The EF-4 tornado crosses I-65 in this photo taken between Memphis and Henryville. Photo by Bryan Wood

The bus driver scurried 11 children from the bus into the brick middle school and high school, counting them as they ran from the bus, urging them with calls of “Hurry.” Thirty minutes earlier, school administrators sent the children home early in advance of what forecasters predicted as a brutal storm with a monster lurking inside, but the storm unleashed the monster before the driver could drop off all of the children. Inside the school, the telephone rang and a male voice warned of a tornado headed toward the school.

Renee Eckart, who describes herself as “basically afraid of the dark” but with one bucket list goal in life of seeing a tornado, ran outside. The Henryville Junior and Senior High School counselor looked southwest then north, seeing “the green that comes with tornadoes” in the sky. But she didn’t see the tornado until a man stepped out of the diner across the street and yelled, “There’s a tornado coming behind the school.” Eckart turned around to see a black wall approaching.

She sprinted back inside the school yelling to get the children into the nurse’s office and interior hallway. A glance back out a window showed debris swirling up in a circle as she helped move children away from exterior walls. She stretched herself over three children lying on the floor to shield them and began repeatedly saying “You’re safe. You’re fine. We’ve got you.”  Lights in the building flickered, sparked and then went dark. She turned to her faith and prayed aloud, “Dear God, please keep us safe,” before immediately thinking, “Oh no, I’m in a public school.” The roar became indescribable as it covered and moved through all. Every part of her body began to vibrate as 175 mph winds engulfed the school building, blowing it apart.

The tornado north of Palmyra. Photo by Simon Brewer of The Weather Channel.

Outside the school, winds scooted the empty bus across the school parking lot then lifted it and plunged it into the diner across the street. The winds lifted Eckart’s 2009 Dodge Journey from the south parking lot and flung it into the east parking lot, where it landed on its roof facing east. A green rubber ducky belonging to Eckart’s daughter plopped down next to the white sport utility vehicle.

Eckart, a ’97 Indiana State University graduate, listened as the roar moved away. In the following quiet, the small band of students and administrators stood covered in white drywall dust. They could smell the insulation that had fallen through the torn apart roof and walls. She could smell what she described as “burnt electric and gas.”

The EF-4 tornado that stretched almost half a mile wide stayed on the ground March 2 for 49 miles damaging homes and buildings in New Pekin, Marysville and Henryville. Thirteen people would die in Indiana that day.

Yellow caution tape fluttered in the wind as it circled a now-empty house with boarded windows. But how can emergency personnel encircle an almost 50-mile swath remodeled by temper-tantrum throwing Mother Nature? State police cars with flickering red and blue lights staked out not only the town of Henryville’s limits, but also the scene of destruction. Their presence proved an unnecessary reminder that all is not well in this Southeast Indiana town of almost 2,000 residents.

Debris lay piled in front of homes sporting the same blue-tarp roofs as their neighbors. Plywood covered windows. Orange spray paint spoke in code to emergency workers telling them of damage, a search completed and its findings. Electrical company workers erected new poles to once again run electricity from the transformer that another team worked to rebuild. Signs directed volunteers to hot meals or places to drop off donations.

The Henryville school bus thrown into the diner. ISU Photo/Tony Campbell

“This is just like a movie with the way the town looked with a school bus in the middle of a building, metal bent around light poles and the way things were tattered and scattered,” said Faith Fear, an ISU freshman dietetics major from Terre Haute.

A week after the tornado, a team of 15 volunteers with Indiana State’s Center for Community Engagement arrived in Henryville to aid in whatever way they could. An additional team and volunteers would arrive to sort, clean and help a family search for remnants of their lives.

“It’s always important work and it’s always meaningful work, but there’s just something a little more special when it’s here with fellow Hoosiers and neighbors,” said Nancy Rogers, associate vice president for community engagement and experiential learning. The Center for Community Engagement has sent teams to help in recovery from other disasters such as New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and Joplin, Mo., after a tornado hit that city. “We’re kind of old pros at helping out in this kind of situation.”

As rain pounded on the metal roof at the Country Lake Christian Retreat Center two miles from Henryville, Indiana State faculty, staff and students moved overstuffed chairs, end tables and foosball tables out of rooms to make way for donated boxes of stuffing, jars of peanut butter, bags of rice and cans of soup. That is what it takes: volunteers to prepare the way for volunteers who will be coming during the long recovery process.

“We’re helping with the logistical aspects of the recovery,” said Greg Bierly, director of the University Honors program.

Since that first week, two additional teams from ISU have traveled south to Henryville to give of their time.

“I decided to come today because this particular event was etched pretty dramatically on everyone’s consciousness over the past week,” Bierly said. “Viewing the devastation of the tornado, it’s clear that any sort of help will be useful.”

Three weeks later

“I thought I knew what I was getting into, but you didn’t know,” said Chris Sweeney, a freshman criminology major from Indianapolis.

In the van, chattering students fell into silence except for occasional gasps when they exited off of Interstate 65 and drove into Henryville. The destruction, he said, was beyond what pictures could show. While Sweeney traveled to Henryville to help in the clean up, he also went as news editor of the Indiana Statesman. The student newspaper staff planned to put together an entire edition on Henryville, the tornadoes and ISU’s involvement in the clean up.

“It really stood out for a lot of reasons,” said Jessica Squires, senior communication major from Mooresville and Statesman editor-in-chief. “We wanted to cover what’s important to our target market. It’s something that ISU is so involved in. We couldn’t think of a reason not to do something so central to ISU.”

Sean Carey and Greg Bierly move a foosball table to make room for food donations. ISU Photo/Tony Campbell

“We wanted to bring to the table something the Statesman has never done before,” Sweeney said.

The Statesman’s team of four split their time between volunteering and reporting. They found themselves immersed in the sounds and scents of clean up with smoke rising from wood debris being burned, gas fumes from growling chainsaws mixing with the rhythmic beat of hammers. In that organic mixture, the team found the seeds for the edition that they titled “Hope on the Horizon.” They wrote stories on ISU students volunteering, relief efforts by Henryville Community Church and the rebuilding of the Henryville Junior/Senior High School. Reporters who remained in Terre Haute wrote on the science of tornadoes and ISU’s recent recognition on the 2012 President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll with distinction.

Through it they learned what it takes to make a good story – time immersed in a situation.

“You can’t hear it and brain vomit it after barely ingesting it,” Squires said.

In addition, the reporters found themselves changed by the experience. They each wrote a column discussing the impact on their lives. Sweeney said he realized that he’s disconnected from the world and the realities that many people face coupled with the need to give to others.

“By giving,” Sweeney said, “you know if you need help you’ll get it in return.”

Squires learned about being less selfish. She wrote in her column, “We rarely allow ourselves the opportunity to really live outside of our self-made parameters of excessive work and activity. It shouldn’t take a tornado’s destruction to make us realize that there is more to life than what we plan.”

An American flag flies amongst the tornado damage in Henryville, Indiana. The town was struck by an F4 tornado on March 2, 2012. Photo by Tony Campbell

The Statesman saw a spike in Internet traffic to its site after the release of the Henryville edition. They also had requests for bundles of newspapers, including from Rich Cheek, pastor of the Henryville Community Church. Cheek journeyed to Terre Haute to personally thank the reporters for their coverage.

“You guys crushed it,” he said, additionally informing the reporters he leaves the newspapers out for new volunteers to leaf through and read. “It’s almost like a guidebook to what happened.”

Moving forward

As Eckart’s husband and other family members searched for her, State Police officers escorted them out of the school to a safe area even as rain and hail continued to fall. That night when she returned to her home in Ramsey and her two children, she hugged them close before putting them into bed.

“I was not scared the whole time and I’m basically scared of the dark,” Eckart said. “Everywhere where there were people in the building, the roof was not touched. It was like the hand of safety was on us.”

An aerial view of Henryville Junior and Senior High School. Photo courtesy of NOAA

Since then, classes in Henryville have resumed in a temporary space as construction workers reassemble the school. While nature exploded in wrath, Eckart said the tornado has brought out the best in people. Students have volunteered to work in food pantries, to cut wood and to help others sort what remains. “The outpour of love and support, I can’t even put into words,” she said.

Lisa Stein, a transfer coordinator in the ISU admissions office, contacted the counselors at Henryville where she had visited as an admissions counselor. “I just wanted to send an email to those counselors to let them know that ISU cared,” said Stein, who found out after that email that Eckart graduated from ISU. “In my opinion, I did what any passionate person would do that cares about people and since that is my high school that I visit, I care what happens to them.”

That was the only contact, Eckart said, the school received from a university.

“I’ve always been proud that I went to Indiana State. Now I’m even more proud,” Eckart said.

Eckart dreams of the tornado occasionally, but the night she bought her new Dodge Journey, she relived the tornado. “I dreamed I was in the tornado. I felt it, smelt it,” she said. Still, she remains fascinated by tornadoes, a product she thinks of her childhood from hearing stories about the 1974 tornado outbreak that hit her hometown of Depauw and the constant drilling for tornadoes at school.

 “I expected to see a pretty funnel cloud come down,” she said. “This wasn’t that.”

 Jennifer Sicking, GR ’11, is the editor of Indiana State University Magazine and associate director of media relations.

The Antarctic ice shelf. Photo by Tony Rathburn

“Icebergs are everywhere, making it difficult to go where we want to … The wind was HOWLING outside,” Tony Rathburn blogged during a research expedition off the coast of Antarctica. “The ice scraping by the ship sounds like a freight train going by. Occasionally, we bump a piece of ice that resounds through the ship with a bang.”

Rathburn’s journey aboard the research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer was anything but routine – even for the veteran oceanographer.

Icebergs up to 25 miles long blocked an area where Rathburn, associate professor of geology at Indiana State University, planned to take core samples of the seafloor. He and his students conduct ongoing research on the impact of climate change by studying benthic foraminifera, tiny shelled creatures that are among the most plentiful life forms in the deep sea.

Rathburn’s research focuses on changes during the course of hundreds – even thousands – of years, but there before him, behind him and beside him during much of his April 2006 trek fell striking evidence of climate change in his time. Ice chunks, some more than 10 feet tall, came crashing down on the 60-foot wide deck of the more than 300-foot long ship.

Just four years earlier the ice had been firmly attached to the Antarctic mainland as part of the Larsen B ice shelf. In 2002, more than 1,200 square miles of ice – an area larger than four average Indiana counties combined – broke off and began drifting toward the Weddell Sea.

“Global warming is right there staring you in the face,” Rathburn said. “I hadn’t seen it anywhere else as dramatically evident as in this sector of the Antarctic. Areas that were completely covered with ice, and had been covered with ice for thousands of years, were now open with large sections of the shelf ice system just breaking off.”

One especially large chunk of ice broke off from a nearby glacier, “creating a gigantic wave in the small bay that we were in,” Rathburn said. Unfortunately, some aspects of the research plan had to be altered because the wave caused the Nathanial B. Palmer to rock violently, snapping a 9/16-inch cable supporting core sampling equipment had been lowered into the water. Equipment was lost along with some samples. Although Rathburn returned to Indiana with fewer samples than he planned from that trip, he had pictures and videos that graphically illustrate for students the effects of global warming. 

Tony Rathburn

He has returned to the Antarctic with students twice since that cruise, each time noting the paucity of sea ice even in the coldest month of the Antarctic winter, and documenting seasonal changes in marine ecosystems and environments.

Through long-term studies of foraminifera, Rathburn said his research and that of others in the field of paleoceanography has turned up other, less dramatic, evidence of climate change.

“We can see acidification of the ocean, which is a direct result of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” he said. “We see changes in the ocean temperature globally and what that means for sea level change, and the consequences for organisms and their distribution.”

The world’s oceans are in crisis, Rathburn said. Humans have long used open water as a trash dump and have inadvertently turned the deep sea into a dumping ground for carbon dioxide, “severely affecting creatures we depend on for our livelihood,” he said. “If we don’t do something very soon we’re going to lose a lot of the resources that we now enjoy from the sea.”

Iron dust busted

Jennifer Latimer

Jennifer Latimer first became interested in climate change while in high school and grew especially curious after watching a television news report around 1990 that said, “Scientists have found the cure for global warming.”

The idea was that dumping iron in certain parts of the ocean would control carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere by promoting the growth of algae. It is an idea that some people still promote but Latimer, now an assistant professor of geology and also a paleoceanographer at Indiana State, has found the cure is not that simple.  

The iron fertilization idea has its roots in the long-held scientific thought that as arid and semi-arid regions expanded when glaciers advanced, iron dust blew off continents and fertilized the South Atlantic. Based on her research since a university graduate student in the mid-1990s, Latimer thinks rivers simply dumped general material into the ocean and productivity variations developed as ocean currents distributed that material.

“I don’t know that it was enough to significantly change the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So there’s got to be some other kind of mechanism that is contributing to carbon dioxide,” she said.

Ice core samples have shown that, during the past one million years, carbon dioxide levels in the ocean have ranged from 180 parts per million to 280 parts per million, but beginning around 1980, the level shot up to about 380 parts per million,” Latimer said.

“By burning fossil fuels and deforestation, we have fundamentally changed the carbon cycle as it has worked, at least over the last million years.”

Latimer was surprised to discover that iron dust was not responsible for varied productivity in the oceans. While all of the reasons behind climate change – let alone solutions – are not fully understood, continuing research is bringing scientists closer to finding answers.

“Technology is constantly improving,” she said. “When I first started, you could look at a peak in the ice core records and a peak in sediment records and say, ‘Oh yeah, they kind of match up.’ Now we’re able to decipher those wiggles a little more carefully. Sometimes carbon dioxide rises first and sometimes it rises second, so it’s not straightforward. Every day I think we learn something new but it’s a complicated problem. To understand the past, you can better understand the future. It just takes a while and I don’t think we’ve done that yet.” 

Trees tell drought history

Kristen de Graauw examines a core sample from a ponderosa pine tree.

Trees record their own history. Counting the rings on a stump reveals the age of a fallen tree.

But those tree rings can also show the impact of environmental factors on the tree. Wider rings mean the tree enjoyed healthy growth while narrower rings mean the tree suffered under some sort of stress.

Jim Speer, professor of geography and geology at Indiana State, is the author of a textbook on dendrochronology (the study of tree rings) and a past president of the Tree Ring Society. While he and his students generally study tree rings for evidence of insect outbreaks, they also look at whether trees are responding to climate change, such as variations in temperature and/or precipitation.

“Climate will often be the noise in our sample. We frequently will remove the climate signal and look at what remains in the trees to look at other factors,” he said.

Tree ring records from Siberia and northern North America going back about 2,000 years show something happened to that “noise” starting around 1980. The size of tree growth rings, which had been consistent with temperatures, started getting smaller or stayed the same.

“The trees are no longer limited by temperature but are limited by rainfall,” Speer said. “This is called the divergence issue.”

This switching of limiting factors is suggested as part of the basic principles of dendrochronology, but it is an unusual case because temperatures are so high in the arctic compared to past temperatures in the area, he explained. 

Those who deny that climate change is real argue against the ability of trees to record temperature back through time and use the divergence issue as one reason. Speer, while president of the Tree Ring Society, co-wrote a letter defending research by climatologists Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Malcolm Hughes of the University of Arizona, who found temperature changes so dramatic they resembled a hockey stick when plotted on a graph. Other external reviews have since shown that the science was sound.

Jim Speer

Speer’s own research into the impact of insects on ponderosa pine trees in the western United States, with ISU students as collaborators, led to another interesting discovery.

Using 600 years of records for various tree species, Kristen de Graauw, a second-year master’s student in earth and quaternary sciences, found that some periods of slow growth in ponderosa pine, which she and Speer suspected may have been due to Pandora moth outbreaks, were actually due to drought.

“A lot of these pine trees were showing significant suppression in the 1930s and our computer programs were attributing that to insect outbreaks,” de Graauw said. “But anyone who knows anything about the history of the western U.S. knows that in the 1930s we started seeing what’s known as the Dust Bowl.”

Comparing ponderosa pine records against Douglas fir, juniper and oak trees not susceptible to the Pandora moth, de Graauw found the same type of “signal” in the tree records.

“We can only assume then that it was the Dust Bowl that was being recorded,” she said. “The opposite is true, too, so that things that might have been seen as drought events, we were actually showing as insect outbreak events. We have found many sites that are sensitive to Pandora moth outbreaks where suppressions may be due to the insect rather than drought.”     

De Graauw also noted fewer insect outbreaks in the ponderosa pine samples in the past 200 years. Her experience underscores the complexity of research where both droughts and insect outbreaks are recorded, she said.

Weather grows more varied

A thunderstorm rolls across the plains.

Greg Bierly has been known to chase severe weather. The associate professor of geography has piled weather monitoring equipment, students, food and drink into a van and criss-crossed the Midwest and Great Plains in search of thunderstorms.

While he’s put his storm chasing days on hold in recent years after being named director of the University Honors program, Bierly continues to research atmospheric disturbances in his role as director of the ISU Climate Lab. A native of southeastern Indiana, he recently inspected tornado damage at Henryville when he traveled there with other ISU faculty, staff and students to help with storm clean-up.

Bierly’s research has confirmed a period of unusual weather in the eastern United States.

“There is a warming and moistening of the atmosphere, an increase in the frequency of large-scale, low-pressure systems and convective thunderstorms and some increased variability in the weather,” he said of climate data for the eastern United States. “As with the national trend, we’ve had some high-end temperature seasons both winter and summer in the past decade and a half.”

While the severity of tornadoes hasn’t necessarily increased, there is evidence the nation’s so-called “tornado alley” has expanded to the east and south to include states such as Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas, Bierly said.

Greg Bierly talks with students to plot a course in following storms.

“For the Gulf States, tornadoes have always been a winter phenomenon, but the occurrence there has been more frequent and those states have also become tornado ready a little bit earlier in the season,” he added.

Bierly recently partnered with biology professors Elaina Tuttle and Rusty Gonser to lend a climate change aspect to their long running research into the mating and reproduction of white-throated sparrows in upstate New York.

Tan and white sparrows tend to mate with one another rather than with sparrows of their own color, and Bierly’s research found that the combination of tan males, which are less aggressive, and white females, which are more aggressive, is best suited to produce healthy, viable offspring through all weather extremes – heat, cold, drought or excessive precipitation.

“Thee tan male, white female pairs are more productive in the face of adversity,” he said, citing such variables as nest success, the number of chicks, survivorship. 

“When the female is the more aggressive, robust one that’s fine,” Bierly said. “Even in the winter before they may be foraging a little better and holding their own before the pairing starts. Once they are paired they are best matched with a tan male, a stay-at-home dad, so to speak.”

In contrast, tan females are more susceptible to weather extremes across the spectrum, Bierly said.

Learning from the past

Russ Stafford takes a sherd to examine during an archeology dig.

Humans have had to deal with climate change before. Students in anthropology Professor Russ Stafford’s course on pre-history and climate change learn how pre-humans and early humans adapted through various climate cycles.

When modern humans evolved and migrated out of Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago during an early ice age, “they basically replaced all the earlier species like the Neanderthals because they were better adapted to colder environments, particularly in Europe,” Stafford said.

Humans hunted wooly mammoths, mastodons and wild cats only to have them become extinct when the ice age ended.

“Humans had to adjust their way of life significantly in the warmer, modern period when they shifted more toward plant resources and culture and social organization changed in response to that,” Stafford said. “The rise of civilization and the fall of civilization are tied into climate change.”

History offers examples of what has happened in the past when humans have failed to adapt to climate change. Stafford cited, as an example, Vikings who settled Greenland during the medieval warm period and failed to adapt to the “little ice age” that began about 800 years ago.

Eskimos in Greenland were able to adapt better than the Vikings, Stafford explained, because they were hunters, lived in smaller groups, had a smaller population and had a history in the Arctic going back thousands of years. The Vikings, however, had an agricultural society that was dependent on raising livestock.

“Once the climate got cold, their hayfields weren’t as productive so their livestock died off, and because of cultural constraints of a complex society they were unable to adapt,” he said.

Stafford’s own research focuses on the impact of climate change on prehistoric hunter gatherers who populated what is now the American Midwest between 3,000 and 10,000 years ago.

“There were some dramatic changes in their way of life over that 7,000 years,” he said. “They became more sedentary, for instance. I’ve been looking at whether that can be explained by climate change and, in my opinion, it can be.”

“The rise of civilization and the fall of civilization are tied into climate change.” – Russ Stafford

While the early hunter gatherers were highly mobile, stayed in temporary camps and hunted and gathered a wide range of animals and plants,  becoming more sedentary as forest resources (nuts and deer) became more abundant. Later agricultural people became more dependent on a single food, corn. Their health suffered as a result, Stafford said, and because their populations were larger, they were unable to hunt as much.

From the Vikings of Greenland to the early hunter gatherers of the American heartland, adapting to change has proven essential to survival – or not.

Ocean circulation patterns are nearing the point of severely affecting climate change, making some places colder and other places much warmer, said Tony Rathburn, for whom six years have now come and gone since he first experienced the dramatic impact of climate change off the Antarctic Peninsula.

“Once we’ve passed those thresholds you can’t easily get back to the previous situation,” he said. “We’re not exactly sure where those thresholds are but we’re approaching them, no doubt. We’re basically in the petri dish. We’re the experiment and we really don’t know it’s all going to turn out.”

 Dave Taylor is the director of media relations for Indiana State University.

Terre Haute experiences an average of 175 days of gray days.

ISU’s official school colors may be blue and white, but for those who shrink at the thought of another long, dreary campus winter, they might as well be blue and bluer.

Terre Haute residents can expect to soak up some rays 190 days on average each year, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That leaves 175 days of dreary — not counting the extra 24 hours thrown in by Leap Year.

For the estimated 4 to 6 percent of the nation’s population who suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), these sunless days present more than just a minor irritation. SAD is a form of major depression that gets its name from the fact that it occurs at the same time every year. For most sufferers, it begins in the fall and continues into the winter.

SAD affects people in various ways, ranging from slight grumpiness to total debilitation. The National Institutes of Health lists the symptoms as increased appetite with weight gain (weight loss is more common with other forms of depression); increased sleepiness (insomnia is more common with other forms of depression); loss of energy, interest and ability to concentrate; lethargy; social withdrawal; and overall unhappiness and irritability.

Along with the 18 million or so SAD sufferers in the US, the Cleveland Clinic estimates that another 20 percent of Americans experience a milder form called subsyndromal SAD — more commonly known as the winter blues or doldrums. Three-quarters of those afflicted by SAD are women, most of whom are in their 20s, 30s and 40s. And though SAD is most common during these ages, it does occur in children and adolescents, too.

Another thing about SAD is that it is more prevalent in areas with extreme seasonal changes. For example, only an estimated 1 percent of Florida residents suffer from it, while nearly 10 percent of those living in Alaska have been diagnosed with SAD and almost a quarter admit they get the winter blues.

Jennifer Lincoln knows about this firsthand. She has lived in Anchorage since graduating from ISU with a degree in environmental health science in 1991, directing the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s Alaska Pacific Office there. (See sidebar.) The sun shines just 41 percent of the days in Anchorage each year, making the region a prime target for SAD diagnoses.

“Fortunately nobody in my family or any of my close friends suffer from SAD, but it’s certainly something we all have to figure out how to deal with,” Lincoln said.

Growing up in mid Indiana offered some preparation for winters in Anchorage as they aren’t much different from Terre Haute when it comes to temperature, Lincoln said.

But they are longer — much, much longer.

“In the summertime, there will be days that go by when you never see darkness because the sun doesn’t go down until after midnight, and then it comes right back up. So it’s only down below the horizon while you’re sleeping and even then it’s still a little bit dusky,” she explains. “Then in winter, the sun comes up around 10 in the morning on the shortest day and goes down around 3:30 in the afternoon. And the sun is never at high noon – it comes up a little bit over the horizon and then sort of circles around and goes back down,” she said.

“So it is darker in the winter, and you do feel like you need more sleep.”

SAD basics

Science still isn’t certain about what causes SAD. One theory is that decreased exposure to sunlight during the winter season upsets the biological clock that regulates mood, sleep and hormones, causing it to run more slowly. Some researchers believe SAD can be traced back to primitive man. The lower energy level that is a symptom of SAD would have reduced caloric intake, so they think it might have been a way for humans to cope with the scarcity of food in winter — similar to what happens in species that hibernate.   

The Cleveland Clinic estimates that 20 percent of the population suffer from a milder form of SAD, more commonly known as the winter blues.

SAD’s first documented mention came from the 6th century scholar Jordanes in “Getica,” his history of the early Goths. However, it wasn’t until 1980 that the medical world truly began to not only take note of SAD, but to take it seriously. That’s when Norman Rosenthal at the National Institute of Mental Health documented and named the disorder. Rosenthal himself suffered from bouts of depression during winter and wanted to know why. He theorized that reduced light might be the cause, so he and his research team conducted a study using light therapy and learned that, indeed, it could relieve the symptoms.

His ideas were initially greeted with skepticism, but it wasn’t long before others began to see the light and today SAD is well recognized as a form of major depression. Further studies have revealed that, along with inadequate light, other factors contributing to SAD include body temperature, hormones and genetics.

Helping SAD Sycamores

As director of ISU’s Student Counseling Center since 2007, Kenneth Chew has seen his fair share of SAD cases. On average, the center’s nine full-time and part-time licensed counselors, augmented by eight or so graduate assistants, treat about 550 students each year.

“Depression in and of itself is the most common issue we deal with, and it’s like that across the board for most college counseling centers,” Chew said. “As for Seasonal Affective Disorder specifically, I would say our numbers are probably similar to the prevalence rates out in the rest of the community, which is anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of actual depression.”

Given Terre Haute’s climate, does he think SAD is more of an issue at ISU than at universities in other regions?

“Probably not,” he responded, “but there are quite a few students who come in with SAD-related symptoms.”

The most severe case Chew has dealt with involved a young male student several years ago who was diagnosed with SAD-related depression. He would become suicidal during the winter.

“It actually took us a couple years to get him on track because of the seasonal nature of his depression,” Chew said.

Diagnosing SAD can be tricky, Chew added. “One of the best things you can do is to get a pretty clear history of the patient. If an individual becomes depressed around the same time each year, which is usually right around the fall or early winter, and if that depression tends to subside starting when daylight hours increase, there’s a pretty good chance you’re looking at Seasonal Affective Disorder versus your standard depression.”

Shedding some light on SAD

Once diagnosed with SAD, the center treats the patient the same as any other person suffering from depression, with one notable addition — light therapy.

"...try doing some minor lifestyle things like making sure you’re exposed to a greater amount of certain types of light within the course of the day.” -- Kenneth Chew

Chew explained, “If it’s true Seasonal Affective Disorder one of the best things we can use is light box therapy. Having a person sit in front of a light box anywhere from 30 minutes to about an hour a day is considered ideal.”

However, light therapy isn’t a cure-all, as about half of those receiving this treatment require an additional form of therapy, too.

“So along with light, the treatment plan could include basic counseling — helping people look at stressors or deal with things going on in their personal lives — or it could include referral to a psychiatrist for medication management,” Chew said.

Diet also can be a factor.

“A more healthy, balanced diet can impact how a person is functioning overall, so as part of our initial patient assessment we examine various areas – biologically, psychologically, socially – to get an idea if there have been any major changes for the patient. And, if so, if we change things back or modify them, including what they’re eating, will this have an impact?”

Despite all the information about SAD, short of moving to a sunny climate there’s not much a person prone to the disorder can do to avoid it, Chew said. But, he adds, there are things that can modify or moderate its impact.

“When the seasons start to change, just be mindful of your behavioral patterns and whether your mood is starting to shift,” he advised. “If you find this happening, try doing some minor lifestyle things like making sure you’re exposed to a greater amount of certain types of light within the course of the day.”

A few SAD-fighting products on the market also could bring relief, including personal light boxes that mimic the impact of sunlight and alarm clocks that gradually increase the amount of light in the room so it’s like waking up to sunlight rather than darkness.

“There are a lot of different things that have been used to treat SAD,” Chew added. “But for the most part, it is a form of depression and it needs to be taken seriously.”

Returning once more to Anchorage, how do Lincoln and friends ward off the doldrums during those long Alaska winters?

“Get away to someplace sunny,” she said, laughing. “There are a lot of direct flights from here to Honolulu.”

Laurel Harper is a freelance writer in Louisville, Ky.

Indiana State University pilots Melanie Abel (left) and Kay Brown pose in front of the airplane they flew in the 2011 Air Race Classic, a flight race that features female pilots from around the nation on a cross country trek. Violent storms caused race officials to cancel about half of last summer’s race.ISU/Tony Campbell

The whiteout engulfed Kay Brown as she navigated her way through the soupy thicket of clouds, scanning the instrument readings in front of her repeatedly. She saw no purpose in glancing out the window for perspective. At times, she couldn’t even see the edge of the wing to her four-seat DA-40 airplane, let alone the ground thousands of feet below.

She peered at her instrument indicators repeatedly, scanning them over and over to ensure the plane flew straight. Though she and co-pilot Melanie Abel had started flying just below the base of the cloud cover, the rain-laden murk, enveloping the diminutive aircraft.

Brown knew better than to rely on her feelings or gut instinct.

“When you’re in white, you have to pay attention to your instruments, because your inner ear will mess with you and you’ll think you’re tilting to the left, but the plane will actually be straight and level, or you’ll think you’re straight and level, and the plane will actually be tilting to the right,” Brown said. “So you can’t rely on what you feel, you have to rely on what the instruments are telling you.  It just takes a lot more concentration, and you have to be on top of it, because if anything goes wrong, you can’t see to get down. You have to rely on the instruments to get you down.”

This was before they even reached the starting line for their national aviation race.

For Brown, an Indiana State University junior aviation technology major, and Abel, an ISU aviation instructor and co-pilot for the competition, the need to focus solely on the plane’s instruments – rather than determining their location by looking outside – was not a big deal, or even an isolated incident.

“We had to understand what the weather was doing so we wouldn’t get in trouble,” Brown said. “… If anything were to build up, we had to understand that we had to land, and we had to understand what intensity we could go through and we felt comfortable with.”

The duo represented Indiana State in the 2011 Air Race Classic, a cross-country aerial race for female pilots, who are underrepresented in the industry. The race hardly went as planned, though, as an intimidating line of storms raging across the competition route forced organizers to scrap the initial plans. They canceled the first four planned days of the race, along with half the scheduled stops.

When Brown and Abel flew to the new designated starting line, they had to choose: fly through overcast skies or around all the cloud cover to maintain visual flight rules, or VFR, conditions. They chose to go through it.

As pilots, Brown and Abel need to be well-adept at understanding climate patterns and reading meteorology graphs and charts, lest they ever be caught mid-flight, unaware of how to respond to impending weather elements.

“It can end up being life or death, really,” Abel said. “Just because you look outside and it looks like it’s a clear weather day, if you’re traveling to a different location, there could be a series of thunderstorms, squall lines, different things in the way.”

Indiana State University student John Davis flies the plane as he next to a certified flight instructor. Davis was part of a group of students from a new course last fall that went flying from Sky King Airport in Terre Haute to airports in Sullivan and Greencastle before heading back to Terre Haute. For several students, it was the first time they ever had an opportunity to pilot an airplane. They flew during VFR, or visual flight rules, conditions. ISU/Sam Barnes

Several ISU professors, including Abel, teach budding pilots about aviation, which means paying attention to what’s happening in the skies. In Abel’s introductory course, students spend weeks learning the basics of meteorology. For pilots, that also means learning to read National Weather Service reports, which include information on weather patterns, visibility and wind speeds and direction.

Once they know about the weather, pilots can determine, based on their plane and equipment, their flight plan, or even whether or not to go, Abel said.

“You need to know what the best option is for your flight,” she added, “and so, ultimately, it’s extremely important for a pilot to know.”

ISU professor Bruce Welsh teaches a course which explores the nuances of meteorology. The semester-long course delves into various aspects of meteorology, and is based on the assumption that students taking the course know little to nothing about weather patterns or elements.

“Most people really have no understanding of why weather does what it does,” Welsh said. “For example, when a cold front is coming through, most people couldn’t tell you where the wind direction’s from, why it changes or anything like that, and we talk about things like that.”

In Welsh’s course, students team up in groups of two to give presentations to the rest of the class. The student teams give an overview of the assigned chapter for that scheduled class session, along with an analysis of the day’s weather. The students are required to give a detailed report of the weather, which is similar to the information received in a standard aviation weather briefing.

“It was one of the hardest classes that we have to take just because there’s a lot of information, and you have to learn it quickly,” said Brown. “We have to present it to the class, so we have to know how to explain it to others.  He’s really good at teaching it.”

On the day Brown’s team gave its weather presentation, they woke up at about 4 a.m. to start compiling information for their daily weather briefing.

“We also helped everyone in the class,” Brown said, “because some people picked it up really fast and some others didn’t quite understand it fully. So we got up with one another and helped each other out, making sure that everybody understood it to pass the class.” 

While those enrolled in the course need to learn about meteorology, they also develop collaborative skills, she said. She added that Welsh emphasizes the cooperative approach in all of the classes he teaches.

“It goes with aviation, because you’re going to have a first officer or a captain that you’re going to have to work with, and you’re going to have to be able to talk with one another,” Brown said.

Aspiring pilots receive various levels of flight training, depending on the certification they are seeking. A private pilot’s certificate, which is the first level of certification, permits people to fly “anywhere in the United States as long as the weather is good,” Welsh said. After receiving their private pilot certificate, pilots can then begin working to gain their instrument rating certification, which allows them to fly when weather conditions deteriorate, such as in overcast skies and rain or fog.

Other certifications, which require additional training and education, are available for a variety of levels, such as for becoming a commercial pilot.

“Then as you keep progressing in your career, you eventually get to a level where you can actually fly an airplane where you don’t even see outside,” Welsh said. “So when you come in for a landing, you don’t see the airport until you touch down.”

Students in the aviation technology program at ISU begin with the basics, but then learn about weather patterns, including how to deal with wind factors and even ice, he added.

“Weather is critical to flight operations,” Welsh said. “Most problems we have in the airline system are due to weather.”

An aerial view of the Wabash Valley. During VFR conditions, pilots can see the ground while flying. Pilots need additional certifications to fly in more hazardous weather conditions, which can include overcast skies, since they prevent pilots from being able to see the ground. ISU/Sam Barnes

Students majoring in aviation technology aren’t the only ISU students learning about piloting. Troy Allen, associate professor of aviation, taught an introductory honors course to interested non-majors, where they reviewed several basics, including visual flight rules. Several certified flight instructors took students to the skies over west-central Indiana; once they were airborne, the students each took turns piloting the planes.

Many student pilots take to the skies in and around Terre Haute to train. While students practice on flight simulators, instructors are also good about flying with students into the clouds when they need to learn how to fly by reading only their plane’s instruments, Abel said.

“A lot of people might think flying in our area is not good because we don’t always get to fly,” she said. “Well, I think the students get to experience more types of weather, which benefits them more, flying here than it would at universities located in Florida, where it’s good weather 24/7, because as soon as they travel elsewhere, they’re going to experience weather they haven’t experienced before.”

The Air Race Classic provided a great learning opportunity for Brown. Had she and Abel tried to fly in similar conditions during the race, the visual-flight-only rules would have meant that the Sycamores – and anyone else flying in the conditions that would have prevented pilots from seeing the ground – would have been disqualified.

This isn’t the only time that weather affected Brown’s experience in the race. In the 2010 and 2011 competitions, Brown and her co-pilot needed to plan for rainy weather that was taking place near at least one airport where they had to land. While flying through the weather did not put their plane in immediate physical jeopardy, they would have been at risk of violating the visual flight rules requirements.

“If you’re a pilot, you have to understand weather.  Even if you’re just a (visual flight rules) pilot and you don’t want your instrument rating, you have to know that you have limitations,” Brown said. “You have to set your own limitations.  You have to understand what the weather charts are saying to you, because if you don’t, you might risk your life and get in danger.”

Austin Arceo is the assistant director of media relations.

Click on the above photo to watch an interview with Judy Barad and video by WTWO.

Judith Barad awakened unusually early, about 4:30 a.m. on Saturday, June 7, 2008. Her husband German Andrade and her live-in grandson Justice Oznoff, then 11-years-old, were sleeping.

Barad, in house slippers, walked down the familiar-for-24-years hallway of her brick ranch home in southern Vigo County.

In the kitchen, her slippers squished.

She switched the lights on.

More than two inches of murky water covered the floor of the front room and was seeping into the kitchen.

By sunrise, about 5:28 a.m. that day, despite her husband’s efforts with a pump, water covered the floors of every room in the house.

Then came the loud gurgling sound.

Muddy water poured from the three-car garage into the last “safe” space, an elevated room attached to the house and adjacent to the garage, where Barad huddled with her grandson. Water reached the second of the three steps to the upraised platform and continued to rise.

Barad waded to open the garage door. At ground level, the water reached to Barad’s hip and her grandson’s waist. “Honey Creek had become a lake,” she said. The open garage door revealed dirty, rushing water where before a driveway, yard and road had been.

A 911 operator said to get on the roof of the house and await rescue by boat. The power of the water would sweep the ladder free, said Barad. They chose the uncertainty of self-evacuation.

Barad wanted to take the 11 house cats. The cats, her husband insisted, would seek higher levels in the house.

She corralled feline Tina. Then the threesome, with the cat carrier held aloft, pushed through the debris-filled water to German’s Jeep.

Most frightening for Barad was the water-covered bridge. Usually a person could stand and look over the rails of the bridge and down at Honey Creek below. This day the water covered the bridge on South Sullivan Place Road.

“I was sure we were going to drown,” says Barad. She never learned to swim. She can’t even float, she insisted. She began praying aloud, “Our Father, who are in heaven… ”

Hours later, from temporary lodgings at the Midtown Motel in Terre Haute, Barad, professor of philosophy at Indiana State University, watched news video on WTWO-TV of the dirty water lapping up to the living room window of her home.

“All I could think about was my cats,” she said. “That night I couldn’t sleep. I don’t think I’ve ever cried so hard. It was the most terrible night of my life.”

The clean up begins at Judith Barad's house. ISU students, faculty and staff participated in cleaning up Terre Haute from the flooding.

Widespread flash flooding in Indiana

The severe flooding resulted from a nearly continuous moderate to heavy rain that fell for 12 to 16 hours on June 6-7 and produced rainfall totals of more than 10 inches in some areas, according to the U.S. Geological Service. Rains fell on ground already soaked by a wetter-than-normal spring.

Communities that were extensively impacted by the flood included Martinsville, Franklin, Paragon, Spencer, and Columbus, which was the hardest hit, according to the USGS.

The flooding in Indiana caused three fatalities and five injuries, more than 8,400 evacuations and water rescues, damage to more than 5,600 residences, and more than 650 roads, 60 bridges, and 100 dams and levees, the USGS stated. Total damage costs resulting from the June flooding were expected to be the highest of any disaster in the history of Indiana.
Barad and her husband were one of 16,230 Indiana households who applied for individual assistance from FEMA by early August 2008, according to data in a state government performance report. More than 18 percent of those applications came from Vigo County.

“I don’t think I’ve ever cried so hard. It was the most terrible night of my life.” – Judith Barad

Presidential Disaster Declarations provide the gateway to federal funds for financial and other assistance. By two weeks after the flood, 37 Indiana counties, about 40 percent of the state, had been declared eligible for relief related to the June 7-8 event.

By Aug. 31, 2008, FEMA or the U.S. Small Business Administration had approved disaster assistance totaling $117.3 million for Indiana residences and businesses, according to the Indiana Office of Disaster Recovery.

You help people in need 

The morning of the flood, while Barad and her family struggled to find lodging, Jeremy Kunz and Justin Kunz, brothers and both 2007 ISU graduates, waded through waist-high water and helped where they could, including with the evacuation of south side nursing home residents.

“You take for granted you can stop what you’re doing and help people in need,” said Jeremy.

“The situation was surreal,” said Justin. The looks on the faces of the nursing home residents, in particular, triggered memories of his grandmother who had passed the year before. “It really made you think about what’s important,” he said.

Al Perone, associate dean of students and ombudsperson at ISU, planned to meet a former student for lunch. Late to arrive, the student called and said he was stuck in traffic because of the flood. “What flood?” uttered Perone, an American Red Cross volunteer, who abruptly shifted into emergency response mode.

Perone helped with sandbag efforts north of Terre Haute. Later from his ISU office, he learned about students being evacuated from apartments. He found one of the students, clutching his laptop computer, sitting on the bridge on South Seventh Street.

“People were coming out of the woodwork with boats to rescue people,” recalled Perone. “People just put everything aside and did what needed to be done.”

“The home is a symbol of who we are. Our material belongings represent identity and history. I can’t personally imagine what you go through when the entire history of your life is taken away in an instant.” – Virgil Sheets

Recovery mode began the day after. That’s the long haul and familiar to him through his Red Cross and Hope Crisis Response Network volunteering. Perone and other ISU personnel identified more than 40 students directly affected by the flood. He housed two students in his home for a week.

People on campus donated supplies such as cleaning products and personal hygiene items for students to pick up.

To assist ISU faculty, staff and students affected by the flood, the ISU Foundation started a disaster relief account with a $5,000 donation. With contributions from others, the fund grew to more than $15,000, according to an ISU newsroom report.

Nancy Rogers, ISU associate vice president for community engagement and experiential learning, and Perone participated in the Wabash Valley Long Term Disaster Recovery Coalition, a nonprofit group of 60 organizations led by the United Way of the Wabash Valley and the Wabash Valley Community Foundation who collaborated to assist residents in Vigo, Clay, Parke, Vermillion and Sullivan counties affected by the flood.

Take action  

Ten months after the flood, ISU students enrolled in a research methods class gained knowledge about stress related to the flood. Through ISU’s Survey Research Laboratory, the students conducted telephone surveys of residents in Vigo County areas impacted by the flood.

An aerial view of flooding along the Wabash River in 2008. ISU Photo/Kara Berchem

People who had not yet restored their property reported 60 percent more stress symptoms than people who had restoration completed or significantly underway, according to Virgil Sheets, ISU psychology department chair, who supervised the students.

“The home is a symbol of who we are. Our material belongings represent identity and history. I can’t personally imagine what you go through when the entire history of your life is taken away in an instant.”

When someone experiences a tragedy, such as a natural disaster, two of the most common coping strategies are to take action and/or to reframe the experience. Take action includes calling the insurance agent, starting the physical cleanup process, or anything that contributes to having some control over the circumstances, said Sheets. The strategy of reframing the experience provides an opportunity for growth. “Lots of people reframe a bad experience through conceiving or creating a spiritual framework. Reframing it in that light, research reveals, is psychologically helpful.”

Generally, research on peoples’ reactions to disasters, is that they think about what to do or what they can do and they do it, said Sheets. “Research suggests that all the movies about disasters that show people frightened and panicking are not accurate,” he said. “What most people do is they say, ‘OK, here’s what we’re dealing with’ and they take action. Whether or not they do the right thing, they try to do something.”

A grateful heart

Barad looked around the small, crowded waiting room of the Salvation Army in downtown Terre Haute and absorbed snatches of conversation. That summer of 2008, she spent a lot of time in waiting rooms of charitable organizations such as the American Red Cross.

The Walmart gift cards, being distributed to flood victims, were the commodities worth the wait that particular day. “I was one with the other people in the room, which is different than being one of the people in the room,” said Barad. “All of us in that room were dependent on the charity of others.”

Her professional markers of achievement — Ph.D. from Northwestern University, author of several books and many scholarly articles, full professor status at ISU — held no currency in any of the places she now frequented.

Barad, her husband and her grandson lost all their possessions, including furniture, clothing and Barad’s car. FEMA assessed their home 85 percent substantially damaged. The family considered re-location, but decided to restore their damaged home.

Barad’s weeping the night of the flood had been transformed to joy the following morning. Amidst the day-after-the-flood destruction, she and her husband found the 10 household feline family members alive. Longtime animal welfare advocates, the couple also cared for several cats in outside shelters. One kitten perished in the flood. All others survived.

The Midtown Motel served as their home the week after the flood. ISU provided them with a graduate student apartment for a month. In mid-August, Barad received a phone call from FEMA that a trailer was available. Her grandson Justice could again live with his grandparents and the cats too. “The whole family was together again,” she said.

The loss of creature comfort that most challenged her peace of her mind during those nomadic months after the flood was a decent bed, she said. When they moved back into their home in mid-October that year, she relished her new bed.

Now almost four years later, she’s, well, philosophical.

Humility and gratitude are powerful gifts, she said. “Parishioners from St. Joseph University Parish, ISU students, many people in the community and even people from out-of-state helped us to clean and to rebuild. One dear family, from my church, sheltered our cats for more than two months during that summer.”

Deeper understanding of the value of simplicity and poverty occurred for her over time, she said. “I learned to distinguish wants from needs.” Material poverty taught her about simplicity, she said, but the greater lesson was about spiritual poverty. “In spiritual poverty, I know that God is my primary need and I am aware that I have room to grow in wisdom and virtue. I also know that I must keep up a steady effort to achieve this growth.”

When daily life upsets occur now, Barad said she strives to pause and to breathe. “I ask myself what I can learn from the situation. The answer I look for is the kind that can teach me to be a better person or an insight that gives me deeper spiritual wisdom.”

She said she now has a deeper understanding about living in the present moment.

“We control our happiness in life,” she said. “That’s what I’ve learned from the flood.”

Patricia Krapesh is a freelance writer who lives in Terre Haute, Ind.

Terry and Brenda Ball, with one of Brenda’s Chinese brush paintings in the background.

Three feet of snow lay on the ground in central Illinois. In classrooms at the University of Illinois, snow dripped into puddles from layers of clothes as their owners sprawled in student desks. Terry and Brenda Ball shivered as they walked to class and hated having to slide an ice scraper across the windows inside of their Volkswagen Beetle. Each night, one would leave the warmth of their apartment to start and run the car for 20 minutes so it would start the next day.

That winter, of ’77-’78, decided it for the two Indiana State University graduates. After living their lives in the Midwest, this winter with the continual piling of snow and the mercury in the thermometer never warming enough to rise above 32 degrees Fahrenheit, was enough.

“We were not moving to Chicago,” Terry said.

“We said, ‘We’re moving south,’” Brenda said.

They considered moving to Washington, D.C., but during graduate school Terry had written a paper on Atlanta and they began to consider that southern city instead.

“Atlanta was an up and coming city,” he said.

“Atlanta was becoming a leader of the South,” she added.

It proved to be a city where the two-time Indiana State University graduates could find jobs. It’s where nature found its place on their home’s walls through blown-up photos of hikes in Georgia state parks and Brenda’s Chinese brush paintings. It was also a place where Terry would deal with the effects that nature leveled at the Southern states.

***

1973 year book photos of Terry Ball and Brenda Bartley.

As Terry Ball walked into his first day of English 101 at Indiana State University, he found himself seated next to Brenda Bartley when the professor seated the class alphabetically by last name. Terry, who grew up in Paris, Ill., wanted something different from many of his high school classmates and decided to enroll at ISU after his parents nixed his idea of moving to Chicago.

“I was looking for someone to help me with papers, to proofread,” said Terry about that first day of class when he met the girl sitting next to him. “Brenda was a scholarship girl.”

Brenda decided to attend Indiana State because of its reputation for educating teachers and she knew people from her hometown of Jasper, Ind., were also attending the university.

“I was there for an education,” Brenda said. “I wasn’t looking for the love of my life.”

While it wasn’t love at first sight, within a month the pair went on their first date to see “Lion in Winter” starring Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn. Soon they were inseparable. Each semester they continued to sit next to each other in classes. Brenda, a math education major, and Terry, an earth science major, managed to take one class, such as introduction to world religion, English literature or astronomy, together each semester of school.  

By the end of their sophomore years, Terry said, “it was clear we wanted to be together.”

“We spent a lot of time together. We were compatible. We both had the same value system,” Brenda said.

During the summer before their junior year in school, they talked about their goals in life, they talked about the future. And they decided they wanted to get married. By the end of summer, Terry had bought the engagement ring, but Brenda said, “It was his choice on the timing when to officially ask me.” That came at the beginning of their junior years, as they stood in the kitchen of Terry’s off-campus apartment.

Terry and Brenda Ball's wedding photo on Aug. 19, 1972.

They married Aug. 19, 1972, before the start of their senior years. Due to a shift in the university’s schedule to an earlier class start, they spent their honeymoon in married student housing on South Third Street.

“We didn’t have any money anyway,” said Brenda with a laugh.

After graduating in 1973, they moved to Columbus, Ind., where Terry taught at a junior high and Brenda taught at nearby Southwestern Junior High and High School. They continued taking classes at Indiana State and earned their advanced degrees: Terry in 1974 with a Master of Education in earth sciences and Brenda in 1975 with a master’s in mathematics. But after three years of teaching, both knew they wanted to pursue other careers.

“I really enjoyed it,” Terry said of teaching. “But you know in schools, there would be an old English teacher who was great and kept people motivated. Then there was a coach who taught social studies who was putting in his time showing films. I knew I had the propensity to be more like him. I would not survive and thrive in that system for a long time.”

While Brenda enjoyed teaching motivated students, she found the profession different than she thought it would be. She, too, began to think of a new career.

Terry figured out his next career first, building upon his classes at Indiana State. He decided he wanted to move into urban and regional planning and enrolled at the University of Illinois.

“I took urban and regional planning classes at Indiana State so I didn’t see it as being that much of a change. It was still dealing with social structure,” Terry said.

“It seemed you wanted to make a difference in people’s lives,” Brenda said.

“A public service,” Terry said. “That’s what kept me in the career that I’m in.”

Brenda decided she would go into accounting and also enrolled at the University of Illinois.

“I thought math and accounting were probably kind of related. Then you get into it and it’s not as related as you might think,” she said. “My math background has continuously helped me to be a good accountant.”

Then came the frigid winter of ’77-’78.

***

Terry and Brenda Ball in Maui to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary.

In Atlanta, Brenda began working for the international accounting firm Deloitte and Touche.  She would work for different accounting firms, undertake a complete change of careers by becoming a massage therapist, before finding her niche in non-profit accounting.

“It’s more like I’m providing a service in a community where they’re providing a service,” she said.

She contracts with various non-profits to help them take care of their financial records while making sure the accounting process works efficiently. One friend described her as a chief financial officer for hire.

“It provides the variety I need, but it’s also giving me that satisfaction of helping in the world,” she said.

As a creative and meditative outlet, Brenda also began Chinese brush painting in 1998. Her work has been exhibited in the Atlanta area and selected for juried shows as well as on continuous display at the Chastain Arts Center.

“It’s so different from the detailed work of accounting. It’s creating with paint strokes,” she said. “It’s very meditative, relaxing.”

After a brief stint with a consulting firm, Terry began a 22-year career with the Georgia Department of Community Affairs working in a variety of senior and executive leadership positions.  As part of his job, he coordinated the housing and community response after Tropical Storm Alberto and Hurricane Katrina struck the United States.

In 2004, Alberto floundered ashore in Florida before clambering into Georgia where he stalled, dropping almost 28 inches of rain in some places and causing massive flooding. The governor declared 30 counties in a state of emergency. Terry worked with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to find places for temporary housing for those who lost their houses.

“I would identify properties in the right places and work with FEMA to get in,” he said.

Then in 2005, after 150,000 people fled from New Orleans and Mississippi from Hurricane Katrina, Terry worked on a task force created by the governor to handle the influx of people.  Self described as “the housing guy,” he oversaw the setting up temporary shelters and then the transition to life into Georgia for those who decided to stay. In 2006, Terry received the Magnolia Award for Excellence in Leadership and Service from the Department of Community Affairs for his work.

He also received a job offer. After a task force colleague became head of the Georgia Emergency Management Agency, he asked Terry to become deputy director of programs. Terry accepted and oversees the planning, training, recovery and mitigation divisions. He oversees everything from the creation of what to do in case of a hurricane or winter ice storm and then the recovery from those disasters.

“When bad things happen and the blue lights come on in the operations center, the deputy director of operations is in charge and I do whatever he needs to help,” Terry said.

During the past six years, Terry has responded to the operations center when tornados, wildfires, winter storms and flooding hit the state.

“It was nice to change and learn a whole new job at the end of my career instead of just coasting,” he said. “It was a challenge to me and I can continue to make a difference.”

Jennifer Sicking, GR ’11, is the editor of Indiana State University Magazine and associate director of media relations.

Jennifer Lincoln speaks to a crab fisherman in Dutch Harbor about safety issues.

What are the chances that a landlubbing Hoosier — one who had never even seen the ocean until spring break at ISU — would end up responsible for the safety of commercial fishing for the entire United States, not to mention assisting with television’s popular “Deadliest Catch?”

And in yet another twist of irony, she gets seasick.

A decade later, it all still surprises Jennifer Lincoln, probably more so than anyone else. Lincoln is an injury epidemiologist and director of the Alaska Pacific Regional Office of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). She has worked there since graduating from ISU in 1991 with a degree in environmental health safety. She later went on to earn a master’s from University of Alaska-Anchorage and a doctorate at Johns Hopkins.

A native of Sullivan, Ind., Lincoln — back then, she was still Jennifer Wright — first traveled to Alaska when she took an internship after her junior year at ISU, working for the Indian Health Service out of Anchorage. She was charged with visiting native villages across south central Alaska to conduct environmental health surveys. She loved both the job and the area.

She also fell in love with something else there — a northern California boy named Phil Lincoln who was stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base (now Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson). The two met while babysitting  for a neighbor, Lincoln told Indiana State University Magazine during a recent telephone interview.

“It was his first summer in Alaska and it was of course my first time in Alaska. We ended up hanging out all summer, traveling everywhere we could. We would camp every weekend and just got to know each other that summer,” she said.

“…actually, I didn’t talk – I listened.” — Jennifer Lincoln

Wright returned to ISU engaged. She finished her degree, married Phil and moved back to Anchorage so he could complete his military stint.

As it happens an earlier internship — with NIOSH in Morgantown, W. Va., after her sophomore year — led the organization to think of Jennifer when it opened its Alaska Pacific Regional Office. They wanted to address the high rate of occupational injuries and fatalities in Alaska (five times higher than the national average). Lincoln had been a popular and productive intern in Morgantown, so when they learned she was moving to Anchorage they quickly recruited her to come work for them.

Lincoln is a fast learner and a good listener, both of which proved vital in her new job. “I didn’t know anything about fishing when I moved here,” she said. “I didn’t know the difference between a trawler and a troller, which are two different types of fishing vessels. So I started hanging out with a lot of Coast Guard people, started talking to a lot of fishermen. And actually, I didn’t talk – I listened.”

It wasn’t long before she ended up directing the office.

Taking the ‘Deadly’ Out of ‘Deadliest Profession’

Jennifer Lincoln with her research team and a fishing crew they just outfitted with personal floatation devices.

When she moved to Alaska, she told her mother that she thought they would be there for maybe two years until Phil finished his assignment here.

“Well, Phil ended up getting out of the service, but we stayed in Alaska because we love it and I have a great job,” Lincoln said.

The bulk of her time at NIOSH is focused on identifying hazards in fishing, then working with industry to develop sensible safety programs to address them. According to NIOSH, commercial fishing is one of the most dangerous occupations in the United States. It involves hazardous working conditions, strenuous labor, long work hours and harsh weather.

In the period from 2000­–2010, an annual average of 46 deaths occurred (124 deaths per 100,000 workers), compared with 5,466 deaths (4 per 100,000 workers) among all US workers. Lincoln is dedicated to changing that.

As such she has become the commercial fishing safety expert for Alaska and continues to expand her expertise and research to projects worldwide. She has testified before Congress and, due in part to her efforts, the death rate in Alaska from fishing accidents has dropped significantly. 

Her style is to involve those who are most affected by her work — the fishermen themselves.  Their collaboration has led to safety improvements such as  an emergency shut-off switch for deck winches, which previously was a major industry hazard.

She explained, “I was looking at hospitalizations among commercial fishermen in Alaska and I saw that deck machinery kept coming up as the cause of these expensive injuries and hospitalizations. A lot of them were happening in southeast Alaska, so I went down there and held focus groups with fishermen in four different communities. I showed them the data and said, ‘This is what I’m concerned about, this is costing you a lot of money, this is resulting in very severe injuries to a lot of people. What should we do?’ “

“ Instead, there are more fishermen killed fishing for crab in Oregon, fishing for shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico or fishing for scallops in New England.” – Jennifer Lincoln

They all pointed to the hydraulically driven deck winch, in particular the type used on a purse seine vessel (a type of boat that uses a seine or net for harvesting fish). It wasn’t uncommon for a crewman to get his rain gear caught in the cable and be pulled into the winch, with no way to stop it as the power controls were located behind him.

“So the fishermen suggested  we make something that would allow us to hit a button and stop the winch,” Lincoln says. “I ended up partnering with some NIOSH engineers out of Spokane, Wash., and a fisherman in Seattle who wanted to assist, and the three groups worked together to design this e-stop. Since then we have licensed the technology to a company in Seattle, and now fishermen can buy e-stop retrofit kits for their winches.”

She also convinced winch manufacturers to make the e-stop a standard on their product.

Lincoln’s research extends outside Alaska to circumnavigate the U.S. In fact, the “deadliest catch” doesn’t really take place in the Bering Sea any more, even though they have the television show, she said. “Instead, there are more fishermen killed fishing for crab in Oregon, fishing for shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico or fishing for scallops in New England.”

So her group is examining man-overboard alarm systems in the Gulf of Mexico’s shrimp fleet, “because when I looked at the data I found that the leading cause of fatality among shrimp fishermen were falls overboard, and the victims were usually alone on deck – there was somebody else on the boat, but they didn’t know the person had fallen in,” she explained.

In New England, she’s worked with lobstermen on entanglement prevention, developing ways to prevent them from getting caught in their trap lines and pulled overboard.

Yet another pet project is finding which type of personal floatation device (PFD) works best for which type of fishing, as one might be  better for crabbing, while another type works best for salmon fishing, Lincoln explains.

The PFD is the best chance that a fisherman will survive if he falls overboard, but getting fishermen to wear them is a whole other story. “It’s like getting people to wear seatbelts in cars,” she said. So Lincoln is searching for the best safety device that simultaneously does not hamper the fisherman’s ability to get around and do his job.

Hanging with the “Deadliest Catch”

Jenifer Lincoln and her colleague Ted Teske in the field at Dutch Harbor.

That’s how she became involved with the “Deadliest Catch.” For years, she provided data on lives lost, number of Medivac flights, etc., to the scriptwriters for the show.

“Sometimes I like the way that they use the information and other times it upsets me a little bit because they misrepresented it maybe a little bit,” she admitted. “Like, they’ll ask me about the total number of fatalities that have occurred in the Bering Sea, then they’ll present it like it’s all crabbing fatalities and that’s not always true. So I’ve gotten more specific to make sure that I’m providing exactly what it is they want.”

But she never actually watched the show, she admitted. “It was just a little bit too melodramatic for me,” Lincoln explains.

“Then I ended up meeting some of the guys on the show because I enrolled them in my PFD study. The crews on the Time Bandit, Wizard and the Cornelia Marie participated. They first did the safety survey that I conducted, then they wore the PFDs for me and evaluated them while they were working.

“I ended up starting to watch the show because I wanted to spy on them to see if they actually wore the gear that I gave them,” she said with a laugh.

“ “I think that for me, the story here is that this Indiana girl has created this amazing profession, this amazing career, and it all started at Indiana State.” – Jennifer Lincoln

And did they?

“Oh yes,” she answered. “Every time I saw the Time Bandit group, particularly Andy Hillstrand, he always had the PFD on that I had asked him to test. And the captain of the Wizard made a mandatory policy that everybody who works the deck has to be in a life jacket and it was because of that research study. There’s a $50 fine now if you go out on deck without a PFD on.”

In 2010, her efforts earned Lincoln the inaugural NIOSH Director’s Award for Extraordinary Intramural Science in the category of Early Career Scientist. Before her career is done, she is certain to earn many more kudos.

But that’s not what drives her. It’s the chance to save lives and prevent injuries that keeps Lincoln charged about what she does.

“I wake up every day and I can’t wait to get to work. I feel so fortunate that I have a job that I absolutely love,” she said. “And you know, it all started in Indiana. Going to school at Indiana State, getting involved in the field of environmental health, taking the safety classes, getting exposed to worker safety and health, and the environment and then really realizing that you can have a job — that a bachelor’s degree opens doors for you, and now you can go out and do this.

“I think that for me, the story here is that this Indiana girl has created this amazing profession, this amazing career, and it all started at Indiana State.”

Laurel Harper is a freelance writer in Louisville, Ky.

Bev Kearney, GR '82, now a coach at the University of Texas, recently received the BET Honors Award for Education.

In reflection of her lifetime work and her role as a mentor to others, ISU alumna Beverly Kearney (GR ’82), head coach of the University of Texas women’s track and field team, was presented in January with the 2012 BET Honors Award for Education. 

BET Honors has become a staple in BET history by celebrating the lifetime contributions and exceptional service of certain individuals to African-American culture in music, literature, entertainment, media, service and education. The 2012 honorees included renowned poet/author Maya Angelou (literary arts), internationally acclaimed musician Stevie Wonder (musical arts), Grammy-Award winning songstress Mariah Carey (entertainer), influential filmmaker Spike Lee (media), the heroic Tuskegee Airmen (service) and Kearney, the inspirational coach and mentor (education).

“There is not an honoree who I don’t feel a connection to,” Kearney said prior to the event. “It’s truly an amazing group of people. I am humbled and inspired.”

Kearney, herself, has inspired many over the years.  With a coaching career that spans four decades, she has developed into one of the most decorated and distinguished coaches in the sport of women’s track and field. She has led Texas to six national titles and in 2007 was enshrined in the U.S. Track and Field and Cross Country Coaches Association’s Hall of Fame.

If it wasn’t for Indiana State, however, all of this success may have never come to be.

A standout athlete in college, Kearney started her track career at Hillsborough (Fla.) Community College, earning National Junior College All-America honors. After transferring to Auburn University, Kearney excelled and was selected Athlete of the Year and team MVP during her senior year.  She graduated in 1981 with a bachelor’s degree in social work and went on to earn a master’s degree in adapted physical education at Indiana State while serving as a graduate assistant for the Sycamores track and field team from 1981-82. 

“I never really wanted to be a coach. I was a coach by default,” Kearney said. “When I finished college, I didn’t have anywhere to go and so the only way that I realized I could make it was to go to grad school and the only way I could go to grad school was to take a grad assistant coaching position.  In coaching, I realized that I could do what I wanted to do as a social worker and impact people’s lives through education and through mentoring but I could also quench my competitive thirst, which is to be the best at whatever I do.  So it was a compromise of both and ended up being the perfect career for me.”

Kearney’s time at Indiana State not only redirected her career path, it also influenced her approach and perspective on coaching.

Bev Kearney hugs one of her athletes.

“My experience at Indiana State had a resounding effect on how I coach because it gave me the opportunity to coach men and women at the Division I level which taught me that you coach an athlete, then an event, and never a gender,” Kearney said. “It was amazingly fun but extremely stressful because it showed me that I wanted to win and I had athletes there that were hungry to win.   We didn’t have the pressure of being Indiana or being Tennessee at the time but we were going to disrupt everybody.  We had our first set of real All-Americans and it was a time that I really learned to have a love for the sport from a different perspective other than an athlete.”

Kearney’s story, though, stretches well beyond the sport she loves.  It is a story of triumph through tragedy, a story of defying the odds and perseverance.

From Indiana State, Kearney continued to move up the coaching ranks, first as head coach of the University of Toledo track and field program from 1982-1984 and then serving as the top assistant coach at the University of Tennessee from 1984-1986.  In 1988, Kearney became the head coach at the University of Florida, where she earned national acclaim. Not only was she named the 1992 NCAA Indoor and Outdoor Coach of the Year, but Kearney was also the first African-American female track and field coach to win an NCAA championship. 

The University of Texas hired Kearney as their head coach in 1993 and it didn’t take the talented coach long to transform the Longhorn track program into a national power.

Kearney was on top of the coaching world when tragedy struck. 

In 2002, while traveling with friends to Disney World during the Christmas holidays, the SUV Kearney was riding in crossed the median and flipped four times, killing two of her friends and leaving the former athlete paralyzed. Doctors said Kearney would be paralyzed for the rest of her life but with a strong will and great determination, she defied the odds and now walks with a cane. 

Dedicated to serving her athletes, Kearney coached from her hospital bed and then her wheelchair during her rehabilitation. 

Equally as dedicated to the development of her athletes off of the track, Kearney has been recognized for the high graduation rates of her student-athletes.

“The most gratifying part of coaching, people don’t realize, you forget where the trophies are, you forget where the medals are, you don’t think about the money but you will forever see faces,” Kearney said.  “You see the excitement of a kid, that no one ever thought would graduate, walk across the stage and show you their diploma.  You see someone kiss a goal of scoring at a conference meet or winning a national championship or being an Olympian or being an Olympic medalist.  Those moments are extremely priceless.”

As a result of her accident, Kearney started the Pursuit of Dreams Foundation, a non-profit organization providing resources, motivation and guidance. 

“When people ask me, how is it that you have succeeded in spite of your obstacles,” Kearney said in her BET Honors acceptance speech, “you know what I tell them?  I don’t have a choice, I don’t have a choice because my hero is my history and my history is a legacy of people who have triumphed over tragedy, who have succeeded in spite of the oppression. How can I fail? Because they’ve taught me that failure is not an option.”

Tina Dechausay is the director of new media for Indiana State University Athletics.

Bryan Leturgez, left, poses with teammate Duane Mock after winning the America's Cup two-man bobsled event in Calgary, Canada, in 1997.

Bryan Leturgez heard the horn blaring over the speaker system so loud that it sliced through the frigidly chilled air as if it were a hot knife peeling away butter.

It was time to go to work.

At the top of the bobsled hill, the blaring horn meant he and his three teammates needed to prepare to race down a slick, icy shoot in excess of 70 miles per hour. But for Leturgez, the bobsled driver for the United States national team, only thought of questions. Did he study enough? Does he know the turns well enough? Was there something else he could have done?

As Leturgez grabbed a handle on the bobsled to push it down the course, he realized what he needed to do: let his mind go blank. Empty it of everything. Let instincts take over.

“It’s a real nervous energy, and ultimately, this is where sports psychology becomes a big part of an athlete’s repertoire to prepare themselves, because typically you get in there and you start playing mind games with yourself,” Leturgez said. “You have a lot of energy, you’re excited, but yet you’re scared.”

Leturgez, a Terre Haute native and former Indiana State standout athlete, represented the United States as a member of the national bobsled team. He battled against top bobsledders from around the world, and even represented the U.S. three times at the Winter Olympics in France, Norway and Japan.

It began on the gridiron with hopes of one day playing on Sundays.

Boiled up

Bryan Leturgez competes in a track and field event.

Leturgez excelled in running track, wrestling and playing football in high school, and he accepted a scholarship to continue his football career at Purdue University. But after his first year on the team, the coach who recruited him, Jim Young, resigned from the team, and new head coach Leon Burtnett and Leturgez did not get along.

“I had the speed, I had the strength, and my coach at Purdue said, ‘You’re pro caliber,’” Leturgez said. “But we were just butting heads.”

The relationship deteriorated, and Leturgez quit the team and left the university – along with a four-year athletic scholarship in the process.

He returned to his parents’ house in Terre Haute. Leturgez was quite familiar with Indiana State, as his mother earned two degrees from the university, while his father earned three, and so he inquired about enrolling.

After sitting out a year per NCAA rules for transferring athletes, he participated in ISU’s walk-on tryouts, where his performance was just as it was at Purdue. The coaching staff spoke with Leturgez about joining the team, but he was told that he would have to sit out another year. He could practice with the squad, but he wouldn’t be able to participate in games. The revelations frustrated Leturgez, who still doesn’t know why he would’ve needed to sit a second year.

“My dreams and aspirations of heading to the NFL, they were going to disappear rapidly,” he said. “Mentally, I just did not want to go out and be a tackling dummy for the team.”

He decided to turn his attention to another sport he excelled at, track and field. Leturgez asked an ISU track athlete how to join the team, and he was directed to coach John McNichols. Their paths had crossed years earlier, when Leturgez was a senior in high school and McNichols coached at Bloomington North High School.

Still, McNichols didn’t forget who he was.

“Of course, I immediately recognized him, and he asked if it would be okay if he were to come out for the team,” said McNichols, who coached the standout athlete on the Indiana high school all-stars track and field team. “I was just trying to build the program at the time, and of course, I didn’t kick him out.  I remembered how good he was.  So it all kind of started at that point.”

Leturgez participated in a decathlon, which consists of 10 different contests including the pole vault and long jump, later that October. “That was it,” he said. “I never bothered to look at football anymore.”

He competed regularly in the decathlon before running in the 400-meter hurdle race during a track meet, and his finish “would have placed very high among our conference,” McNichols said. “He was very gifted, and that created a problem as to where we should actually put him.”

Leturgez shifted his training to the 400-meter race, which, he said, would also free him up to participate in more competitive events for points (though the decathlon is 10 different events, the winning athletes earn team points for just one event, rather than 10 separate competitions). He qualified for the 400-meter hurdle NCAA championships in 1986, his final year of eligibility for the team. He remained in Terre Haute following the season and trained for the 1988 U.S. Olympic trials while still taking classes at ISU. He graduated from ISU in 1991 with a degree in business management.

Another chance

Though Leturgez advanced to the final race of the U.S Olympic qualifiers, he did not finish in the top three to qualify for the U.S. team.

“We always are so strong in the hurdles, our whole field usually has ‘A’ standard,” McNichols said. “It’s just whoever has that good race on that day.” 

In training with the Sycamores, Leturgez created another opportunity for athletic glory. Fellow Terre Haute resident Bruce Roselli, who also trained with the ISU track and field team, noticed an ad for the U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton Federation seeking track athletes to become pushers for the national bobsled team.

After the 1988 Summer Olympic trials, Roselli approached Leturgez about becoming a member of the bobsled team he was creating for the World Cup trials. Leturgez’s training for the Summer Olympics was over, and as he was not encouraged by the prospects of looking for a job when he hadn’t finished his baccalaureate degree, he snagged the chance Roselli offered to pursue a different sport. “It was kind of a no brainer for me,” Leturgez said. He became one of the pushers, the members of the bobsled team who provide the running start to begin a sled run.

Bryan Leturgez at the Hall of Fame induction luncheon.

Though Roselli’s squad did not qualify for the U.S. team, the bobsled federation approached Leturgez separately and requested him to join.

“They’re going to try to find the strongest, the best to be on our national team,” McNichols said. “So I wasn’t surprised that he was asked.”

Though his competitive life gained traction, his personal life hit encountered friction. His mother, who had encouraged him to focus on bobsledding, passed away while he was in Calgary, Canada, training for upcoming bobsled competitions.

“My dad decided to hold off on having the service for her so I could come home,” Leturgez said. “Three days later, I was headed on a plane to Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, to start the World Cup season.

“So [there was] a lot going on.”

Globetrotting

Leturgez had to once again transition to another sport –in the midst of bobsled World Cup events, which are international competitions featuring the top bobsledders in the world representing their countries.

“For me, I was just like a kid in a candy store,” he said. “I was just excited to be a part of it all, but then recognized the way I was going to be successful was to watch, learn and listen.”

He estimates it took about two years before he regularly competed with his global counterparts.

In the 1992-1993 season, the team won the gold medal at a World Cup competition in Calgary. At World Cup contests that year, the team won three gold medals, one silver and one bronze.

“Finally getting the opportunity to go and compete in bobsledding and then start winning, and winning medals was just hugely gratifying, because now you’re not just competing against Americans, but you’re competing against the best in the world,” Leturgez said.

That year his team won the overall World Cup championship.

“It’s all synonymous of a great experience because I’ve got to tell you, in life, there are few things other than maybe the birth of your children, that give you a greater sensation than standing at the top of the podium and listening to the national anthem being played,” Leturgez said.

He made the U.S. bobsled team for the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France, where he was the captain of the team that finished in 11^th place. Following the momentum of his team’s World Cup performances in the 1992-93 and 1993-94 seasons, they arrived at the 1994 Winter Olympics expecting to compete for a medal, Leturgez said.

 But on the second day of competition, an unbelievable mistake happened: the bobsled was left out in the sun, Leturgez said, causing the metal runners that propel the bobsled down the ice to warm up, in violation of Olympic rules. The Washington Post reported in 1997 that it was the only sled ever disqualified for the violation, as runners that are warm can cause a bobsled to run faster.

The team entering the Olympics with medal aspirations didn’t finish the competition.

 One final hurrah

Following his 1994 experience, Leturgez wanted to become a driver for the next team. He realized after his first year that he eventually wanted to become a driver, which “is basically the quarterback of the team,” he said. The driver decides which pushers from the U.S. national team will be with their sled. The federation wanted drivers capable of faster push starts, Leturgez explained, so it was receptive to training him as a driver.

Bryan Leturgez poses with Ron Prettyman at the 2009 Indiana State University Athletics Hall of Fame induction luncheon.

Learning to drive the sled, he said, proved easy to do. Yet, to steer the sled at speeds between 70 and 90 mph, he needed to develop his focus to study the nuances of each track. Reading those nuances meant the difference between making the run in safety or risk injuring bobsled team members.

 As the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, neared, Leturgez felt prepared to steer the sled through turns as it flew down the ice on narrow blades of steel in what he expected would be the final Olympics of his career.

 Three weeks before the games, Leturgez rode in the bobsled of another driver hoping to qualify for the U.S. team when the sled crashed coming out of a turn. Leturgez fell partway out of the sled. His knee and elbow scraped along the ice as the heap of bodies and bobsled continued screeching down the track. Leturgez suffered a third degree burn that eviscerated a patch of skin on his knee to the bone and a second-degree burn on his shoulder caused by the intense heat from the friction of his body abrading with the ice course.

He faced a decision: have an operation to repair the damage, preventing him from competing in the Olympics, or wait until after the games, knowing that he’d be racing with a silver dollar-sized hole on the right side of his knee.

 “So I bit the bullet, and made it through it,” he said. “It was excruciatingly painful, but I made it.”

 Though he made it to Nagano, his Olympic experience again proved bittersweet. He participated in the practice runs with his bobsled team, but the injuries affected him – he needed five minor surgeries to cut away the dead skin of his knee wound. Coaches replaced him on the team, preventing him from racing in the Olympic competition.

 Lessons learned

After the 1998 Olympics, he evaluated his life. His father had died. He had been living with his girlfriend for three years. He decided to pursue other life goals.

 His girlfriend is now his wife, and they have two daughters, ages 12 and nine.

 That doesn’t mean that he was initially happy to leave bobsledding behind when he finally retired.

 “After I left the sport, there was a lot of resentment, and a lot of athletes feel that way when they walk away,” Leturgez said, “I think part of that is dealing with closing that book, so to speak, that reality is about to set in.” 

 He was asked by a reporter before the 2010 Winter Olympics, if he would be interested to be on the team again. Leturgez dismissed the idea.

 “I said the biggest thing about it is that I don’t want to be that selfish anymore,” he said. “As an Olympic athlete, the one thing you find yourself having to do is be very selfish.”

 He since has put his ISU business management degree to good use in the financial services field. He has lived in several parts of the country before recently moving to the New York City area – not far from Lake Placid. While he would be interested in getting involved in bobsledding again by creating training programs for athletes, his focus remains on family, especially spending time with his daughters and helping them reach their goals.

“… I still hold that opinion, that I’d much rather share (in their lives) with them, where they want to go, as opposed to me,” Leturgez said. “I’ve already been there.”

Austin Arceo is the assistant director of media relations.

Benjamin Tomak visited Buckingham Palace during his study abroad in England.

When Benjamin Tomak walked on to Indiana State University’s campus in 2010, he did so with a certain amount of fear and self doubt.

On May 5, Tomak will cross the stage at Hulman Center and graduate. Beyond achieving his degree, Tomak found a future by defeating his doubts. He received a fellowship for a one year master’s program in history at the University of Liverpool. After completing that degree, he will attend the University of Delaware, where he also received a fellowship to work on a master’s and doctorate.

The man who once had trouble attending classes now wants to be a history professor.

“I want to be the kind of professor I’ve had here,” Tomak said.

Tomak enrolled at ISU in 1998 after graduating from high school. Two years later, he dropped out. Then he dropped out of Indiana University and Ball State University, admitting that he didn’t have a willingness to attend class.

“I always kind of regretted it, but I put it in the back of my mind,” he said.

He went to work in the restaurant industry and worked his way up to a general manager position.

“I was making good money,” he said. “I was in charge of the place, but I absolutely hated my life.”

“ At that stage, I needed people in my corner.” – Benjamin Tomak

But he began to read again and, in reading, found his path. He delved into history – his major while at ISU – and soon spent his days off reading that subject.

“I thought ‘Once upon a time, you had a chance to do this,’” he said about studying history. While the idea of returning to college tempted him, his doubts raised their specters. “I was terrified I’d fail again.”

But in 2010, with the support of his girlfriend, now fiancée, he decided to go for it. He also had a plan, one that had worked his first semester back in school at Ivy Tech Community College. He attended every class. He sat in the front row. He listened. Every day, he worked on his homework.

Instead of failing, he succeeded. He also discovered something else.

“I started loving it,” he said.

Though he lived in Bloomington, Tomak decided to attend Indiana State because he had accumulated some college class credit from his previous stint. He also found help when he had questions.

“At that stage, I needed people in my corner,” he said.

With his mantra of “Don’t miss class,” ringing in his head, he made it to every class, even driving through snow and ice from Bloomington.

He also found professors that encouraged him.

Benjamin Tomak sightseeing in Paris at the Arc de Triomphe.

“Right away I noticed that Benjamin was absolutely determined to do something with his life,” said Robert Hunter, history professor and Tomak’s adviser. “He wanted to prove to himself that what happened earlier was not the real Benjamin Tomak.”

Hunter described his role as helping Tomak figure out what he would need to do at ISU into order to gain admission into a highly-competitive graduate program, and also inspiring him in order to boost his confidence.  Hunter told Tomak his own story of being a struggling, first-generation  college student with limited financial means who dreamed of attending an Ivy League graduate school, and had made it into Harvard. 

“Since study abroad had not only enhanced my competitiveness but also changed my life,” Hunter said, “I suggested that he consider this.” 

However, Tomak at first laughed at the idea. 

“I had about 100 reasons why that was impossible,” he said.  “I mean, who hasn’t thought about it.  Financially, it was impossible to do.”

Except that it wasn’t. Hunter convinced Tomak to meet with Janis Halpern, director for academic programs abroad.

“I went to talk to her with absolutely no expectations and I walked out with hope that it might be possible,” he said. “She’s the kindest, most helpful woman, period.”

Tomak received three scholarships, including the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship from the U.S. Department of State, to pay for his study abroad semester. The money allowed him not only to study at the University of Chester in England, but to also travel in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales as well as to Paris and Rome. He also found a graduate program that interested him in nearby Liverpool.

“For Ben, I wanted to ‘make it happen’ so he could go. For him it wasn’t just an ‘adventure’ to travel, but more a way to open doors to a future as a university professor,” said Halpern.

“I was transformed by the whole experience,” Tomak said. “I went over knowing that I wanted to be a professor and go to grad school. This made things less vague. I knew what I wanted to do and what I wanted to write about.”

“He’s laid the ghosts of his past to rest.” – Isaac Land

Tomak plans to study the Atlantic world in American and European contexts. In Liverpool, he will earn an interdisciplinary master’s degree in the study of the global 18th century. That degree, he thinks, will be useful when he returns to the United States and studying history.

“To study 17^th and 18^th century topics in England and get that perspective is invaluable,” Tomak said. “Early American history is British history. What I want to study doesn’t go much past the American Revolution.”

On his return to Terre Haute and ISU after studying abroad, an excited Tomak began meeting with Isaac Land, an associate professor of history. Land created a reading list of 17 books for Tomak. Once a week, the two would meet at Coffee Grounds and discuss the book they read for the week. During those months of meeting, they discussed books usually read by graduate students such as “The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History,” “Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference” and “The Satanic Verses.”

“I wanted to give him a broader repertoire and a sense of the diversity of scholarly approaches,” Land said. “The list was tailored to his particular weaknesses with gender history, race and nationalism.”

Benjamin Tomak visited the coast of Wales while studying abroad.

Tomak described Land’s work as “above and beyond” and he said the reading list proved the key to help unlock graduate programs’ doors.

“This is why most of us went into this profession,” Land said. “It’s not just about educating, it’s to really build a scholar, to build a thinker.”

Tomak applied to 12 graduate schools and was accepted to eight.

“I have been planning this for more than two years and now it is here,” Tomak said about graduate school. “This is someone who never had a goal or had seen something through in his life.”

The University of Delaware, one of his top picks, besides offering a fellowship, allowed him to defer for a year to complete his schooling at the University of Liverpool. 

“It’s like I’m a different person,” Tomak said looking forward to graduation. “Coming back to ISU was absolutely the right decision to make…I had a level of support at ISU all along the way. I thought, ‘What if I fail again?’ Now, I’m going to a world famous university across the ocean.”

 “If you’ve had setbacks, there’s no barrier to recovery,” Land said. “He’s laid the ghosts of his past to rest.”

Jennifer Sicking, GR ’11, is the editor of Indiana State University Magazine and associated director of media relations.