By Ashley Duran

“I want everyone to stop what they’re doing and be completely still,” shouts the excited English professor.

The semi-circular room in Memorial Hall goes quiet at Professor Jeanne Murray Walker’s command, as her confused students look slowly around.

“Close your eyes and think about where you are right now. Pay careful attention to your surroundings,” says Walker.

She tells her students to think of a feeling that they’re experiencing at that moment and write a sentence about it. The students are then told to go outside, find something that reminds them of their feeling and write a metaphor relating to both the sentence and object.

After returning to the classroom, sophomore James Chasteen seems puzzled. He raises his hand and says, “I don’t really understand what we’re supposed to be doing.”

Such seemingly abstract assignments are usually how a discussion starts in Professor Walker’s Introduction to Poetry class (ENGL 207). In this case she was teaching the class how to first write a metaphor, and then turn it into a poem.

Eminent poet, Jeanne Murray Walker, has a national reputation. She has had six volumes of poetry published, the latest of which being “A Deed to the Light.” She is currently putting together her seventh book, and is also working on her ninth play.

Walker says that people don’t pay nearly enough attention to their surroundings, especially nature.

“We get messages from nature all the time and we just ignore them,” she says. “I want my students to walk away from my class not only being able to enjoy poetry, but also to enjoy the world around them.”

Walker, 62, is not only a poet and scriptwriter but also an English professor of scriptwriting, introduction to poetry, graduate level poetry, Shakespeare and introduction to drama.

Born in 1944 in Parkers Prairie, Minnesota, Walker originally had aspirations to become a professional violin player. She played for about 11 years but gave it up because she realized just how serious the competition was. After that she started to write consciously.

Because of boredom that she says was provoked by a terrible Latin substitute teacher in high school, Walker decided to write a cowboy novel.

“I knew nothing about cowboys,” she laughs. “But I guess I couldn’t imagine writing about my real life. It was just too boring.”

When Walker was 19 and a sophomore at Wheaton College, she was encouraged by a poetry teacher to enter a poem and a short story in The Atlantic Monthly Competition for young writers. Both of her works won first place in the competition. This was the first time ever that anyone had won first place positions in both of the categories, giving Walker more confidence to continue writing.

After earning her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania at the age of 29, Walker was hired at the University of Delaware as a professor and has now been with the institution for 30 years.

“She reminds me of my mom,” says junior Joanna Lenck. “She treats students like her kids and she is a really gentle and passionate teacher.”

Walker says that teaching fulfills an inner need that she has. She worries about the obsession of material things in today’s society, believing that if you gain everything in the world, you lose your own soul.

“But I’m still learning myself,” she says. “We all are. That’s what keeps us from getting bored with life.”

This constant worry of boredom with the world, specifically nature, weighs heavily on Walker’s mind.

“It’s sad that we’re all so busy because we’re moving so fast that we can’t really enjoy anything,” she says.

Walker talks to her poetry class about the importance of nature on a regular basis and finds ways to create assignments from images of the surrounding world.

She explains that the exercises are ways to get students to look at life differently so that they can relive seeing things as if it were for the first time.

“It’s like snow,” she says. “Living in the North and seeing it so much, you might not appreciate its beauty anymore. On the other hand, for someone who lives further south and never sees snow, actually seeing it might be like witnessing a miracle.”

Walker feels that people need to understand the environment in order to understand what they read, whether it is a poem, a short story or even the news.

She explains that if people paid closer attention to the world, they would be aware of the fact that their sufferings in life would bring rebirth. Referring to nature again, she speaks of its death in winter and its rebirth in the spring.

Walker currently lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with her husband of 24 years, Dan Larkin. She has two children, Molly, 30, and Jack, 22, comparing them with two of her passions, poetry and scriptwriting.

“If you can’t solve a problem in one form, you can go to the other form,” she says, smiling. “I could never pick a favorite.”

By Lori Goldson

As a child in Plainfield, New Jersey, university alumna Arienne Gomes spent Friday and Sunday nights at her grandmother’s house for dinner with her family. The kids ran around until the porch lights came on, playing “ghost in the graveyard” around the house.

Adults indulged in laughter as everyone ate until they couldn’t eat anymore. Occasionally partaking into a “crack session” of teasing each other, the family sat on the steps of Emerson Avenue house until the wee hours of the night, with neighborhood kids and parents throughout Plainfield joining the festivities.

Arienne recalls some of her best memories as just sitting and laughing with her family, which has always been close, as her grandparents welcomed everyone who knew them with open arms.

At the age of seven, Arienne’s family’s tradition changed. No longer would there be the fun-filled gatherings at her grandparents’ house. Her grandmother was hospitalized with breast cancer that became terminal after spreading to her colon.

“I thought I was a bad grandchild,” Arienne says. “My grandmother didn’t eat pork. No ham or anything. I was hungry so my mother took me to the vending machine to get something to eat. We went up to my grandmother’s room. I was eating and my grandmother asked me what I was eating and I said a ham sandwich. We said our goodbyes and the next morning when my mom sat me down and told me she died, I thought me eating that ham sandwich had killed her.”

Arienne’s loss of her grandmother struck her down to her bones. Instead of becoming feeble, Arienne used the experience to her benefit.

“From then on, I promised myself I would excel at whatever I did,” she says. “So I excelled at school.”

After her grandmother’s death, Arienne began to take a liking to the white-collar working world. Her playtime consisted of playing a teacher, judge, or doctor as she fantasized of a more glamorous life not just to make grandma proud, but to avoid her mother’s consistent struggles.

“My mother’s been working two jobs since I was 13,” she says. “I’m not saying she doesn’t work hard, but she works too hard for minimal rewards.”

Arienne’s mother was forced to work to care for her and her younger siblings, Ariel and Aaron Davis. Unfortunately, none of their fathers were around, leaving Arienne and her siblings financially and emotionally devastated.

Without her father, Arienne’s self confidence never congealed. She lacks the sense of self that most people would assume she has.

“I don’t have the confidence and esteem that I should,” she says. “I was always afraid to be fearless. While the other kids skated in the street, here comes little Ari with a helmet and some Playskool skates on.”

Although Arienne has been estranged from her drug-addicted for many years, she never allowed his absence or his drug problem to distract her from her goals.

In every attempt to go above the influence, Arienne rebelled against attending the teen pregnancy and violence-infested Plainfield High School, opting for Union County Magnet High School instead.

“I had heard bad things about Plainfield High and how it was hard for seniors to get into college,” she says. “I knew it would be important if I wanted to go to college.”

While Arienne excelled academically and won enrollment to the university as a medical technology major, she continued to resent her father and felt guilty about her grandmother’s death. These negative feelings took their toll on her interactions with those around her.

University alumna Nicole Barkley says living with Arienne their sophomore year was a better idea than actual reality.

“She would have her moods and would go days without saying anything to me, she says.

For her junior and senior years, Arienne opted to be a resident assistant for Pencader and George Read Halls. The experience gave her a new insight on handling people and being more patient, a virtue that would prove essential in the medical field.

Independence Complex coordinator Zakia Reaves says as an RA, Arienne cared deeply for the well-being of the other students, and strongly impacted the residential and Delaware community with her commitment to responsibility.

“She was actively involved in organizations that served the people and worked hard within her field of med tech, which is ultimately a service for the people,” Zakia says. “Arienne has a genuine soul and heart and upheld her responsibility to her colleagues and residents.”

Keeping with her self promise to always prosper, Arienne now works as a medical technologist at Summit Medical Group in New Jersey. Planning to attend graduate school within the next few years, Arienne is seeking enrollment in the osteopathic program at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

“Medicine is something I love,” she says. “I love being able to tell someone what’s wrong with their body or what’s going well with their body. It’s like, ‘Here are some solutions. Let’s work together and make you feel better.’ Patients always come first.”

By Sonia Dasgupta

Walking along the Green to class, university students may hear a faint whistle chant in the distance. Suddenly, a spunky Border Collie appears out of no where, swiftly running across the path of students rushing to class.  Soon a shirtless man, with glowing white locks, runs along the grass full speed, whistling. He follows in the first dog’s direction and then another Border Collie follows him.

Any university student that regularly walks around campus has seen this so called “Dog Whistler” otherwise known as Steve Cottrell. This 55-year-old native Delawarean has a Facebook page called “WTF Is Up With That Whistling Shirtless Dog Runner?” dedicated to him and his dogs.

“I don’t have time to be online,” Steve says in response to learning about his page. “What people do in their spare time is their business.”

As of Wednesday morning there were 2,649 members in this groups, with 270 wall posts, various pictures of Steve and the dogs in Newark and a discussion board filled with heated debates about controversial things he has been accused of saying.

Steve is an alumnus of the Class of 1982 and graduated as a chemical engineering major. Although he frequents bars for the social aspects on weekends now, he says it was quite different when he was at the university.

“I didn’t have much of a social life back then,” Steve says, “being a chemical engineer, I didn’t get out.”

He says he grew up in the Browntown area of Wilmington off Maryland Avenue. When he came to Newark for college, he bought a house that he still owns. Although he owns a house in Newark, he lives across the border in Pennsylvania and in the past he lived in Villanova and Lancaster County for a short period of time.

After graduating from the university, Steve worked as an engineer for five years, then moved into programming. He currently is involved with environmental work, where he removes invasive plants from their preserves.

Steve is training for a marathon in Philadelphia on Nov. 19 and that is the reason why he always seems to be running. He is trying to break his own record for the 26-mile race. Steve runs throughout the day in between shifts at work, and for approximately three hours. His whistling is a breathing technique.

“I get more oxygen,” he says, “so I’m able to run faster.”

Steve says he has run four marathons in two hours and 25 minutes. He has run the Boston Marathon six times, the New York Marathon five times and in 1994 he also ran the Rodderdam Marathon in the Netherlands. His adventurous nature led Steve to hitchhike to Alaska and the best part was when he traveled through British Columbia and the Yukon in the dead of winter, he says.

Steve says an unforgettable moment was when he ran with Juma Ikanga, the New York Marathon record holder from Tanzania.

“We ran along the Charles River together in Boston,” he says. “That was the highlight of my life.”

One of his more memorable moments came from his experience at ‘THE’ Woodstock, as he refers to it with enthusiasm.

“It was probably the biggest party of the twentieth century,” Steve says, “no probably the biggest party of all time.”

“On a tiny hill a half a million people were packed. Peter Townsend asks for silence. There was dead silence. He then asked them all to light a match. Everyone lit a match and there were a half a million flames,” he says.

Steve’s dogs love running with him as well.  He ran with dogs since he was 10. Spooky was his first dog, a mutt Labrador, followed by a half a dozen others.

Cody and Pistol, his two running buddies, have been his since they were six weeks old. Cody, 6, and Pistol, 2, are brothers but not from the same litter. Steve says he bought Border Collies because he had heard they were the smartest types of dog and his two friends have not let him down.

Cody can walk the length of Main Street backwards and Pistol has figured out how to use crosswalks.

“He must have watched me one day,” Steve says. “He walked up to the side of the crosswalk, waited for the cars to stop and then sprinted across.”

Steve says he cannot take the credit. They are just fast learners, he says. Cody and Steve were featured in Runner’s World magazine in April for Cody’s ability to run marathons.

“No one can believe that a dog can stay focused for 3 hours, especially since they run off the leash,” he says. “They never cease to amaze me.”

He says Cody is the more loyal dog. This proves to be a fact, since Cody will never take his eyes off Steve.

“If you stand in front of his line of sight, he’ll move until he sees me,” he says. “It’ll tire you out.”

He says that Cody is also more outgoing and a Frisbee-lover while Pistol is more affectionate.

When he is not running or with his dogs, Steve says he frequents coffee shops to read or just to “shoot the breeze” with the locals. This self-proclaimed marathon-dog-escort says he can be found reading Shakespeare in his spare time as well. He is also the landlord to four sophomore girls who live in a house across the street from Morris Library.

Sophomore Alan Wilkinson started the page on Facebook on Sept. 21.

He says he did not realize that so many people would join his page so soon.

“I was curious about him,” Wilkinson says, “Who is he? What’s he do?”

Wilkinson claims Steve yelled “murderer” at him when he was walking in his ROTC uniform by Trabant.

“That raised all the questions,” he says referring to why he started the page.

Steve says he did yell at the ROTC members because he believes that their message does not belong on campus.

“Students come to the university to learn how to solve problems in a peaceful way,” Steve says. “They represent a violent view.”

He says he participated in protests against the Vietnam War when he was in high school and believes that students now are very apathetic.

“It’s your future, if you want to live in a world or violence, ignore the war,” he advises students. “Show your opposition. If you don’t your future will be controlled by people who force, instead of by a consensus.”

Senior Dan Landsman however feels offended by Steve’s supposed comments.

“He calls us ‘baby killers, rapists and murderers,’ ” Landsman says, when discussing what some ROTC members have experienced.

Landsman says he is opposed to Steve being on campus, especially because if someone had screamed something racist down the street people would probably hate the guy.

“It just bothers me because no one cares, because people agree,” Landsman says. “There’s a lot of support for this guy and his beliefs.”

By Alex Honeysett

It’s 1983 and Michael Fosina is standing in a mattress store on Main Street in Newark, Del., educating himself on the health benefits of waterbeds. This is no hobby. Fosina has a meeting with the director of housing at the University of Delaware and needs to defend the 5-foot by 7-foot hand-built frame and the waterbed that lay atop it, lying not so comfortably in his 8-foot by 10-foot Pencader dorm room. The latest addition to his bedroom had been found days earlier by his R.A.

“It started as a joke, just ha ha, having a little fun with this thing” Fosina says. “Then I figured, if I need to explain myself, I should know what I’m talking about.”

After rumors of the boy with the waterbed circulated UD’s campus, Fosina was approached by his swim coach, Edgar Johnson, who insisted Fosina visit the doctor.

“The doctor thought it was completely ridiculous,” Fosina says. “And, well, they let me keep it.” A grin passes over Fosina’s face as he stifles a laugh. “There’s a picture of me in the yearbook laying on it,” he says. “It says something like, ‘Michael on the waterbed: very relaxing and illegal.’ ” He shakes his head and continues to laugh. “And no, I do not have a bad back,” he says.

A fact his swim coach was happy to hear. Fosina swam for the majority of his youth, and found a home in UD’s swim team and coach Johnson. “He was a very quiet leader, quiet in the sense that he wasn’t ‘Ra Ra Ra’ but quiet in the sense that he’d say okay, let’s get this done,” Johnson says. “He was a good man to have around because he had solid values. He knew what was important. He knew his education was important, and swimming, and religion, and social life, and family. He’s just a good, solid citizen.”
In addition to swimming, Fosina came to UD to pursue animal science.

“It was a fascinating major for me,” he says. “Milking cows, raising chickens. I was doing stuff I would’ve never come close to in my daily life. Literally, I took a dairy production class and three times a semester we had to get up at four a.m. and milk 85 cows. I’d come back smelling like manure and my roommate would scream ‘DON’T … COME IN … THIS ROOM,” he says.

Fosina’s life post-college took turns he had not expected, but eventually led him to a family and career he feels destined to have obtained. Three years after graduating, Fosina visited a homecoming game and met his wife, Linda, at the Stone Balloon.

“She was standing in the back and I just went up and started talking to her,” he says. Wife and husband smile at one another. “And that was it,” says Linda.

After a year of working in a spaying and neutering clinic, Fosina decided it wasn’t something he wanted to do the rest of his life and enrolled in Columbia’s graduate school where he became interested in hospital management. Three years later he graduated with a degree in public health, and is currently the vice-president and executive director of the Allen Pavilion of New York Presbyterian Hospital. Fosina in a message to the community that Presbyterian Hospital “the only New York area hospital named to the Honor Roll in U.S. News & World’s ‘Best Hospitals 2003’ Issue.

“The same things I used to find fascinating, I now find challenging,” he says with a grin. “You’re in a not-for-profit corporation in a for-profit world.”

Though frustrating and often time-consuming, Fosina’s dedication to the community brings him a great sense of satisfaction. This devotion did not begin or end with his involvement in the hospital. Instead, it began with conversations around the dinner table with his family growing up in New Rochelle, NY.

Fosina’s father, Joe Fosina, was a city councilman for 12 years. He founded the New Rochelle Youth Football program 30 years ago. Fosina began coaching youth football and later youth baseball, inspired by his father’s dedication.

As Michael expanded his family, their involvement in the community grew and intertwined. Linda is on the PTA Council Board and Co-President of their neighborhood association, Premium Point Park. Both Linda and Michael are involved in the monthly newsletter educating their community on local issues and events. “It’s good for the community, but we do it for selfish reasons too,” says Linda. “It’s fun, and it’s fun to feel connected to where you live.” Adds Michael, “It’s important. My grandfather did it for 40 years, my father for 30.”

Perhaps most importantly, Fosina maintains the same sense of values that impressed Coach Johnson two decades earlier. “You know, he was the same then as he is now, says Johnson. “I respect him for that.”

Though more than twenty years and 180 miles separate Fosina from his college experience, he remains an active member of the UD community.

“I give donations, go down to the games, stay in touch with the guys,” he says. Two years ago, 15 of Fosina’s friends flew to Los Vegas from all over the country for a guy’s weekend in Los Vegas. He smiles and shakes his head, lost in thought.

“Those were the best years, really, the best four years,” he says. “I loved it down there. I really loved it.”

By Dane Secor

When Alexander Long was visiting the university for the Arak Award celebration in May 2005, he didn’t expect to receive news about his writing.

“I was on the steps of Memorial Hall and I got a call on my cell phone,” Long says. “It ended up being the editor and he said, ‘We want to take your book,’ and I said, ‘Holy crap – I mean this is great.’ “

Long, a recent Ph.D at the university, had his collection of poems selected in an open competition by New Issues Press. His book was released Oct. 3.

The collection, “Vigil,” is a series of documentations of where Long was at certain times in his life, he says. The collection is primarily elegies and many of the poems were influenced by the deaths of two close friends in the same year.

Long says he wanted to address his friends and memorialize them, as well as pay tribute to some of his influences.

“I’m just trying to communicate with people who I can’t communicate with in any sort of dimensional sense anymore,” he says. “I use the poems to keep in touch.”

The manuscript went through many changes before he had something that could be settled on, Long says. Coming up with a title for his collection was a struggle.

“After a long couple of months of being frustrated, I threw my hands up and said ‘Eh, Vigil,’ ” he says. “Then I slept on it and a couple weeks later I thought it wasn’t too bad, maybe it works.”

Long spent his undergraduate career at West Chester University. After graduating, he worked long hours as a fry cook and wrote obituaries for a local newspaper.

“I worked a succession of stupid jobs,” he says.

Long says the obituaries, in particular, affected his work and being reminded of his mortality 15 to 20 times per day had a large effect on his writing. Balancing his jobs with his poetry writing was tricky, Long says, but he had his mornings free to write.

“It was just something I did, for a lack of a better phrasing, to keep my sanity,” he says.

Long says he first started writing poetry in the spring semester of his sophomore year at West Chester, after reading a collection of poems by Larry Levis.

“Something really clicked, something in that book was really speaking to me,” he says. “I was like, ‘I want to try this too. I can hear this book, I can feel this book.’ “

The transition to graduate school was made when a professor at West Chester asked him what he was planning to do with his life, Long says.

“He saw some talent in my work that I couldn’t see then,” he says. “He said I should probably go to grad school, and I said ‘OK, it beats writing obituaries.’ “

Long says he also started submitting his poems for publication at the suggestion of a professor.

“I got lucky a couple times, I got unlucky many more times,” he says. “I used to have a folder of rejection slips.”

The initial rejection Long received did not discourage him.

“It kind of triggered the West Philly in me that I can’t shake, the ‘Oh, yeah? I’ll show you’ kind of thing,” he says. “It was blind ambition or youthful rebellion, which is silly, but at the time I remember feeling that.”

Long moved around the country after college and lived in Michigan while he worked toward his master’s degree, but eventually settled back in the West Philadelphia area. He applied to the university for his doctorate in English in 2001, primarily because of its location.

“It was stupidly and ignorantly based on geography and it turned out to be a blessing beyond blessings,” Long says. “I just encountered all these wonderful things in my own backyard.”

Long says one of the greatest benefits of attending the university was his opportunity to work with Delaware poet laureate Fleda Brown. He was a teaching assistant at the university and taught introductory English classes.

“Teaching isn’t all roses,” he says. “But in my time in Delaware, I can say it really was.”

Senior Tom Keegan says he was lucky to have Long as a professor in his Introduction to Poetry (ENGL 207) class.

“At the time, I was writing some poems and I just needed somebody to bounce them off of,” Keegan says. “He was willing to look at them and not just tell me, ‘Oh yeah, it’s great,’ he actually gave me criticism and advice.”

In addition to his poetry and teaching at West Chester, Long spends his free time playing in a band. Long says he writes lyrics for the band, which takes a different process than his poetry writing.

“You’re limited to the melody, which forces you to really get in what you have to say in a small amount of time,” he says. “When I go back to trying to write a poem, I feel a little more free.”

The band plays accessible, melodic-based music, he says. The group’s music is influenced by rock acts such as the Beatles and U2, as well as newer artists like Radiohead and Coldplay.

“We’re just trying to hit people in the gut and the heart,” he says.

Long is currently exploring the academic job market and has a number of readings scheduled in the West Chester and Philadelphia areas. He is working on having some readings in the Wilmington and Newark areas, he says.

English professor Charles Robinson says he worked with Long in putting together job applications.

“It was fun to work with him because I could be mean-spirited to him and he would correct it and send something back,” Robinson says.

Robinson says Long should be commended for finding the teaching position at West Chester because there are a lot of poets looking for jobs in the academic market.

“He is an extremely hard worker and he has street smarts,” he says. “I think he will survive in the profession.”

By Sarah Lipman

Digging for buried treasure isn’t just for little kids in a playground sandbox. Or at least anthropology professor Marc Meyer doesn’t think so.

In fact, he’s been doing just that.

Meyer, who has been splitting his time commuting from Philadelphia to teach biological anthropology at the university and gross human anatomy to medical students at the University of Pennsylvania for the past four years, spends his summers abroad on various archaeological digs.

“I’ve been all over the world on these digs,” Meyer says. “They’re absolutely fascinating; we’ve discovered some really insane fossils.”

He says he has excavated and done research in Lebanon, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Egypt, South Africa, some U.S. states, and his personal favorite, Republic of Georgia.

“We found fossils of early humans that are 1.77 million years old there,” Meyer says. “They’re not quite human and they’re not quite ape. In some ways they are human, but at the same time they’re just so far from it — and I love that.”

Meyer says a typical day on a dig moves pretty routinely: wake up, dig, eat lunch, nap, dig a little more, have dinner and play cards — there’s no electricity on-site, he adds. That routine drastically changes, however, when a new discovery is made.

“You get a rush like you wouldn’t believe when you make a discovery — it’s one of the greatest feelings I’ve experienced,” he says. “I actually found a skull in the Republic of Georgia and brought a cast of it to the Museum of Natural History in New York. It’s on display and you can view it there.”

Meyer, a New York native, says he didn’t always want to be an anthropologist and that the idea just kind of grew on him. Taking longer than the average four years of undergraduate and two years of graduate studies, he took his time to experience different career paths.

“I wanted to be a rockstar,” he says in a joking manner, although he is completely serious. “I was a punk rocker, a pop rocker, and even did a little R&B music production. Then I wanted to be a triathlete and I competed in tons of national races. It was all I did for a while. Finally I decided I wanted to be an archaeologist.”

He graduated with an undergraduate degree from Queens College and moved onto to the University of Pennsylvania for his graduate degree in anthropology. While there, he became a teacher’s assistant to some of his favorite classes.

Meyer says he finds archaeology to be one of the most interesting fields of study because there’s so much “buried treasure” still yet to be found.

When Meyer, isn’t on-site halfway across the world, teaching his students and cracking jokes to keep them coming to class.

“I’m a serious scholar,” he says trying hard to keep a straight face. “Everything I say to my students should be taken as a completely serious statement.”

Meyer says he doesn’t mean to be funny, it just kind of happens — which is hard to believe considering it isn’t unusual for Michael Jackson to make frequent special guest appearances in his lecture slides.

“I just like Michael, he’s so easy to pick on,” Meyer says. “From an anthropologist’s point of view he’s a perfect example. No matter how much he messes with his appearance and acquires new characteristics like bleached skin, he’ll never be able to pass those traits on to his children, thankfully.”

By adding jokes and personal anecdotes to his class lectures, Meyer creates an atmosphere which encourages students to come to class. Sophomore Briana Samuels, a communications major, took his introductory course to biological anthropology her first semester freshman year not even knowing what anthropology was, let alone the biological aspect.

“I was kind of talked into it at the DelaWorld freshman orientation because I needed to fulfill a science requirement,” Samuels says. “I ended up loving the class—I even got 100 on the first exam. Professor Meyer called a few other students and me to the front of the room, but didn’t say why, so I started to panic, expecting bad news. When I got down there he handed me a big, soft, delicious chocolate chip cookie as a reward!”

By Kristin Vorce

On the first day of class students file into the Kent dining hall, less than enthused about the menu choices of “roasted red bliss potatoes” and “vegan zesty organic soy chik filet.” One by one, they shuffle in and hand the front-desk worker their student ID cards.

“Welcome home,” she says.

It’s Granny: 4’11”, with gray hair, bright blue eyes and a big smile. She looks like the type of grandma who whips up a batch of chocolate chip cookies just to see delighted looks on her grandchildren’s faces.

Students can’t help but smile back.

Doretta Lou Mayle is 70 years old and has worked in the dining halls since 1964. She has worked in every dining hall on campus, swiping ID cards from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekdays.

“I love it,” she says. “This is my whole life other than my children and grandchildren.”

She has three children, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. “This is my youngest one,” she says, beaming as she points to a small picture of a 7-year-old boy taped to her name tag.

Her great-grandchildren were born within a few months of each other. She says every time one was born, her boss would hang a “Congratulations, Granny!” sign in the entrance hall. The name stuck – students started calling her Granny.

Junior Hilary Sophrin is a regular at Kent dining hall. Sophrin says one day she looked at Granny’s name tag and thought the name was very appropriate.

“It’s fitting that she’s the one who greets us up front,” she says, “It’s almost like she’s a mother figure saying, ‘Enjoy your meal.’ ”

Granny says she thrives off human interaction and doesn’t plan on retiring soon. She says she was so depressed during the summer vacation that even her neighbors noticed. When she does retire she hopes to volunteer someplace.

Granny says one time when she was at the grocery store she bumped into a former student, who said, “I went to Delaware 20 years ago. I remember you from Rodney dining hall. Let me introduce you to my husband.”

She says she loves university students and has never had trouble with anyone being disrespectful.

“Maybe they feel I really do love people,” Granny says, “I do. It would be hard to do this job if you really didn’t have your heart in it. You can’t fake it for years and years.”

She was born in rural West Virginia in 1935. When her younger sister was born, her mother remained in the hospital for three months afterward. Her dad, struggling to make ends meet, was in Michigan, where he had a job.

She was 10 years old and for those few months was fully responsible for watching her baby sister. At a time when most girls were playing hopscotch and giggling about boys, Granny was changing dirty diapers.

Granny, who can strike up a conversation with strangers, says she was not always outgoing. She says she first met her husband Ronald when she was in grade school, at a time when she was a bit more timid.

“I couldn’t stand him,” Granny says, and then adds, as if she’s telling a secret, “He was a show-off.”

When Ronald was 14, she says, he left school and started construction work. At age 17 he left West Virginia and ventured to Michigan to find a job. He was not old enough to work legally, but he had a friend doctor his birth certificate. His employers either didn’t recognize the fake birth date, or they didn’t care.

“Then he came back and looked me up,” Granny says. “He had money, which no one else had at that time.”

Granny says she doesn’t remember much of their courtship. It’s all a bit hazy at this point, she says, plus dating wasn’t a big deal back then. She married Ronald in 1952 at age 16. She had her first child at 17 and her second at 18.

“I would not recommend that for everybody,” she says. “For me, it was the natural thing to do.”

Granny has lived with her family in Newark since 1957. She says she’s excited about going to Disney World with the whole clan for six days this Christmas.

“We’ve been so busy raising kids, we’ve never gotten to do anything,” she says.

By Stefanie Gordon

Ever hear the one about the rowdy frat boy who made a killing on the stock market and left it all to become a rabbi?

Rabbi Eliezer Sneiderman became campus rabbi in a very unconventional way. He grew up in a mostly non-observant household.

“I wasn’t religious,” Sneiderman said. “My dad was in the military and got transferred every 18 months, so we just went to whatever synagogue was nearby where we moved.”

For high school, Sneiderman attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts, an Episcopalian boarding school. He later attended the University of Pennsylvania for his undergrad career.

While at Penn, Sneiderman rushed ZBT, a historically Jewish fraternity.

His younger sister, Hayley, said Sneiderman was very social.

“He was a big party animal, a typical frat rat,” Hayley said. “He used to call me for advice on women all the time, like ‘Should I call? Should I not call? How many days do I need to wait?’ ”

Hayley said there was one memorable moment of Sneiderman’s wild days.

“One time in college, he went to a dance dressed in a full gorilla suit, just to be funny,” she said.

Sneiderman first explored his Jewish identity while in college. One summer, he attended the Ivy League Torah Study Program, a paid fellowship in the Catskills, where students attended daily classes taught by rabbis on all types of Jewish study.

“When I was there, I decided to become totally religious,” Sneiderman said. “But when I came back home, I let a lot of it go.”

However, Sneiderman said he still retained some aspects of his Judaism, such as eating kosher food and observing the Sabbath by not working on Saturdays.

Chabad Rabbi Shraga Sherman said he and Sneiderman became more observant in college.

“We use to see each other Friday nights at the Chabad house,” Sherman said. “For him, the road to becoming more observant was an intellectual one. He’s a deep thinker, and a lot of his decisions in life are very thought out.”

In his last month at Penn, Sneiderman, a Non-Western Intellectual History major, asked his guidance counselor what jobs did not require working on Saturdays.

Sneiderman was told to look at jobs in finance, but they had all been taken by students at the Wharton School months ago.  Suddenly, he heard about a job opening, and went to a few meetings to learn more about it.

“At the first meeting they told me what the starting salary was,” he said. “I decided then and there it was what I had always wanted to do with my life. I became a market maker on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, one of those guys in the bright, colored jackets from Trading Places who scream and yell a lot.”

Sneiderman taught himself everything he needed to know through a book and an           instructional video. At his next interview, he was offered a job, and within three months he bought his own seat on the exchange. He was 22.

Business was going well until a stock market crash in 1987. Sneiderman made about ten years of income in one afternoon, and then watched it disappear overnight. He said his firm lost fifty million dollars in assets.

“One guy that worked for us lost everything,” he said. “He ripped his computer out of the wall and threw it out the window, and then had to be sedated and taken away,”

While the group waited to get refinanced, Sneiderman took a short trip to Miami, and then decided to go to a yeshiva, a place of Jewish study, in Morristown, NJ. He studied for a week, but left after hearing that his job was once again available.

“I was making money again, but it wasn’t as good and there was more stress,” he said. “I also felt bad because no one had really missed me while I was gone. I was well liked and popular, but I disappeared and no one cared.”

A rabbi friend recommended Sneiderman go back to study at a yeshiva, so he returned to Morristown for a year.

“I was very driven and studying about 16 hours a day,” Sneiderman said. “I would race the other students to see who could eat the fastest and get back to studying. There was competition to see who could study the most, sleep the least, and stay the latest.”

Sneiderman finished the program, went to Israel for four months, and then came back to begin a rabbinical ordination program. While in Israel, he met a woman named Roni Sara.

Roni Sara said she met Eliezer through a woman who knew them both from the Ivy League Torah Study Program.

“We dated six times, and on the seventh date he proposed,” Roni Sara said.  In the religious world you’re not dating to do something new and romantic on every date. You’re dating to see if you two are compatible to get married. You talk about practical issues, like where you want to live.”

Sneiderman then finished the ordination program. He was later invited to visit the university campus, as the university was in need of a full-time rabbi. Sneiderman accepted the position, and he and his family moved to Newark in May of 1992.

Junior Rebecca Chabrow, lead intern for the Jewish Heritage Program, said Sneiderman is a unique rabbi.

“Rabbi Sneiderman makes people want to be involved in religious things,” Chabrow said. “He’s very different from other rabbi’s in that you can just hang out with him.”

From toga parties to torah, Sneiderman has come a long way to become a religious leader at the university.

By Maria Michelli

Chains clang and metal doors slam in the Cecil County Detention Center. Inmates chat and create a disturbance. Sounds normal, except the prisoners are long gone, and the building was converted to a retirement center in 1985.

In the new jail, on Landing Lane in Elkton, Md., prisoners are held down by “phantom Indians” until the sun comes up. The Native American burial ground underneath the prison was not respected.

By People’s Plaza, in the Turnquist housing development in Cecil County, heavy footsteps are heard on carpeted floors. Cabinets and refrigerator doors are left open, and lights flicker. The neighborhood was built on top of the wreckage of 81 passengers, whose plane was struck by lightening in December 1963.

Ed Okonowicz, author, storyteller, and University of Delaware professor, told these and other ghost stories at Historic Elk Landing, in Elkton, Md., on September 30. In this program, “Spooky Ghost Tales of Cecil County and Maryland,” Okonowicz entertained audiences with his unique brand of ghost stories, based on factual events and interviews in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Elk Landing has its own share of spirits, including the ghosts of former owner, Mary Hollingsworth, and a young soldier who put out his cigarette on some ammunition. These days, according to Okonowicz, Mary walks through the walls of the Hollingsworth property, while the twelve-year-old boy floats across the Elk River, regretting his choice to smoke against his mother’s wishes.

Okonowicz has been telling ghost stories since 1993, when the Delaware native met his first storyteller. He started out in public relations for the university, but when he found it wasn’t creative enough for him, he moved to freelance feature writing for newspapers and magazines.

At the time, Okonowicz knew nothing about storytellers and he was uninterested when he was assigned an article on one. However, once he began talking to her he was hooked.

“I stayed for three hours and talked to this woman,” he says. “Then I took a graduate storytelling course, and I decided to start doing that.”

Storytelling has become a career for Okonowicz, who says it is incorporated in his teaching and writing.

“That accidental meeting with that woman changed my life,” Okonowicz says. “The storytelling helps me deliver the stories that I write in the books, but it also feeds more stories. It helps in the classroom to create a nice mix. It’s an nice juggling act, they all relate and feed off of each other.”

Okonowicz develops his programs by matching a time period with the geographical location and regional history of the site. The programs change as new stories are discovered and developed. He says each location has its own legends, but some stories evolve based on audience reactions and children’s comments.

Okonowicz creates cemetery tours and ghost walks at other historic sights in order to draw interest to the history.

“Sometimes people will call you in and say we have this historic plantation, can you develop a ghost tour?” he says. “The ghosts serve to entice people to learn about the history. People come to a campfire to be scared, but it’s a trick. They end up finding out all this neat stuff and they want to learn about it.”

Okonowicz says although some sites look down on using ghosts to attract visitors, he feels his tours are a great way to raise money and share the history of a particular site. However, he says if his programs were advertised as historical, people wouldn’t come.

“Ghost history, they come for, but you give them the history while you’re doing it,” he says. “People like that stuff, and you’ve got to get them in the door. Folks will walk away with a good dose of history that they normally wouldn’t be exposed to.”

Communications professor and historian Mike Dixon provides the history half of many of Okonowicz’s programs.

“He’s the historian, and I’m the ghost guy,” Okonowicz says.

Dixon has been on the Board of Directors of Elk Landing since Elkton purchased the property from Hollingsworth descendants in 1999. Dixon says he met Okonowicz while taking one of his tours, and since then, the pair has been creating programs together.

“I went on one of Ed’s walks at Fort Delaware and I saw it as a great opportunity and a way to make history more fun,” Dixon says. “The way people want to get their history has changed over the years. I have definitely borrowed from Ed as a storyteller.”

Elk Landing Director of Programming and Events Bruce Leith says although he has yet to see any spirits in the house, he still enjoys the ghost walk.

“It’s a great fundraiser for the place,” Leith says. “It brings attention to Elk Landing and draws people to our other events.”

For Okonowicz, storytelling has created a career in books. In 1994, he started his own publishing company with his wife, Kathleen, called Myst and Lace.

Since, he has been voted “Best Local Book Author” in 2005 by Delaware Today, and published 26 titles, mixing history with mystery. His books include the nine volume series, “Spirits Between the Bays,” “Terrifying Tales of the Beaches and Bays,” “Possessed Possessions,” the “DelMarVa Murder Mystery Series,” and multiple volumes about historical ghosts, lighthouses, and local folklore.

Okonowicz says he enjoys his job because it keeps him out of the ordinary.

“I get to go everywhere from restaurants and inns, to cemeteries and plantations,” he says. “It’s fun, as opposed to a classroom or a library.”

Is he excited for the ghost walk?

“This is my life,” he says.

By Kaitlin DeRoy