Sea Spirit

Here’s Miss Lady, getting close enough to toss us a cold beer! Oliver really appreciated that!

I had hoped to return to Sausalito, which had been the home for Tao Neutrino before our departure about a year ago as we headed to join the 2024 Baja Haha. But all of Sausalito was full of boats, so our shore crew got us a spot in the Berkeley Marina.

The boat had gotten beat up by that last crossing.

A sense of accomplishment started replacing the relief and elation of being back in civilization. I only really felt that through the eyes of my friends, especially Ben. As I settled back into shore life I felt a bit worn out, like the boat. Here’s my hat in a pile of wet clothes and my bunk. But I got a boost every time I told someone that I was living on a boat that had just sailed to Hawaii and back.

Author’s Note: Now I’m off to Indonesia to get on a friend’s sailboat in one of the top eco and dive spots. It will feel good to not be the captain or owner. I’m hoping this will help me decide if I want to sail Tao Neutrino there as part of my planned Pacific Circle. This time, I think I’ll do more planning.

Donn Denman ‘79 is a software developer turned sailor.

While the use of cold water in the medical profession goes back to the writings of Hippocrates, it had become less prevalent among Enlightenment age physicians of the 18th century who saw themselves as doing battle with illness and disease. Consequently, conventional medicine of the time could be quite horrifying to the patient. Beginning in the 1820s, however, healing with water made a stirring comeback as “hydropathy.” Also known as water cure, hydropathy could be practiced as self-care or under the direction of a hydropathic physician. In mid-19th century Yellow Springs, Ohio, the local hydropath physician was Dr. Abner Cheney, who operated The Glen Forest Water Cure Institution located in the southern half of Glen Helen. The only description Antiochiana has of “the Cure” from a patient’s perspective follows, complete with original misspellings.

The writer, Clara True, about whom we know almost nothing, mentions “taking pack sheets,” sheets she probably packed herself based on the advertisement about The Water Cure Establishment that appeared in Reilly’s Ohio State Business Directory for 1853: “Patients are requested to bring with them 2 coarse cotton sheets” among other linens and towels. Pack sheets are first soaked in cold water before the subject is wrapped up tightly. Eventually, the patient’s body temperature warms the pack sheet, which based on Clara’s account takes about forty minutes. That she wrote this letter in mid December and mentions that nearby Antioch College opened a week after she arrived tells us that Clara has been at the Cure for about two and a half months. No wonder she dreads the “bath bell.”

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Copy of a Letter from Clara True to her Brother-in-Law, Ralph Collier of Guilford, Indiana. Original in possession of Mrs. Chester W. Murphy, RFD 5, Xenia, a granddaughter of Mr. Collier.

Yellow Springs, Dec. 15, 1853.

My dear Brother Ralph,

Your very welcome letter is before me, which was received 2 days after mail, and which I should have acknowledged e’er this, but I felt so little like writing of late and besides Mr. Smith was talking of leaving in 2 or 3 days so I thought it expedient to turn my attention to him while he remained. He left Monday morning for Cincinnati, his health very much improved. I feel very lonely indeed since his departure. Life at the cure now is rather monotonous. There are only 4 patients here now. Dr. says it is invariably the case in winter. How much I would like to write you a long interesting letter, but my head aches so bad. I am now taking pack sheets. I have taken one every day for a week, in the afternoon 40 minutes. I have never got warm in one yet. Dr. says they will finally be beneficial to me even if they do make me worse now. If it was not for this hope, I would not submit to the packs, they are so unpleasant. Sponge bath in the morning, Sitz at 10 A.M. 75 degr’s, foot at 7 P.M. 90 degr’s. I am very unpleasantly situated for writing. I don’t what kind of a letter this will be. I am in the sitting-room. Mrs. Cheney is talking at her usual rate which is not slow I assure you. The children are playing, which is very confusing as well as annoying. Now I am interrupted again by the dreaded ring of the bath bell.

Well, I have just returned from the bath room as cold as ice, and resumed my pen. The children have gone, but Mrs. C. interrupts me occasionally. Ellen the bath nurse tells me I have a dripping sheet this afternoon. You know how well I like them. Have I ever told you anything about Antioch College? It is a splendid affair. It was dedicated the next week after I came here. It is not finished yet. It accommodates about 2 hundred scholars. I wish your urchins could have the benefit of it. It is estimated at now I have forgotten the exact value, but several hundred thousand. It is one of the largest if not the largest College in the United States, Honorable Horace Mann is President. I suppose you know him by reputation. He is a distant relative of David Mann’s the invetrate talker. Wouldn’t I like to hear his lectures? Dr. Cheney considers him a superior being. This College is built for the accommodation of the world in general, entirely free from sectarianism. All denominations and none at all attend, Male and Female. It is a mixed school. I intend to visit it before I leave this place. Dr. Cheney thinks that I might almost as well leave now as to leave in less than 10 weeks, it is so necessary to remain that long, but I know I cannot remain more than half that long. He reduced my board $1, so that will be 4 dollars per week, as cheap as I could ask. He does not oblige me to pay weekly. How are the folks all getting along out there. Does the Bloomerites still wear their costume? I wear mine yet and expect to until there is a greater improvement made then I shall adopt. I want to see you all, but I have no desire to go home, and would not for six months yet if I could remain that long, for I know it is absolutely necessary. Dr.Cheney would ensure me a cure if I would stay long enough. I am bound to stay as long as I can. You need not expect a letter from me often as it requires a little fortune to write so much. Dr. Cheney says that I am the coldest subject he ever saw. We have a good Library, very good, among which is Andrew Jackson Davises writings the clairvoyant. They are very interesting . if read without prejudice, you nothing can be interesting clogged with prejudice.

Goodbye,

Clara.

First row L-R: Linda E. Jones ‘’80 (Vermont)., Merrily Lovell Eiseman ‘70 {Vermont), Alan Hammaker ‘67 {Montréal), George Grantham ‘64 (Montréal), Suzy Margot Slavin ‘63 (Montréal)

Second row: Robert Goldsmith ‘76, Johanne Boisvert (RG friend), Jane Fernandes, Natalie Kubat, Natalie Kubot’s spouse.

Canadian and Vermont alumni gathered at Robert Goldsmith’s home in Montréal on January 11, 2026 and were joined by Jane Fernandes and Natalie Kubot.

The event happened on the evening of Sunday 16 November 2025. We had “real American food in the form of refried beans and guacamole, made from my lime tree in the front garden, meeting Australian roadkill (actually legally harvested and sold in a supermarket) in the form of marinated Kangaroo skewers.”

The people from left to right:

In the photo, from the left, Lincoln Kern 1986, Tom Fisher 1964, Amy Gill 2006, Louisa Joy Wise (Early 1970’s) and Heather Cain 2026

All residents of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia except Amy (Brisbane, Queensland resident) and Heather Co-op student with no regrets of living life long or short down under!