Freshmen Rose Nelson and Amee Ellis

Through the years, the teeter-totter marathon has raised tens of thousands of dollars for the shelter, which merged with other service organizations to become Tubman. It now offers help to families struggling with domestic violence, substance abuse and mental illness.

The St. Thomas tradition started as the result of a student disciplinary decision. A student had defaced a female doll. In reparation, the student was to design a fundraiser to benefit female victims of abuse. As a result of the unfortunate incident, the fundraiser was born.

In order to raise funds and meet their goal, each of the participating Ireland Hall residents pay a minimum amount to ride the teeter-totter for an hour. They also go out into the community to secure pledges from local businesses, family, friends, fellow students, faculty and staff.

Since the inaugural year, few things have changed. While the original event involved 48 hours of continuous teetering, the event was expanded to 72 hours in 1993. However the mission and impressive teeter-totter technique remain the same. Students continue to flock to the event hoping to claim a time-slot. Contrary to what you might expect, the night shifts are usually the first to be filled. While the May-time weather is usually mild, marathoners have had to endure poor conditions, such as the 40 degree temperatures and heavy rain in 2003. Rain or shine, they keep a positive attitude and support each other with hot chocolate and conversation.

Webster defines “tradition” a half dozen different ways. At the University of St. Thomas, “Tommie Award” defines tradition. On Wednesday, May 8, the Tommie Award will be presented for the 81st time, to Eyo Ekpo, the latest in a long purple and gray line of the university’s best and brightest.

The award has been presented annually (with two exceptions) since 1931, when Ralph Antil edged classmate Don Pates by an 87-82 vote of their classmates. Awards were not given in 1945 and 1946 because of World War II and extremely small enrollments.

The award was titled Mr. Tommy in 1931, and later became the Tommy Award and still later the more gender-neutral Tommie Award.

In a 2007 St. Thomas magazine story, Pat Nemo and Marie Connor ’07 wrote that the “announcement was bold: The Mr. Tommy Award, vowed a 1931 Purple and Gray story, ‘promises to be the biggest event of its kind in the history of the school.’ Hyperbole aside, the College of St. Thomas student newspaper (and predecessor of The Aquin) thought it had hit on a winner in the spring of 1931: a contest to name ‘the representative St. Thomas student’ based on ‘popularity, scholastic standing and extracurricular activity.’”

Voting procedures and criteria for winning have changed somewhat over the years along with the name, but the heart of the award remains unchanged since its inception – recognition of the St. Thomas “senior who, according to UST students, faculty and staff, best represents the ideals of St. Thomas Aquinas through scholarship, leadership and campus involvement.”

In the beginning

The award was initiated in the early years of the Great Depression. According to Joseph B. Connors, author of Journey Toward Fulfillment, a history of the College of St. Thomas, times were tough on campus in the early ’30s.

The stock market had crashed in late 1929, bringing on the Great Depression. On campus, the old Administration Building had been condemned (again) by city inspectors, who gave the administration a month to vacate the building. Archbishop Austin Dowling, chair of the college’s Board of Trustees, died Nov. 29, 1930. “It was to be more than a year before a new archbishop would arrive to take over direction of the St. Paul archdiocese,” Connors wrote.

But as Connors pointed out, “Paradoxically, it was a period of accomplishment.” The trustees voted to build a new administration building and a classroom building. Enrollment, which had been 490 in 1930, jumped to nearly 650 in 1931.

Connors continued:

Despite the bleakness of the times, morale throughout the student body was good. The students generally felt confident that the school was advancing academically. They seemed, too, to have felt an increased sense of being part of a distinctive collegiate community. The academic year of 1930-31 brought the first strictly collegiate yearbook, the Aquinas. Within that same year, an important campus tradition was started with the election of the first “Mr. Tommy,” a student chosen by the student body as an embodiment of qualities held in special esteem at the College. The first person to bear the title was Ralph Antil, of Maple Lake, Minnesota, a campus leader who had maintained a high scholastic average while starring in football and basketball and being captain of the 1930-31 teams in both sports.

Tommy firsts

Antil was the first Mr. Tommy, but other historical “firsts” also have been recorded.

1935
This year marked the first time that two students – Bernard Van Demark and Frank Haider – shared the award. A tie vote was recorded again in 1943 when James B. Gergen and Eugene C. Neitge shared the award.

1947
Norbert Robertson was the recipient of the Mr. Tommy Award, but times were different back then. “He was the first Tommie to be married with a child,” said Gwen, Robertson’s wife of 60 years. “It was war time and the war was just over.”

1958
Charles Williams Jr. never paid much attention to being first black award winner. “I understand that I was the first black student to win the Mr. Tommy Award,” he said, “but I never paid much attention to that. I was just a member of the student body and there was no emphasis on black students on campus, though St. Thomas always welcomed students of color. Being named the outstanding senior affected my life by reinforcing the sound moral and personal values instilled in me by my parents.”

1981
Rachel Wobschall, from Waseca, Minn., became the first woman in the award’s 51-year history to win it. It was named the Tommy Award at that point. Today, Wobschall is the executive director of Alumni and Constituent Relations. Interviewed in 1981 by Anne Etzell in The Aquin, the student newspaper at the time, Wobschall said, “I didn’t know until the day of preliminary voting that I was up for the award. It’s the highest honor I could imagine. I was so surprised.”

Wobschall was highly involved on campus. She was president of the All College Council (ACC), a member of the President’s Student Development Council, Spanish Club, Liturgical Choir, the Alcohol and Drug Education Committee and Advisory Council on Religious Affairs; in addition, she was a former ACC vice president for academic affairs and was class representative her freshman and sophomore years.

1982
One year later, William Vouk, from St. Stephen, Minn., became the first St. John Vianney Seminary student to win the award. The Aquin reported that he was majoring in philosophy, was a tutor-teaching assistant with the St. Thomas’ Philosophy Department, and a member and former chairman of the Pro-Life Subcommittee of the St. John Vianney Apostolic Life Committee, coordinator of the seminary’s Christian Children’s Fund, and a member of the CST Democrats.

Aquin staff writer Lou Anne Coyle wrote that Vouk said that as a Tommy Award winner he was “‘very atypical. It’s kind of a fluke that I won. It’s still a surprise, especially since the rest of the guys (the other three finalists) were such great guys.’ Vouk said the seminarians were very supportive and wanted to get ‘one of their own’ elected. He said he feels that the Tommy Award represents the model St. Thomas student.”

Tommies of note

Following graduation, Tommie Award winners sometimes remain on campus or come back to campus. Six award winners are employed by St. Thomas:

• Steve Fritz ’71, director of athletics
• Mark Dienhart ’75, executive vice president and chief operating officer
• Joe Sweeney ’77, head coach, women’s cross country, and track and field programs
• Rachel Wobschall, ’81, executive director, Alumni and Constituent Relations
• Steve Hoeppner ’84, executive director, Development
• Elizabeth (Baniak) Zupfer ’91, manager, alumni systems, Alumni and Constituent Relations

Through the accompanying purple-tinted sidebars, they have shared their thoughts on what it has meant to them to have won the Tommie Award.

If one reads through the entire list of 82 award winners, and soon to be 83 with the addition of Eyo Ekpo, you likely will recognize many who were prominent members of the community in the years following their final march through the Arches. Three of those Tommies are highlighted here:

1937  E. Harvey O’Phelan, M.D.
A  former member of the board of trustees at St. Thomas, Harvey O’Phelan served for many years as a doctor to the Minnesota Twins. He often patched up St. Thomas athletes, even going to Cuba with the baseball team in 2000. Two sons, Sean and Edward, graduated from St. Thomas in the 1970s, as did his father, James, in 1906.

1941  James Shannon
The straight-A student graduated in three years with a major in Latin, was ordained a priest and, at age 35, became president of St. Thomas. He served from 1956 to 1966. Pope Paul VI named Shannon a bishop and he served until 1969, when he left active ministry. He later married and served in the administration at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M., before returning to the Twin Cities as president of the Minneapolis Foundation and then the General Mills Foundation.

1955  Francis Mach
Director of athletics at St. Thomas from 1968 to 1992, Mach said his “most gratifying accomplishment was playing a significant role in re-establishing the men’s athletic program to prominence in the MIAC, and the rare opportunity to start an athletics program for women and watch it prosper.” What he liked most about St. Thomas were his fellow students: “The many friends were unpretentious, serious about studies and fun loving.” Three Mach children graduated from St. Thomas.

Back to the future

Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish, essayist, historian, teacher and social commentator, may have been right when he said: “History is the essence of innumerable biographies.”

The University of St. Thomas has been blessed to have had “innumerable biographies” since its founding in 1885 by Archbishop John Ireland, and among them have been numerous Tommie Award winners.

If Tommie history is any indication of the future, generations of Tommie Award winners will continue to be outstanding student leaders and citizens who will uphold the “ideals of St. Thomas Aquinas through scholarship, leadership, and campus involvement.”

His venture inspired UST Libraries Director Dan Gjelten, OSF administrative assistant Julie Kimlinger and poet/former circulation supervisor Kirsten Dierking to launch “Poetry on the Patio” in 1999. The event is held over the noon hour annually in April  in celebration of National Poetry Month.

Festivities always hold court outside on the patio of O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library near the glass pyramid. Foul weather has caused the event to relocate indoors – to the library’s Leather Room – only three years: 2005, 2010 and 2011. Gjelten fondly nicknames these rainy occasions, “Poetry in the Parlor.”

“I love it that this event treats poetry as a people’s art, not something that is refined or effete or scholarly or separate from people’s real lives. These poems all mean a lot to the people who read them, and for very different, and often very personal reasons,” Gjelten enthused.

Kimlinger works hard all year to solicit an interesting mix of administrators, faculty, staff and students to read. Past readers have included couples (English Department professor Heid Erdrich and John Burke), as well as mother and daughter (Lisa Burke, Opus College of Business, and her daughter Abby) and father and daughter (Dr. Steve Laumakis, Philosophy, and Molly, who at 4 is the youngest to have read). Other unique readers have included then-student and library staff member Carita Izzo, who read “Life” by Mother Teresa in Portuguese; Dr. Michael Degnan (Philosophy), who recited all 80 lines of W.B. Yeats’ “Easter 1916” from memory; Dr. Bill Banfield (Music), who read from Langston Hughes’ play “Soul Gone Home,” accompanied by Gjelten on blues guitar; and Professor Emeritus of Music Dr. Merritt Nequette, who read selections from a collection of writings that were meaningful to his wife, Dr. Pauline Lambert, St. Thomas’ first woman senior administrator, who passed away from a brain tumor eight months before the reading. Nequette selected “Instructions for Life in the New Millennium,” an Anishinaabe prayer, and a short passage called “Doors,” which was read at Lambert’s memorial service.

Gjelten said the event is “a true potluck, and you never know what you’re going to get.  But it always works out. It’s like a piece of performance art, really.” Past readers have recited poems on war, love, God, defiance, fathers, marriage, even dancing giraffes. The only rule is that readers may not read one of their own poems.

The most read poem – recited at four readings, in 2001, 2003, 2006 and 2011 – is “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. In addition to Frost, the most read poets during the event’s history are Shel Silverstein, Billy Collins, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson.

Dan Gjelten

Since the goal is to get as many different people involved as possible, Gjelten is the only person who has read at the event every year, something he considers to be a perk of his job. He kicked off the inaugural event in 1999 to a modest crowd of about 15 people with a reading of “A Blessing” by James Wright (1927-1980), a poet who taught at the University of Minnesota and Macalester. It has since doubled in size, though the turnout is largely dependent on the unpredictable late-April weather.

On Poetry in the Patio becoming a tradition at St. Thomas, Gjelten said he is pleasantly surprised: “Who knew so many people liked to read poems? But the big lesson for me is that THEY DO!  It was a wonderful thing that Pinsky did – he believed that Americans both read poetry and had favorite poems, and I think we’ve proved that it is true. I love giving all kinds of people the chance to stand up and read something.”

If you’d like to hear what Gjelten, in 2002, called “an experience of regular people reading remarkable poetry,” attend this year’s Poetry on the Patio, at noon Tuesday, April 23, on the front steps of O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library.

Poetry on the Patio, 2012

In addition to the crèche, located atop the university’s landmark Summit Avenue Arches, the university is lighting a large pine not far from the Arches and the deciduous trees leading from the campus’ lower quad to its upper quad.

For the first time, a 34-foot artificial tree will decorate the atrium of the Anderson Student Center, which opened in January. Although it is located inside the three-story atrium, the tree will be visible from throughout most of the newly expanded lower quad.

The annual ceremony also features music, readings, hot chocolate and holiday cookies.

St. Thomas has had an outdoor Nativity scene for more than six decades. Campus clubs erected the first scenes in the 1940s. Later, Dr. Hugo Reny, a Vienna-born psychology professor, fashioned flat, hand-painted plywood figures that were displayed in the quadrangle.

In 1950, a log-wall stage – some 8 feet high and 5 feet wide – was built for the scene and installed on the Summit Avenue-facing veranda of Aquinas Hall. It later was replaced by the more elaborate and lighted statues that the university’s Physical Plant staff install each December on top of the Arches.

Father James Lavin serving peanut butter sandwiches to students in the basement of Ireland Hall.

Since his death earlier this year, countless St. Thomas alumni and students have paid tribute and shared stories about the impact Monsignor Lavin had in their lives. (See a selection of those tributes here and in the comments section of this story.)

Alumni relations manager Nadine Friederichs ’90, ’12 M.A., recalls celebrating Lavin’s birthday every year while they worked together in the Alumni Association and after he moved off campus. “It’s always been a big deal to celebrate with him,” Friederichs said. “I remember celebrations being held at The Lexington, and later in his life we would celebrate on campus.” The largest celebration was his 90^th birthday party in 2008.

The on-campus celebration of Monsignor Lavin’s birthday continues Nov. 12, what would have been his 94th. The Alumni Association invites the entire St. Thomas community to enjoy complimentary peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Scooter’s, the restaurant bearing the beloved priest’s nickname.

And you can look forward to the tradition continuing for years to come as Nov. 12 has been officially declared Monsignor James Lavin Day at the University of St. Thomas.

For more information, contact Friederichs.

When it comes to MIAC football, there’s only one rivalry that can truly be labeled: “The Big Game.” Other schools may stake a claim, but everyone knows “The Big Game” is when the Tommies take on the Johnnies.

Saturday in Collegeville “The Big Game” kicks off the MIAC schedule for both St. Thomas and St. John’s University. The Tommies have taken two straight from the Johnnies, and one can bet that the Johnnies will be pumped sky-high to avenge last year’s 63-7 thumping in St. Thomas’ O’Shaughnessy Stadium. (Ironically, the stadium is named after Ignatius Aloysius O’Shaughnessy, who got the boot from St. John’s and enrolled at St. Thomas.)

It’s been said that the game wasn’t as close as the score indicated, to twist a cliché, as St. John’s didn’t score until 4:10 remained in the game. Will the Johnnies avenge their ignominious defeat of 2011? Will the Tommies “three-peat”? Both teams are 2-0, the Tommies are ranked No. 6, and the Johnnies are unranked.

Forget last year, forget the rankings, forget the record – they mean nothing when “The Big Game” is played. But don’t forget the history of this annual battle royal, some of which is pictured above, and some of which is posted here by Gene McGivern, UST’s sports information director.

Tickets for Saturday’s 1 p.m. game in Collegeville are $7 for adults and $5 for students. (Parking spots are gone by 11 a.m., so arrive early to avoid a long walk to the stadium.)

The game will be aired on WCCO AM 830 with Dave Lee and Eric Nelson on the call.

Go Tommies!

There are 1,460 students in this year’s incoming class. Among them are 37 international students, 29 valedictorians and six National Merit Scholars. They come from 429 high schools in 30 states.

March Through the Arches is a Tommie Tradition that began in 2000. It was the brainchild of St. Thomas Dean of Students Karen Lange, along with two of her student leaders, who came up with the idea on the trip home from an orientation conference. “We heard from a lot of other schools at our conference about the traditions they had for their incoming students each fall,” said Lange. “We thought this would be a meaningful way to gather our incoming students and send them to the arena for the convocation.”

According to Lange, the first March Through the Arches looked a little different than what took place on Tuesday. “When we first started, we lined the sidewalk across part of the quad. Now we line it all the way across, several-people deep,” she said. “It’s clearly become an important tradition for faculty and staff, as well as upperclassmen who participate.”

Tommie pride was in high supply as well. According to Lange, “It was Tommie Tuesday, so there was a sea of purple. It was also fun to see the cheer team and the student athletes taking part.”

As to whether the tradition leaves an impression on students, Lange has first hand evidence that it does. In the words of a student orientation leader, “This is one of my favorite days of the year.”