Features
Kat Braz
A Window into Westwood Manor

The Stewarts at Westwood

Robert Bruce Stewart (HDR M’68), known as R.B., joined the Purdue University staff as controller in 1925. At that time, Purdue enrolled 3,000 students, the physical plant was worth $3 million, and the endowment totaled $340,000.

Stewart, who went on to become the university’s first vice president and treasurer, is credited by many with influencing the character and growth of Purdue University. He spent 36 years building the university both fiscally and physically.

A Window into Westwood Manor
Profiles
Kat Braz
A Story in Stones

Geochemist Marissa Tremblay ’12 analyzes Antarctic rocks to unravel Earth’s climate chronology and predict the planet’s future environment

A geologic field excursion to Death Valley during spring break her first year at Barnard set Marissa Tremblay ’12 on course to becoming a scientist. She entered college intending to pursue a law degree, but stepping foot on that vast, desolate desert landscape marked with sand dunes ignited a curiosity to uncover the stories in stones.

A Story in Stones
Features
Kat Braz
Call of the Wild

50 Years of Wolf Park

Founded by Purdue ethologist Erich Klinghammer in 1972, Wolf Park began as an experiment to study wolf behavior. The pioneering research conducted there over the past 50 years contributed to a better understanding of the apex predator and facilitated its reintroduction into the wild.

Call of the Wild
Profiles
Kat Braz
Come From Away

Twenty Years After 9/11 Longhorn Reflects on the Unexpected Detour—and the Subsequent Broadway Show—that Altered His Life’s Trajectory

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Kevin Tuerff and his then-partner, also named Kevin, were on an Air France flight bound for New York City. The couple had just wrapped up a European vacation and they were eager to get home. A sudden drop in elevation over the Atlantic Ocean was the first sign that something was amiss. Then came an announcement from the cockpit.

Come From Away
Profiles
Kat Braz
A Way with Words

Pioneering journalist Betsy Wade ’51 broke barriers for women in news

When Betsy Wade ’51 became the first woman to edit the news in the 105-year history of The New York Times, she noted the spittoons vanished from the city room within her first week. Her landmark appointment to the copy desk in 1956 signaled a new era for women in journalism, previously relegated to women’s pages that covered the “Four F’s” — family, food, furnishings, and fashion.

A Way with Words

Art & Design

A Timeless Design

A Timeless Design

How Matt Bliss turned a family tradition into Modern Christmas Trees

As a child, Matt Bliss ’98 relished celebrating the holidays at his grandparents’ Broomfield, Colorado, home where the Christmas tree was anything but ordinary. Bliss’s grandfather, Lawrence Stoecker, designed his own tree, an artful cascade of concentric rings that hung from the ceiling.

He crafted the first model from cardboard in 1966 before experimenting with a second version made from Masonite and eventually settling on Plexiglas as the favored material. For five-year-old Bliss, his grandfather’s acrylic tree was a thing of wonder and a hallmark of the Mid-century Modern design aesthetic Bliss would grow to love.

My View from Seven Feet

My View from Seven Feet

Boilermaker basketball star-turned-artist Joe Barry Carroll explores his roots and shares his perspective on growing up in the impoverished South and traveling the world with the NBA through large-scale paintings that befit his imposing stature.

Joe Barry Carroll can’t answer the phone. His fingers are covered in paint.

When he calls back an hour later, his baritone voice exudes warmth. Carroll (M’80) grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Although he graduated high school in Denver, Colorado, he’s called Atlanta, Georgia, home since retiring from the NBA in 1991. There, he built a successful career as an investment adviser.

Exploding the Board Game Industry

Exploding the Board Game Industry

Meet the Boilermakers behind some of tabletop gaming’s hottest titles

Sir Ragnar had been found. He was alive but badly hurt. The wizard only needed to escort the injured knight back to the staircase where the rest of the rescue party was waiting. Suddenly, an alarm sounded throughout the dungeon. Ulag, the Orc Warlord, and his minions began attacking. Ragnar was killed in the melee. The heroes had failed.

It was all a bit too much for then-9-year-old Brady Sadler (LA’09), who vividly remembers breaking down and crying after the defeat.

The Secret Garden

The Secret Garden

Alumnus renovates his sophomore landscape design 20 years later

The hidden light court encased within the walls of Duncan Hall in downtown Lafayette, Indiana, was neglected and overgrown when Aura Lee Emsweller was hired as the hall’s first executive director in 1996.

The Georgian, colonial-style building opened in 1931 as a meeting place for social, patriotic, charitable, educational, and cultural events. A 1958 addition created the inner courtyard, designed to allow light to pass through the stately ballroom windows. It was in this narrow, unkempt space with a mucky, untended pond and ivy climbing the brick walls that Emsweller’s 6-year-old son, Schuyler, discovered a wonderland for the imagination.

Finis

Finis

Last apparel design and technology majors showcase collections in the final Purdue Fashion Show

The day has finally arrived. It’s five o’clock in the morning when the hair and makeup teams roll into the Cordova Recreational Sports Center and begin setting up the makeshift studio space where they will be camped for most of the day.

Designers arrive soon after, already exhausted from the previous day spent transforming the feature gym next door into a fashion runway and the previous evening running a dress rehearsal and finalizing their choreography. Not to mention the previous three months spent planning and organizing the final details of the show and the previous year spent designing and constructing their garments.

The past four years have all led to this day, when the last students majoring in apparel design and technology will showcase their capstone collections.

It’s the final Purdue Fashion Show.

Radical Underground

Radical Underground

Honors course explores how zines fostered communities of resistance

In the aftermath of World War II, social critics in the United States grew increasingly pessimistic about the roles of mass media, consumerism, and bureaucracy in society, viewing them as instruments of authoritarian control. These counterculture voices frame the curriculum of Underground Networks, a new course offered through the Honors College that examines radical forms of social life that emerge within yet in opposition to oppressive institutions.

Tired Boy

Tired Boy

Tired Boy, the bronze sculpture centered in Windsor Circle near the entrance of Wood Hall, was part of a collection of gifts donated to the university by philanthropist and art collector Catherine Barker Hickox of Michigan City, Indiana.

Its sculptor, Leopold Bracony, was inspired by an incident he witnessed during World War I. He noticed two people, a small boy and a woman, who stopped to rest in the midst of the bombing. Touched by the confidence the tired child placed in the woman, Bracony created the sculpture as a symbol of faith.