Portland

The University of Portland Magazine

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Valentine’s Day Stories

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#1 – Christine Kincaid Smith

Christine Kincaid SmithAugust 1985 – Freshman Orientation Dance. I was a freshman and knew no one at school but a few girls that were on my floor at Mehling Hall. At one point during the dance, a handsome young man came up to me and asked me to dance. He said “My name is Chris and so is yours!” (I was shocked, but didn’t realize that he had asked someone else who had danced with me what my name was) These were the first words I ever heard him speak, and I was in love at first sight. I thought he looked like Tom Cruise, and he was a real gentleman. I didn’t talk to him again that night, but during the next week, I found out where he lived (Shipstad Hall), and that he was in ROTC and went over to meet up with him again after finding out that one of my hall friends had started dating his room mate. I gave him a hand-made cassette tape of my favorite R.E.M. songs, and he really loved it. Our first date was to the Oregon Symphony who came to play a concert at the Chiles Center. Our relationship continued, and I practically wore a path back and forth from Mehling to Shipstad to see my favorite ROTC cadet as much as I could. I had to get through my last year of nursing school without him as he had to leave to join the Air Force and enter Navigator training. It was a long year, but we made it through. We were married four years after we met. Our 30 years together have been full of ups and downs, military deployments to Desert Storm and other overseas locations for months at a time, and nine military moves from Maine to California, and points in between. We have four children and have settled in the Dayton, Ohio area. I know that the Lord had our relationship all set up before we ever entered college. I had always wanted to marry a man in uniform, and I got my wish. Praise God for Christopher Smith (1988) and the love that he has for me, and I for him. He is truly a blessing to me, and I wouldn’t want to spend life with anyone else. Thank you to the University of Portland for being such a big part in bringing us together. By the way, I still have that cassette tape.

 

#2 – Kelly Brockney Reynolds

Reynolds#TBVD Throw back Valentine’s Day! Chris Reynolds and I met on Valentine’s Day, 1998 in Kenna Hall. I was supposed to go out on a date that night, but the guy was late. I wasn’t willing to wait around so I went out to coffee with my friends. Afterward, we were visiting in the hallway and a friend from Biology walked up with one of my neighbors and this other happy and handsome fella. He introduced himself as “Bob,” but I knew right away he was teasing me. We spent the next few hours laughing and getting to know each other. He spent much of the time delivering some really cheesy one-liners…I gave him my number, but really never expected him to call. The next day, dripping with sweat from a run, I answered a knock on my door. It was “Bob,” and he said, “I had to come over to make sure I wasn’t dreaming that I met the most beautiful woman in the world last night.” I laughed and agreed to go out with him. We have been together ever since. We have been happily married 13 years and have two wonderful future Pilots! It feels like we’ve already had a lifetime full of wonderful adventures together and it all started at UP!

 

#3 – Aimee Becker Rolin

Aimee Becker RollinKris Rolin & I met the very FIRST weekend of our freshman year, 1997. He walked off the elevator in my dorm, Mehling Hall (was meeting up w/ a mutual friend) and it was love at first sight. We started dating almost immediately and I was so sure he was “the one” that by the time Fall Break rolled around, I had already called my mom and told her I had met the man I was going to marry- but not to worry, “I will finish college first!” Well my mom was tragically killed in a car accident while I was home visiting my family over Fall Break. I returned to school just one week later to finish what I started- as promised. Kris was by my side, every step of the way, supporting me as I worked to finish the dream my mom & I had shared … despite the very real struggle of grieving over the loss of my mom.

Ironically, Kris wasn’t even supposed to go to UP- he had planned to run for the Univ of WA- however that plan changed when the coach was fired & Kris was recruited by UP’s head XC coach, Rob Conner- when Kris won the WA state track 2 mile race his senior year of high school. Kris ran as a scholarship athlete for UP’s track & cross country teams the entire time he attended UP. I guess we have Coach Conner to thank for us meeting?! Skip ahead 17 years and here we are, married for 12 years!! We have 3 beautiful children- 4 year old Lucas, 2 year old Caroline & 4 month old Samuel. We live in California but Portland (UP especially) will always hold a special place in our hearts for that’s where our story began.

 

#4 – Alexandra Westover

AlexLate Fall of 2002, I stopped by The Cove during a late evening Theology class with a girlfriend who was in University Singers with me. As we stood in line, she introduced me to a guy who happened to be in front of us in line. Tony and Jen had gone to Salzburg together, and I had just gotten back from my year abroad there. There was a spark, even just in our casual “nice to meet you”. We met again a week or so later at the infamous ” Salzburg Keg-off”, where my group obliterated his in the consuming of our keg (despite his group’s best attempts to rig the contest in their favor). We talked that night, amid our beloved Salzburgers, and met again later that week at the UP/ Gonzaga game (UP lost…do I need to remember that?) where he asked me out for the first time. We had our first date at the Brasserie and talked for hours. Nearly 2 years later, he proposed to me following an elaborate city-wide scavenger hunt that led me through all our favorite shared places. He had one of his friends at each spot, to hand me my next clue (very dedicated friends, considering it was 8am on a Saturday). I was given a final clue, which led me to the T-Room…and then I was mad. I thought to myself, “If he proposes to me at the T-Room….I’m saying ‘no’!!” But, lo and behold, there was his friend Jesse, waiting to hand me my last clue. That clue led me to the Bluff, where Tony had set up a white tent with a table covered in a huge bouquet of white flowers. He handed me my final “clue”, which was a proposal. He got down on one knee and asked if I would marry him, right there on campus, by the statue of Lewis and Clark and their guide, overlooking Portland. We married a year later, at my home parish Saint Mary’s Eugene. We are celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary this September, along with our three beautiful children. Every time we return to the Bluff, it’s like revisiting the start of our love story.

 

#5 – Katherine Lilly

Lilly1My husband, Max Lilly, and I met in high school and started dating the summer before our Junior year. Although we are high school sweethearts, our years at UP were more formative and influential than any of the others. On September 7, 2012, Max was asked to emcee the half time show at the UP Women’s soccer game against Notre Dame– the biggest game of the season. All of our friends and family came to watch the game. Even though I was reluctant, I finally agreed to take photographs of the event for the Air Force and Army ROTC programs. Little did I know, I would be getting a lot more attention than I thought.

Lilly2At the end of the show, Max asked me to meet him in the middle of the field. He proceeded to tell the story of the moment he knew he wanted to be with me for the rest of his life. Eventually, he got down on one knee and proposed to me in front of thousands of spectators. We got married in May of 2013, and we now live happily in Hawaii. UP will always have a special place in our hearts.

 

Lilly3

THE NEW OLD LIBRARY

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Photographs by Jose Velazco and Jeff Kennel.

Inside the University’s utterly amazingly renovated Clark Library, which reopens this fall after many months of reinvention and reimagination.

  • Clark Library

It took more than a year. It entailed the entire staff and most of the contents of the library moving to various locations on campus. It cost more than 12 million dollars, for which the University community is wildly grateful to hundreds of Campaign donors, among them alumni, regents, foundations, corporations, and many friends of clearly shining intellect. It allows glorious light into a building that could charitably have been called shadowy inside. It turns the library to face the busy quad rather than a narrow sidewalk. It boasts new Douglas fir ceilings, apt and suitable here in the fir forest. It has new display space for the University’s copy of the rare Saint John’s Bible, and the musical scores that composer Aaron Copland gave us, and the vast collection of Northwest literature left by the beloved Father Art Schoenfeldt, C.S.C., at his death. There’s a beyond-cool digital lab for audio, video, photography, and design projects. There’s a classroom, bless its heart. There’s a fireplace lounge, bless Rich Baek’s generosity. There’s a study room named for University benefactor Lee Brenneisen, the bestread person we have ever met. There’s a study room named for Julia and Dan Danielson, which is apt because Dan’s firm Soderstrom Architects rebuilt the library not to mention ten other buildings on campus over the last twenty years, bless their hearts for reimagining the entire Bluff. There’s a whole new energy conservation system which will save the University untold dollars.

It is the herculean effort that completely renovated the Clark Library, which we can say, with admiration and something like awe, is the University’s newest educational space. More than fifty years after it was first built it is born again, dreamed anew. Come visit if you have a chance.

The Best Professor in the State

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By Brian Doyle

Becky Houck

Died four years ago, just about when you are reading this. She was a biology professor here. She had the coolest smile you ever saw, one of those smiles where when it starts it can’t stop and it lights up her whole face and then everybody else’s face lights up for about a mile around. It was one of those smiles that was nuclear like a star. It was one of those smiles that when it really got going you thought you might get sunburned. Her hair leapt up in aureoles and frazzles and you could tell it was Becky from all the way across the quad if the light was right. She had once won an award as the best university professor in the state of Oregon and if I saw her across the quad walking briskly I would happily shout O my god is that the best professor in the state of Oregon? and she would blush quick as a wink because of course she did not think she was the best professor in the state, although she was, and everyone else in the state knew it, even people with egos so big they have to cart them around in wheelbarrows. After she blushed she would smile that tremendous smile and everyone else on the quad would smile also, a remarkable thing. It always seemed to me that after she smiled there were more swallows and damselflies in the air than there had been before she smiled, but I could never prove that.

As a child she craved the ocean and she became a marine biologist. One of her study projects was an octopus who spit at her every time she removed the lid of his tank; she had once accidentally pinched his tentacle and he never forgot or forgave. Not so many biologists can say they have been so thoroughly hated by an octopus, as she said. She also grew fascinated by embryology and the study of bats and antipodean fauna and she was so brilliant that she ended up teaching university classes in all of those subjects. She taught in classrooms and in her office and on the quad and on ships and while walking through the desert. Among her scholarly feats was identifying a new species of octopus and discovering that many bats are left-handed but her greatest feat as a professor was identifying the loneliness of freshmen and their despair at being far from home and losing their high school sweetheart and failing their first test and being afraid they were not cool enough to make new friends. She made the university create a whole thorough attentive huge project to care for these frightened children, and that was the best thing I ever did as a professor, she said, and she was right.

How did you do that? I asked her once, fascinated, for I have studied university administrations for thirty years, and they are vast creatures who move toward new ideas with the alacrity and eagerness of telephone poles. I laid out all the facts, she said, and then I kept talking about all these children weeping alone in their rooms, a remark I never forgot.

She was small in stature. She wore loose clothing that did not fit her form. She did not command the room with her beauty. She knew this and did not care a fig about it and laughed about it as she laughed about most things that we value that are not valuable. She knew children were valuable, and life, and laughter, and kindness applied like water to those who thirst. She knew who she was and did not care what the world thought. She knew her work and she did it with every iota of energy and creativity she possessed and in those sweet gifts she was rich beyond measure. She was blunt and glorious and her amused generous soul poured out of her face and eyes like she was lit from inside. She was more beautiful a being than I can ever find words for and by god I have tried. I will keep trying as long as I have fingers and a full heart. Rest in peace, Becky Houck. Rest in peace, my friend.

PAINTING SALZBURG

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Paintings by Fr. Mark Ghyselinck

As the University begins the Salzburg Program’s golden anniversary year celebration, we set a fine painter loose in the city to catch what he liked of landscape and light.

HIS HOLINESS

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Photos by Steve Hambuchen

Back for his second visit to The Bluff in ten years in May, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama enraptured his audiences, chatted at length about pollution and education with University president Father Bill Beauchamp, cheerfully wore a Pilots cap all day, and said happily I love this college! I love the color purple!

Dalai Lama at the University of Portland
Dalai Lama at the University of Portland

THE BEAUTIFUL GAME

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By Dennis O’Meara

The University’s most successful and renowned sport wasn’t actually born when Clive Charles arrived, grinning and cracking wise, in 1986. A look at a colorful 109 years of soccer on The Bluff.

Why Not Us?

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By Brian Doyle

The long and riveting road of the University’s dean of engineering.

Face to Face

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By Brian Doyle

On September 27, 2013, University of Portland president Fr. Bill Beauchamp announced that he will retire at the end of the 2013-14 academic year. Fr. Bill’s dedicated leadership has steered the University over this past decade, and UP has risen to remarkable heights during his tenure, many of which you can read about here.

But we thought it would be fun to look back to 2003, when Fr. Bill was first named president.

In this piece by Brian Doyle from the Fall 2003 issue of Portland Magazine, Fr. Bill shares some of his own personal story and discusses what he hoped to accomplish during his tenure at the helm.

* * *

Notes on the character and history and memories and convictions of the University’s new president, Father Bill Beauchamp.

He grew up under oaks and elms and maples. He played stoopball in the street from dawn to dusk with Butch and Larry and Fred and George and Billy. He went to Saint James School and at lunch he’d run to the family grocery store for soup or a sandwich and then run back to Saint James. His sister went to Saint James and his mom went to Saint James and his dad went to Saint James and his grandparents were the first parishioners at Saint James when the church building was still a chicken coop and Ferndale was pretty much still farms even though it bordered the city of Detroit.

“That was just after my paternal grandfather had come down to America from French Canada,” says Bill Beauchamp. “He started the first grocery store in town, Beauchamp’s Market. My maternal grandfather was an  organ and piano player who played in theaters during silent movies, but when the talkies came in he never played  again, not even in church, not once. It was the oddest thing. He started working for the city, and when he did  there were crosses burned in their yard.Fr. Bill

“My mom and dad and sister and I lived in a little house near Eight Mile Road. I remember listening to the Lone  Ranger and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and The Green Hornet on the radio, and being an altar boy, and walking  the golf course where my cousins and I caddied. I even remember the night we got our first television set. I was  eight years old, and I remember it was a Wednesday in Lent, because we went to church instead of watching  television.

“I was a straight arrow as a kid. I loved sports but I wasn’t much of an athlete. You know how a kid knows inside  himself whether he’s a good athlete or not? I knew I wasn’t so good. I was the romantic lead in the senior play,  though – Jenny Kissed Me, by Jean Kerr – and I won the religion medal, and I was the salutatorian, and like every  Catholic teenage boy in America in 1958 I thought about the seminary, and I interviewed for it, and took a test  and all, but I just didn’t feel any real feeling for it then. I just wanted to be a typical guy, you know – get married and have kids and have a job and be independent.

“I wanted to go to Notre Dame for college, but we just couldn’t afford it. I remember having one of those real honest conversations with my dad about that. So I went to the University of Detroit, which was a big commuter school in 1960. Started as a chemical engineering major but I was awful at chemistry, so I switched into accounting, partly because I took an aptitude test right about then which told me I had empathy for people, a sharp sense for business, and a talent for pastoral matters – predictions which fascinate me now, looking back at a career as priest and accountant and attorney.

“I worked all through college, for a direct mail firm and a visiting nurses association and for an engineering firm and as comptroller of the student council, and I did pretty well, finished first in the business school, and then I started in to work right after graduation, as a financial analyst for Burroughs. This is 1965 now and I had registered for the draft but I was never called up – I suspect because my local draft board had so many enlistees that they never dipped into the student deferment pool.

“In 1966 I got an offer to teach accounting and business law at Alma College, right in the middle of Michigan. Well, I was 24 years old and still living with my parents, so I took it, and I did that for three years, and then worked in the admission office for three more years, and I made dear friends there, and dated some lovely women in Alma – let’s see, Linda, Sharon, Shirley, you don’t need to know more – but I was still restless. It was time to move on, so I applied to law school. This time I did get into Notre Dame, and I started in 1972.

“I needed a job, though, and the only one I could find was to be an RA in Grace Hall. I’d never set foot on the campus, never lived in a dorm, and I was thirty years old – not your usual RA profile. But I figured I could do anything for three years, and that turned out to be my first step toward Holy Cross. I owe my vocation to that job. I met really generous and fascinating priests – men like Don McNeil and Tom McNally and Claude Pomerleau and the late Mike McCafferty. I became aware of priests who were also scholars and teachers and activists and counselors. I began to think it might be possible to be a lawyer and a priest, which intrigued me.

“But I figured maybe this was all just the aura of Notre Dame, so when I graduated I figured I had to get away. I went back to Alma, this time as a lawyer with my friend Bill Goggin, and I was a lawyer for three years. Then I got an offer from a firm in Cincinnati, and I was all ready to take it, but one day I faced the fact that I had never resolved that nagging thought about being a Holy Cross priest.

“So I figured I’d face it, and I went to see the vocation director, a great guy named Father Joe Carey.

“’I’m not holy and I don’t pray,’ I told him.

“’Then you’ll be a great priest,’ he quipped.

“Well, I took the application home and thought on it for two months and finally I filled it in and I was accepted as a candidate. My mom and dad drove me to the seminary. My dad didn’t say anything and all my mom said was if I was going to quit the order, at least I should leave before ordination.

“Dry Irish sense of humor, my mom.

“In seminary I was out of synch with the other guys – I was 35 years old by then, and used to being on my own. But I was calmer too, maybe. I didn’t have to answer the interior questions they did, about marriage and children and independence.

“Well, I didn’t quit, and I spent one summer here at the University of Portland, working downtown with alcoholics at the DePaul Center and living on campus. I was ordained in 1982, and started teaching law at Notre Dame, and working as assistant to the executive vice president, Father Ned Joyce. I learned a lot in those years – primarily that I was wrong to think that being a priest fit into being a lawyer. It had to be the other way around for me – being a priest first and everything else second. That took a while for me to get straight, and by then it was 1987, and suddenly Father Monk Malloy was named president of Notre Dame and I was named executive vice president.

“That was June first, I remember that, because a hundred days later the police found my parents.”

Ed and Marion Beauchamp were murdered in their little house near Eight Mile Road in September of 1987. The man convicted of their murders was sentenced to prison for the rest of his days. Bill Beauchamp celebrated the funeral Mass for his mother and his father and then he presided at their burial and then he went back to work.

“I threw myself into work,” he says. “I did. It took me years and years to arrive at a peace. First I blocked it out and then I had a crisis of the soul. Did I believe what I preached or not? Did I believe such evil could exist in a world filled with holiness? And I found that I did believe. I came face to face with my faith. I believe in God’s grace and mercy. My parents are at peace. They are together. They are with God. We here are left to deal with it and we grapple the best we can. There is evil in the world that God made. I don’t understand why. Neither do you. No one does. But because we don’t understand it doesn’t mean we can’t battle it.”

Thirteen more years as vice president and professor at Notre Dame, thirteen years of running capital campaigns (more than a billion dollars raised, and Notre Dame’s endowment went from $400 million to $3.2 billion during Beauchamp’s tenure), and thousands of days and nights overseeing athletics and events and construction and maintenance and investments and legal affairs and finances, “everything except academics and student affairs,” and when the century turned Bill Beauchamp was worn and weary, and so when changes in Notre Dame’s administration needed to be made that year, he stopped being everything except a priest.

“I took a semester off,” he says. “I read a lot. I was appointed steward of the Indiana Province of Holy Cross. I got ready to teach law again, I had my class all lined up, I was eager, and then I went for a walk with David…”

Father David Tyson, that would be, then president of the University of Portland, now superior of the Indiana Province, a verrry persuasive man, who invited Beauchamp out west, and Tyson knew he’d hooked his man when Beauchamp hesitated a moment, there by the bookstore at Notre Dame, and then asked Tyson:

“Could I live in a residence hall?”

He could: he moved into Corrado Hall in the summer of 2002, when he started as the University’s senior vice president. In 2003 he became a finalist for president. In 2004, at age 61, he became the University’s 19th president (and moved out of Corrado into the president’s house in north campus). And what does the lad from Saint James School dream for the Catholic university he now leads?

“We are on the road to greatness,” he says. “We are. There’s not a lot that needs fixing. We are focused. But we need a lot more money. We need a lot more endowment. We need unassailable financial security. We are committed to faculty excellence, to our Catholic character, to a national athletic reputation, to creating an education of moral and civic and intellectual depth that will draw students from around the world. But to reach greatness we need much more support. We need a new recreational sports center, a new student center, new residence halls, a renovated library, a renovated engineering hall, a nursing center, more classroom space, more land, more money for faculty, and those are just the pressing needs.

“Can we do it? Yes. Will we? Let me put it this way: I believe in God and I believe in us.”