People/Legends 2

Former archivist assistant and long-time University employee, Martha Wachsmuth, passed away on the morning of May 4, 2015 at 94 years of age.   The University Archives and Museum mourn her passing while remembering Martha for her faithful service to the University for 41 years, retiring in September 2012 at the age of 91!

Martha came to the University in 1971 to serve as administrative and research assistant to history professor Rev. Barry Hagan, C.S.C. who suffered from diminishing eyesight.   Martha patiently handled Fr. Hagan’s correspondence, typed his class assignments and tests, and delivered his research papers at history conferences.  After 23 years in the History department, Martha moved with Fr. Hagan to the University Archives and began the mammoth task of organizing and recording University history.  Upon Fr. Hagan’s retirement in 1999, Rev. Robert Antonelli, C.S.C. took over the helm of the Archives.   Together, Fr. Bob and Martha worked through the piles of boxes and stacks continuing the work begun by Fr.  Hagan.  With only enough room to move a few steps here and there, Fr. Bob and Martha slowly transformed the Archives into an organized system using recent technology.  Many of the subject or category lists used by archives staff and researchers were compiled by Martha.   She spent hours and hours poring over old photographs with no identification while using yearbooks, Beacons, and other University publications to assign dates and names, much like a detective trying to a solve a mystery.   Martha’s long tenure at the University proved to be a valuable resource on more than one occasion because having been on the scene she was able to recall events and names.

People have described Martha as a “wonderful person and devoted beyond expectations”; “a woman of grace and pith and wit … prompt and smart, too”; “one of the sweetest people I’ve ever known”; “she had a wonderfully resonant voice when she answered the Archives telephone”.     Martha was a poet, sketch artist, avid mystery reader, and served as president of the UP Secretaries Association in 1976.

The Archives owe Martha a huge debt of thanks for everything she has done.  It has made our own work and that of those who use the Archives much easier.

Reverend Richard Berg, C.S.C. is a Portland native, attending Columbia Prep ’54 for high school, Notre Dame for seminary, and the University of Portland for a PhD in Psychology ’69.  The career circle coming full and fulfilled by serving as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1978-1991; and as emeritus professor since 1998.  Except that for Fr. Berg, Consecrated Life means that your horizons sometimes expand when you are not looking and without consideration of the neat lines of your career-planning.

From 1952 onward, Pilots have been involved in volunteerism and social outreach to the poor, outcast and helpless through Blanchet House in the Old Town area of central Portland.

In 1991 while he was still CAS Dean, Fr. Berg was asked by the Archbishop of Portland to administer the Downtown Chapel in Old Town.  A package deal for the Archbishop.  An opportunity for UP. Because through friendship, knowledge of the school, and administrative connections, the University created new student internships in Social Work and Nursing programs at the same time.  That is, Fr. Berg brought students right alongside him in direct collaboration working among the lost, sick, forgotten in Portland.  The UP Mission elements of Teaching and Learning operating in direct contact with the mission practice of Service and Leadership.

On June 18, 2008 Mary Sue Richen and Fr. Richard Berg received an achievement award from the Coordinating Committee to End Homelessness.  The award was presented by Portland’s mayor Tom Potter and Multnomah County Commissioner Ted Wheeler.  From the citation:

‘This brother-sister team has spent 20 years ministering to the frail and poor of downtown Portland.  Dick established the Macdonald Center with innovative financial and care models, including outreach to those isolated in residency hotels.  Mary Sue has been there since day one and has made overcoming social isolation one of the Center’s primary missions.  Dick’s vision and creativity are well complimented by Mary Sue’s gentleness and compassion.  Together they have made a lasting difference in the lives of the city’s most vulnerable residents.’

(The Macdonald Center was founded in 1978 by Maybelle Clark Macdonald; who together with her family, is a major benefactor of the Clark Family Library.)

Sources: The Beacon, February 22, 1990, p. 2; March 21, 1991, p. 4; October 10, 1991, p. 9; October 31, 1991, p. 7; November 18, 1993, p. 8.
(cf. Portland Magazine, Autumn 2008, p. 47)

For those in religious life, their life is not their own and they are often transported to areas or parts of the world where culture and language are not familiar.   Consider the journey of these religious sisters.  The Sisters of Mary of the Presentation were exiled from France in 1901 when an anticlerical government enacted legislation to weaken the influence of the Catholic Church in France.  Though just passing through, Rev. John A. Zahm, C.S.C., learned of the Sisters’ situation from the Holy Cross superior general in France, and Fr. Zahm offered the sisters employment at Holy Cross institutions in the United States, including the University of Portland.

Thus Fr.  Zahm, arranged the Sisters’ travel and personally met the first contingent of Presentation Sisters in New York in June 1903.  Then from New York to Notre Dame.  Three sisters remained at Notre Dame while twelve traveled to Portland and the new University beginning there.   The sisters resided temporarily in West Hall until the construction of a Convent was complete.  The three-story convent building (with a porch) was semi-secluded, located in a grove of trees at a spot that today is green-lawn inside the Academic Quad — west of St. Mary’s and the Chapel of Christ the Teacher, north of the Commons.  The St. Mary’s Convent was meant to serve as a residence for the Sisters while also accommodating a small school for small boys (a plan which never materialized).  Instead, the children’s wing became the student infirmary.

The Sisters served the teachers and students through duties variously exercised in the kitchen, dining room, laundry, infirmary, and poultry yard.   Their wages in 1903: annual payment of only 300 francs, thus in American terms, about $58 a year, including room and board.  Jim Covert writes about the Sisters in A Point of Pride— “Various views have been recorded about their cooking.  Some claimed the meals were exceedingly frugal and the diet too frugal, but others took delight at their tables, especially praising the pastry”.    Brother David Martin, C.S.C., arriving at UP in 1928, recalled how “the waxed floor of their recreation room would always stay spick-and-span [because] they moved around in this room by skating along on small pieces of carpet when they needed to go from one part of the room to another. . . .  Despite their constant work they never seemed to get sick.  I asked them about this once or twice to which they responded that they didn’t have time to get sick.”

The Presentation Sisters (a rotating membership, renewed beyond the original twelve?) remained on the Bluff until 1940 when they were recalled by their religious community.

Sources:
Presentation Sisters in Holy Cross Apostolates 1903-1963 by Brother Franklin Cullen, C.S.C., p. 1-4

Rev. Barry Hagan, C.S.C. recollections

A genial and irrepressible Holy Cross priest, Fr. John Delaunay’s life had a tendency to spill-over into the lives of peers and students, and across borders, national and academic.  A consecrated religious and UP professor who was hard to sum up or contain.

Fr. Delaunay was born in Paris, educated at the Sorbonne, came to the United States as a refugee in 1903, and after studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. became a Holy Cross priest in 1909.  One of his first assignments, therefore (?), sent him to the mission territories that are now Bangladesh.  He arrived at UP to teach languages, moving thence to the Departments of Philosophy and Education, and in 1949 became Professor of Psychology — having had to found the Department of Psychology to achieve this goal.  The faculty and students of the Psychology Department immediately created a pioneer program in clinical psychology, the Child Guidance Center, to provide counseling services for the greater Portland area community.  At first housed on campus, the community services section evolved into an independent organization.  After a half-century of family counseling, this legacy of Fr. Delaunay closed in 2003.

Fr. Delaunay died in 1953.  His name survives in a building we never built, and hundreds of alumni lives.  In 2012, alumnus E. John Rumpakis ’54 endowed a Professorship in Hellenic Studies at UP, remembering Fr. Delaunay, who “believed in educating the whole man,” Rumpakis said.  “It still resounds in my mind.”  (UP Press Release, May 22, 2012).

Fr. Delaunay’s services to the University are legend; see the profile of the man in Portland Magazine, Winter 1998, pp. 14-19.  For a history of the Delaunay Institute, see The Beacon, 30 March 1973, p. 4; for a personal history and account of the Center’s closing, see also the note from Dr. Paul Myers, Director, University Health Center, in Portland Magazine, Summer 2003, p. 8; who quotes Fr. Delaunay as writing: “My life ambition is to make my psychology department the leading social work center in the Catholic West.  I am very hopeful that it shall do its share toward child delinquency prevention.  I shall have a special room for the direction of parents, since there are more problem parents than problem children . . .”

Pope Francis has dedicated 2015 as The Year of Consecrated Life.

Many meanings and associations flow from the term ‘Consecrated Life’, one of the first would be the thought of those men and women who pursue the vocation of religious life as nuns, brothers, monks, priests.  Another association is the way in which a person might consecrate or bless life by using the gift of our days as a blessing in life.

Consider this University of Portland legend. Rev. Arthur M. Schoenfeldt, C.S.C.

Born in Portland, “Padre” first ventured onto the Bluff as a student at Columbia Prep (’48).  He went on to become a Holy Cross priest serving in educational works, and returned to the University in 1978; for the next thirty years he served our community as pastoral resident, hall director, and counselor-at-large.   For all the fame of the Schoenfeldt Writers Series [named for his parents], Father Art’s true legacy at UP is his extraordinary grace as a counselor.  His oceanic patience, his gentle nature, his willingness to listen as long as necessary, his quiet wisdom, his shy playfulness, his remarkable generosity, his wry humor, his sweet selflessness made him a trusted and beloved counselor, advisor, and spiritual confidant to many, many  men, women, and children.  His University community, his Holy Cross brethren, and the thousands of people whose lives he touched with such wit and grace mourn the loss of such a sweet, kind, gentle man now at home in the hands of the Lord.

Memorial Mass program
11 January 2008