Feeling Presidential

I just can't get enough of these things. Thanks, Winnie.

Tink Wagner, Part I

On June 1st of this year, my dad would have turned 70 years old. Bernard Royce "Tink" Wagner died on November 18, 1970. He was barely 31, and I was about seven months old at the time. Sometime during the previous year he had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease, which was at that time still a young man's disease but it was nowhere near as manageable and treatable as it is today. I think it's safe to say that all my life I've missed him; I've been fascinated by the thought of him; I've felt cheated that so many of the people in my life knew him but that I never did. There's not a week that goes by when I'm out in the park or on the field with one of my boys, throwing a baseball, that I don't wish I could have done the same thing with my dad, the ballplayer. Or that my boys could be out there having a catch with their granddad, the ballplayer. It's the same reason that I cry like a baby every time I watch Field of Dreams, a movie that I'd seen a zillion times over the years but to which my nine-year-old has recently taken a shine.

Over the next week or two or three I'm planning on putting some of my thoughts about him into this blog. I hope it's not too weird to do that. I AM pretty sure that it's not as weird as my first idea, which I hope no one has stumbled upon yet (although I'm about to spill that one). In clicking around Facebook one day a few months back, I found a network of folks who would have been contemporaries of my dad's at Colby College in the early 60s. I thought, "hey, maybe it would be cool if I started a FB page for my dad," so that his old friends and classmates can get the news about my mom (who many of them would surely remember), and about his son (me), and about his grandkids that he himself never met. I ran that plan by a couple of my colleagues at Davidson, who were less than enthusiastic about the notion of a friend of theirs starting a page for his dead father. Yeah, maybe a little odd. So now that I have this blog I thought that I'd be able to post a few things and circulate them to a targeted group of family, friends, and folks in the Colby alumni network who might be interested.

Anyway, you get the idea. All of you in the family and group of close friends, I hope that this all doesn't offend you. And I hope that you'll be patient and realize that I'm probably the one guy who's completely NOT qualified to write about my dad, since I never knew him. So I'm counting on all of you to help me along with some of the details, and to share your stories and memories with me so that I've got a better picture in my mind than I have now. And speaking of that, I'd also love to have you send to me any photos or other tidbits that you think would interest me. I will greatly appreciate anything that you have to offer.

So I'm going to let this post sit for a day or two, and I'll come back with some more in a little bit now that I've got the concept out there for all of you to consider.

And it was so great to hear from you yesterday, Uncle Dan.

BTW, the caption of the photo above is "French Ferucci Tink Ralph Bill". Not sure which year it's from, but it is one of the photos that over the years helped me build my personality myth around my dad: strong, confident, right in the middle of the pitching staff, a force to be reckoned with.

There's a fire burning in this guy

Most of you reading this will know very well who Max Paulhus Gosselin is. If you do, you should consider a Oui Oui Max tee-shirt. If you don't, he's the Tim Lincecum of Davidson basketball. The physical freak who finds a way to get the job done no matter how he has to do it... the guy who wills himself to success with smarts, guts, and unnatural anatomical composition. That's him in the photo to the left, probably on one of those gorgeous ally-oop passes that Steph used to get into his hands , coming out of nowhere from the weak side.

Max and I had breakfast at The Egg yesterday morning to talk about his big post-graduation endeavor, the working title for which is "From the Hardwood to the Ocean." I won't try to explain the whole thing here, but the synopsis is as follows:

• Max and his girlfriend, Katherine, will sail unassisted from Miami to the Azores, then to Morocco, and then once they pass through the Straits of Gibraltar, they will circumvent the Mediterranean. Completing that, they'll take stock of their health, their energy, and the condition of their boat and other equipment, and at that point will decide whether or not their year-long journey has satisfied their quest. They might continue on to Brazil and other points in South America (he even talked about making it around Cape Horn - yikes!).
  
• Max has been a boat owner for a year. One year. And the 25' vessel that he uses to tool around Lake Norman? NOT the boat he'll be trusting to deliver him across the Atlantic. He's in the process now of finding a seaworthy craft more in the 38' or 39' range. That's a lot more boat to manage, but it will allow him to sleep in something better than a contorted position at night and will be more suited to ride out storms at sea (more bulkheads = less torque).
• Max and Katherine will be learning how to do this and survive by taking pretty much every course known to man in the next few months. They'll start "CPR at Sea" a couple of days after he returns to P.Q. next week, and then move on to navigation, boat repair, and language classes after that. Yes, language classes. He's not going overseas to affect lives (more on that in a moment) without speaking their languages!
• He's going to make it a point to do some things that he really feels he should do along the way. They'll try to make it to Bulgaria to see the home of Darina Spasova, who has been one of the team managers. They'll shoot for Istanbul so that they can see the home of Can Civi, one of his teammates. Max really wants to see Sicily and Egypt. He'll stop in Algeria to visit a friend there (as well as a friend in Casablanca, that they'll probably hit on the way in and again on the way out).
• And they will do everything they can to touch the lives of children along the path of their journey. You see, Max isn't content with the way he's affected and inspired people during his four-year basketball career at Davidson. He wants to meet families and children in every country they pass along the way to spread the message of hope, dreams, and the promise that one can achieve them. He wants to show that you can make a difference in people's lives even if you don't have a million dollars in your bank account. That sometimes you can make a difference just by having smarts and guts. And an unnatural anatomical composition.

The adventure aspect is certainly looming large for Max. I sense that now that his life as a basketball player at Davidson is behind him, he needs something new and crazy to match his innate energy level (and being the first time I've really sat down for a long conversation with Max, I was struck by the similarities in watching his mind work on something and watching him play basketball - he's absolutely kinetic). But he's SO stoked about making a difference for all of these people that he has never met - and will likely never see again after he departs. I don't know if these guys are just trying to one-up each other now or what, but it's just so refreshing and inspiring to see the way our guys are making their mark on the world. Math major and three-point specialist Bryant Barr? Just raised over $16,000 to combat malaria in poor African communities. Gospel-singing, shot-blocking, fade-away-jump-shooting adonis Andrew Lovedale? Leaving in a couple of weeks to deliver and distribute more than 11,000 pairs of shoes to children in his native Nigeria. By night, they're mild-mannered D-I basketball players making an improbable run to the Elite Eight. By day, they're freaking superheros. Thank you, Davidson College student-athletes, for showing America exactly what is possible when a quality academic institution runs a quality athletic program. It's a shame that other schools are afraid to recruit the athletes we do.

Anyway, you should keep your eye on Max's blog. His ability to make updates will be limited over the summer - he'll be on board a boat doing some training somewhere near Greece - but I for one am excited to see where this journey takes him.

Good luck, Max and Katherine! Be safe.

Oh, the horror. The horror.

Yeah. So, remember when I mentioned my friend Winnie? The one who I work with who has all of the fun and creative talent? Here are some additional examples of the marvelous work she does.

I could TOTALLY have lived in the 1500s. No question about it. I also make a killer amphibian. And in the last couple of years, I've been a leprechaun, Cupid (but a really, really disturbing version of Cupid), a reindeer, Harry Potter, an NC gubernatorial candidate, and now I can't even recall what else. Ask nicely and I'll try to dig up some of the other concoctions.

Alenda Links... it's coming soon!

Among our mad geniuses that work behind the scenes at Davidson is Winnie Newton. She is the master of the witty Photoshop job, and without her creativity I don't know where we'd be. I wanted to know if she could whip up something quick and fun that we could use as imagery for Alenda Links, Davidson's new online alumni community that will be launching soon. Viola! Behold the Chambermaids, with our online community's title chiseled at their feet... and those grand dames of the college are so excited about the project that they've busted out their own laptops to get into the action.

Okay, all this fun aside. We really are close to finally giving all Davidson alumni the keys to the community, which comes with:

• a fully searchable alumni directory that can be accessed 24/7 from home
• career mentoring tools so that you can register yourself as a mentor and/or find one for yourself
• nice new online registration tools (see the earlier post about Summer College), so that we can start phasing all of our events into online registration (no more sending us checks!)
• lifetime email forwarding address, that allows you to have "Davidson" in the name (user@alumni.davidson.edu)
• Facebook network compatibility - since the email forwarding addresses have "davidson.edu" in them, they can be used to get yourself into the Davidson FB network
• real-time, photo-capable class notes that you can post and read anytime, anywhere
• a far superior user interface for updating the college with changes to your contact and other information, as well as the ability to be completely granular about which information you do or don't want other alumni to see when they search for you in the directory (currently, your only choices are "viewable" or "confidential"

Anyway, it's gonna be great. I can't wait to roll it out to all of you very soon.

For the love of the game

So my oldest, Colby, who is 9, has become quite the ballplayer and fan in the last year or two. Earlier this week he had his first real run-in with a screaming one-hopper in the infield. It took him a few hours to get over the "oh my goodness that's the hardest I've ever been hit with anything" panic, but by the next day he was telling some tales about it in school.

For those of you who go back with me a few years, in order to help him get over the injury I finally went into the attic and grabbed some old Twilight League uni shirts that I've had ever since the BIW team went under (the boys had been asking for weeks that I get them so that they could wear them around). With a nod to the Mayfair crowd (Augusta, Maine, circa 1975), the three shirts here were worn by Peter Wagner, Ryan Card, and Bobby Porter in the summer of 1990, I think.

The Islamic World

So do you know yet about this year's Summer College program? We've got such an outstanding week of education and fellowship happening in just a few weeks, and there's still time for you to sign up and take part. We've got some AMAZING faculty taking part, and we'll be hitting our timely and relevant topic from several angles in the liberal arts spectrum (history, political science, religion, and art). Register online!

2008 was a banner year for our program. Where Summer College had often drawn 10-15 participants, last year we had about 30 students for Russ Crandall, Ralph Levering, and "Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency." So far this year we do have a handful of return participants, and we're counting on another 30+ attendance. I, personally, can't wait. And I'll hopefully be doing some blogging from the classroom as it's happening.

Getting it started

Blogging, to over-simplify as I often do, looks like fun. I've got several friends, mostly in the Davidson world, who do some really great stuff. I followed Will Bryan and Wells Black faithfully over the last couple of years (Wells was, incidentally, pretty much THE original Davidson hoops blogger... he did it because it was too hard to find Davidson in the media, so he did the dirty legwork and compiled it all in one spot for us all to read). When he's got the time to really keep up, Dave Mabe does some really cool things both for his work and for himself. Michael Kruse publishes some wonderful things, but of course he's a professional. Coach Cooke was awesome from Beijing this past summer. The things that Anna Marie Smith, Nicole Keroack, and Reed Ryan did from overseas really impressed me. And how can anyone overlook the freakish skills of Jordie Poncy?! I've always looked at their stuff and wanted to get in on the action, but it's a big commitment and I have been hesitant to jump in for fear that I'll get started and then lose the fire.

What has kicked me into action is the inspiration that my good friend John Syme, Davidson's Alumni Editor, has provided. This summer he's taking his vintage convertible and his super-cool dog, Dodger, on a cross-country trip of discovery... and he'll be blogging along the way. The more I think about it, the more excited I get about helping to spread the word about his trip and the writing that he'll be doing along the way. So I think that the folks above, and John's trip, and the promise that I don't have to bound by word count have all pushed me over the edge and now I've decided to officially become a blogger. Officially.

I do this with one particular occasion in mind, and that is my July 1-9 trip to Europe that I'll be taking on behalf of the Alumni Association. Part of our "Lifelong Learning" program, I'll be leading/hosting a group of Davidson alumni that are on a "WWII in Europe" excursion. We begin in Paris, spend significant time on and around the Normandy beaches, and then we follow the path of the American military in 1944-45 as our forces pushed to the German frontier. For personal reasons, this is a dream come true for me. My grandfather arrived in Theatre in November 1944; less than two months later, after surviving the horrors of the Hurtgen Forest, he was fighting for his life in a hospital in England after being mortared in the first days of the Battle of the Bulge. I've always dreamed of re-tracing his footsteps, and I can at last do so. But in a professional way this is also going to be a treat, because I'll be the representative of the college for an enthusiastic group of Davidson alumni and friends... most of whom had parents or grandparents who also fought over the ground we'll be covering. I'm so thankful for this opportunity, and I look forward to sharing it with you as much as I can in the coming weeks.

I plan to post information about our preparations, and then will attempt daily posts while we're on the trip in July. I wonder where we'll be, exactly, on the 4th of July?