French Alumni Newsletter
Alumni Notes, updated 6 April 2006
A number of miscellaneous comments and apologies are in order, beginning with a loud mea culpa for not having completed and distributed this newsletter over a year ago. The initial delay was not my fault; the extended delay, into a third year since I first sent out the questionnaire, is ultimately my fault.
All of the entries below have been typed by me or by my wife, Nancy. I am responsible for the final proofreading and editing, so all errors in name spellings, dates, grammar, etc., are to be laid at my doorstep. We did our best to pass on to you as much as possible of each response, but obviously had to summarize in many cases. I recognize, as I reread, that we did much more cutting/summarizing in some entries than in others: that was simply a matter of fatigue at the end of a typing session, not a lack of interest in what had been sent on. Please note that all responses have been filed and that many will be used by me or by another volunteer to complete a history of French studies at KU.
You'll note that a number of entries give nothing but the person's name. In most of those cases, we had received form notices from the Endowment Association regarding one or more contributions to the department and therefore had addresses and a clear indication of the person's interest in the department. I ask here that those alumni/-ae send us a response (see below) as soon as possible and I will definitely send out a supplementary newsletter in the next few months. A few of those "name only" entries are there because one of the respondents sent us that person's name and address and asked that we send a questionnaire to him/her-but no response has been received.
A note about format: As you'll see, I have organized the entries by decades and alphabetically within decades-alphabetically by the family name of the person at the time s/he was at KU. If you're looking for someone in particular, it would be wise to check the preceding and following decades and to look under any other name(s) that you know. I did double-list many of those who overlapped decades, with a note to check the other decade, but I'm sure I did not catch all of them. The date in parentheses after each name is the date of the response. Whenever I remembered to do so, I used square brackets ([]) around my personal comments inserted in a response summary, but I think they are usually obvious from the context.
To those who made specific requests somewhere in their response: I tried to answer all of these, but know I missed some. In some cases, there was a request for the home address or e-mail address of a former classmate and I did not reply right away because we had not had a reply from that person-and then failed to follow up when the information became available. In addition, we are anxious to protect your privacy and will not send out addresses without your premission. I urge anyone who wants to contact another alumnus/-a to e-mail us and we'll contact that person (if we have his/her coordonnées) and start the ball rolling. One of the tasks that took a good chunk of my time was the creation of a more complete data base; it's not great, but now requests can be answered more easily.
Content of this newsletter. This is first exclusively alumni newsletter for the Department of French and Italian and, for the decades before the mid-1960s, the Department of Romance Languages. As you'll see, the body of the newsletter is the set of responses to my questionnaire of late 1999, early 2000. The great majority of responses are from alumni who studied French, although many of the earlier ones also studied Spanish (and went on for advanced degrees in Spanish) and a few of the later ones were in our Italian program. Italian has been an important section in our department, with a very strong Summer Language Institute (SLI) so I am sorry we have so few responses from those alumni. It may be a function of the way the KUAA sets up its list of alumni, but our original questionnaire was sent to every person on the KUAA list who had a major in French or Italian; additional questionnaires or e-mails were sent to persons we knew had gone on an SLI or otherwise had a strong connection with the department despite not being a major.
Former faculty. We have not included entries for former faculty unless they were also students (nor have we included separate passages on current faculty: that is available on the department web page: we provide a link below) but (1) in a future mailing, I will summarize as well as I can the changes in the department over the years since 1952, when I first came to KU, and (2) more immediately, one can learn quite a bit about the way things were "in the good old days" as well as about changes just by scanning the entries for each decade, even if it is not "your" decade.
Remaking contact with the department. I hope that this newsletter will prompt some of you to contact us more frequently, especially those still living in this area (and there are many-many of whom voiced an interest in attending French activities). In fact, I'd be happy to facilitate the creation of an alumni club in Kansas City and/or Lawrence, and/or Topeka. Or perhaps we could start an Alliance Française here in Lawrence with a nucleus of alumni: there is already one in KC and one in Topeka ( at least two of our alumna very active) but I'd like to see one here. It would also be great if alumni living in France would contact the SLI group(s) and visit them, meet the students. That goes for alumni who travel in France in the summer. Contact us and we'll give you the names of the directors and dates of the programs in a given summer. Meanwhile, those of you in the area are strongly encouraged to participate in current activities. To check on what's going on at KU and Lawrence in the French & Italian Department, please return to the home page of the department's web site
...and now on to reading the alumni notes.
