ALUMNI NEWS


In this department:

Alumni House: A reality at last!

A Message from the President of the Association of Emory Alumni

Dear Fellow Alumni,

Just over twelve years ago, the Blue Ribbon Alumni Study committee reported to the president of the University that among many other things, Emory needed an alumni house "at the earliest possible date." As is often the case with such committees, its vision ultimately met with life in the real world, and the Association of Emory Alumni (AEA) has continued to make do with its small, cramped quarters across North Decatur Road from Glenn Memorial Church. Despite the lack of adequate facilities, the AEA has progressed from an organization that was barely noticeable to an active and dynamic force in the Emory community.

I am now pleased to report that the problem of inadequate facilities is about to change. Perhaps as soon as Alumni Weekend in September, we will break ground on our new state-of-the-art alumni house. The Alumni House Committee has been meeting regularly since last fall. We have hired an architect, and we are well into the design phase.

The Alumni House will be located on Houston Mill Road just west of the Houston Mill House. The University has purchased the former Scholars Press building which, in much modified form, will make up a portion of one wing of the Alumni House.

The house will be built in the Tudor style, similar to the Lullwater Estate and many homes in Druid Hills. It will have approximately twenty-two thousand square feet, a large formal garden area that can be used for functions when the weather is good, and a two-level parking garage with more than one hundred parking spaces, most of which will be under the house.

Present plans call for the house to be L-shaped, with the former Scholars Press building forming most of one wing that will house the AEA and other alumni offices. The rest of the house will contain the reception area located at the angle of the L, a living room, a formal dining room, a board room, smaller meeting rooms, a library and archives, a lounge area, and a catering kitchen. There will also be a large Alumni Hall that can be opened up toward the formal garden for hosting functions for several hundred people. Throughout the Alumni House there will be places to display Emory memorabilia and places to honor recipients of the Emory Medal and the Pollard Turman Alumni Service Award.

Best of all, this house gives us a chance to honor some great men and women from Emory's past. It will be named the Miller-Ward House, for H. Prentice Miller '27C-'28G and Judson "Jake" Ward '33C-'36G, two men whose lifelong work, dedication, and love for Emory has touched thousands. Others will have significant rooms named in their honor.

The cost of the Alumni House will be approximately $6.5 million, with almost half the funding coming from alumni. The rest will come from other sources including the University and affinity program revenues. Although we are approaching our goal, we are not there yet, and we need additional help from alumni. A brochure further describing the house is enclosed in this issue, along with a response form. All contributions, large and small, will be put to good use.

See you at Alumni Weekend!

Cordially,

Doug Kniskern '68C-'74L
President of the Association of Emory Alumni


The Arts at Emory

Alumni return for Assembly

More than one hundred and eighty alumni participated in the Association of Emory Alumni's Seventeenth Assembly, "The Campus as Canvas: The Arts at Emory," March 19-21. Activities included a panel titled "The Fine Art of Collecting" that culminated with a tour of the Michael C. Carlos Museum; a discussion of Emory's campus master plan; an opportunity to experience student arts classes in dance, theater, and music; and performances by student a cappella groups The Gathering, Aural Pleasure, and No Strings Attached.

"I heard many of our alumni delegates say this was the best Assembly program yet, and I would agree with them," said Bob Carpenter, executive director of the Association of Emory Alumni. "Since so much of what we've accomplished in the teaching of the arts at Emory has happened fairly recently, there was a real sense of discovery and excitement. Add the Turman Alumni Service Awards dinner and the presentation of the campus master plan and it was a program I wish we could share with all alumni."

What follows are highlights of the Seventeenth Assembly.

What is it about us that responds to a well-crafted vase sprouting a bouquet of jonquils? A phrase you've heard from a chamber group that recurs and haunts you, not only in the hours after, but years after, when you're grieving--or when you're ecstatic? A piece of poetry that gives you the language to say what you've always wanted to say? The sheer act of beholding in a culture of distraction and forgetfulness and ugliness--that's the secret. Works of art can teach us, can reveal to us something about our inner powers of intuition, about beauty, about the root of our vital energies. The loving of art in everyday life is like breathing. It is essential for our humanity."

--Don E. Saliers, Franklin N. Parker Professor of Theology and Worship, from the keynote address of the Seventeenth Assembly, "The Love of Art in Everyday Life"

Photo by Kay Hinton

 

Turman Alumni Service Awards

More than two hundred fifty people attended a dinner in the Emory Conference Center Hotel honoring recipients of the first J. Pollard Turman Alumni Service Awards. Turman '34C-'35L, who died in 1990, was recognized by civic, industrial, business, and philanthropic organizations as an inspiration and role model. Turman served as president and chairman of the board of J.M. Tull Industries and was instrumental in the formation of the Tull Charitable Foundation, an agency that supports colleges, universities, hospitals, and schools throughout Atlanta. At Emory, Turman served on the Board of Trustees and was vice president for development from 1976 to 1978. He was inducted into the Emory Sports Hall of Fame in 1989.

Recognizing Emory alumni who have demonstrated exceptional volunteer leadership in many alumni-related activities, the first J. Pollard Turman Alumni Service Awards were presented to Pamela Cheyenne Pryor '69C-'70G and William Marvin Hardy III '61Ox-'63C-'65L.

Since 1973, Pryor has worked for BellSouth and is currently the company's regional director for corporate and external affairs. She has served four terms on the Dean's Council of Emory College and has been active in the Caucus of Emory's Black Alumni and the Emory Board of Visitors. Pryor has also served on the boards of many non-profit organizations, including the Academy Theatre and the Atlanta Urban League.

Hardy, who lives in Orlando, has been an attorney with the law firm of Gurney and Handley since 1970. He served as president of the Emory Club of Orlando, vice president of the Association of Emory Alumni, class representative at the University's Sesquicentennial Convocation in 1986, and numerous terms on the Emory Law School Council. In addition to his service to Emory, Hardy has served on the executive board of the Central Florida Council of Boy Scouts of America and as a director and president of the Central Florida Chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.


H. ELIZABETH KING '67C

Helping kids cope with cancer

During the summer of 1992, H. Elizabeth King '67C was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her two children struggled to understand the disease and their mother's chemotherapy treatments. One day, King discovered that her eight-year-old son, Mitchell, had drawn a picture of a shark that he called Kemo Shark. In Mitchell's drawing, the giant fish was a kind of superhero that swam through his mom's system devouring cancer cells.

"He would use those drawings to talk to me about what was happening, to allay his fears of whether the cancer was going to come back," says King, a psychologist in private practice in Atlanta who served as chief psychologist in Emory's Department of Psychiatry from 1978 to 1981. "One of the things I did was to tell him that as soon as I finished treatment, we were going to draw a comic book for other children."

After her treatment was completed, King, her son, and an illustrator collaborated to produce a comic book about Kemo Shark. According to King, the comic is helpful because "children think in metaphors, and it gives them a metaphor of something that is terrible and frightening, so I think it allays their anxiety that way. We tried to make it educational and [explain] the mother's reactions to chemotherapy."

In 1994, King and her husband, Charles N. Center, founded KidsCope Inc., a nonprofit organization designed to create and disseminate materials for children whose parents have cancer. Ann Hazzard '76C, who works in private practice with King and is an associate professor in Emory's Department of Pediatrics, serves on KidsCope's board of directors and has been instrumental in its projects. The Kemo Shark comic was published in 1995, and since then KidsCope has distributed more than ten thousand copies.

After the comic was published, many of King's friends and colleagues encouraged her to write a book about her experiences with breast cancer. While King wanted to help families who were going through cancer, she did not want to write a book. Instead, she decided to produce a video. After getting together with several colleagues, she made plans to interview a number of mothers who had survived breast cancer and their children about what they had gone through.

The resulting half-hour video, "My Mom Has Breast Cancer: A Guide for Families," addresses issues such as how children react to the disease, how children cope, and how the disease disrupts families. King, who narrates the video and is interviewed with her own children, says making it was emotionally trying and achieving the right balance was a challenge.

"We learned in the process of doing the video how intensely emotional it was," explains King. "Several of the interviews I conducted, the film crew cried through the whole interview. When we first put it together without my narration, we invited twenty women who were either mothers, teachers, or professionals to view it and give us feedback, and it was too intense without the narration. So we put in the narration and tried to dilute it even more because the whole point is to get something that people can manage to look at and can get all the way through."

Since the video was released in 1997, KidsCope has distributed hundreds of copies in forty-eight states and five foreign countries. King says she has gotten positive feedback from mothers, psychologists, oncologists, and nurses. "[The response] has been absolutely tremendous, touching, and heart-rending," she says. "People write back and say it's wonderful, very helpful and useful."

King says KidsCope is hoping to get both the comic and the video translated into several foreign languages, to get the Blockbuster Video chain to stock the video as a free public service, and to get the Kemo Shark comic into public libraries. She admits there is a dearth of products designed to help the children of parents with cancer, and she hopes KidsCope's efforts inspire others to create new and different kinds of materials for these kids.

"People don't realize how great the need is," King says. "My feeling is that you can't have too many of these things."--J.D.T.

Photo by Sue Clites


Sports Hall of Fame Class of '98

On September 24, during Alumni Weekend, the Emory Sports Hall of Fame will induct its six-member class of 1998 and celebrate its tenth anniversary. The honorees are track and field All American Tracey Colvin Allen '89C; soccer All American Scott Jeffrey Cahoon '91C; swim team captain Peter S. Elmore '84Ox-'86C, who swam the English Channel in 1988; five-time tennis All American Todd Patrick Kennedy '92B; national champion and All-American swimmer Rachel LeClair '90C; and the late Carl Lucene Anderson 1898C, who was captain of Emory's and the South's first champion basketball team. For more information, call 404-727-6479.


Hunter-Gault to speak at Alumni Weekend

Charlayne Hunter-Gault, an Emmy and Peabody award-winning national correspondent for PBS's "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," will be the featured speaker for Alumni Weekend 1998. Hunter-Gault, an Emory parent, will speak during the Emory Medal ceremony on September 26 at 11 a.m. in Glenn Memorial Church.

Also featured during Alumni Weekend will be the Emory Sports Hall of Fame banquet on September 24; reunions for classes ending in "3" or "8" for Emory College, undergraduate business, MBA, School of Nursing, School of Public Health, and School of Medicine; tours of the new library addition and Druid Hills; and Lullwater Day on September 27.

For more information on any of these events, please call the Association of Emory Alumni at 404-727-6400, or check our Web site.


Return to Summer 1998 contents page

Return to Emory Magazine home page

Return to Emory University homepage