When John Jenkins ’74 arrived in Lewiston from Newark, N.J., to attend �ֲ���ý, the Androscoggin River was polluted and stinky. 

No one would ever — ever! — imagine spending time along the river to bike, kayak, walk, jog, or just hang out. And it definitely wasn’t a place to celebrate someone with imagination and hope. But things change, sometimes for the better. 

Fifty years later, on a former railroad trestle turned walking bridge over the Androscoggin, a big gathering of friends, family, colleagues, and admirers came together to remember Jenkins, who died in September 2020, and to dedicate the span as the John T. Jenkins Memorial Bridge. 

Everyone misses Jenkins, but every message at the June 10 gathering was upbeat, positive, and hopeful. Because that’s who Jenkins was. “He had the ability to make people feel good just by showing up,” said Maine Gov. Janet Mills, , an unprecedented figure in Lewiston, Auburn, and Maine history. 

The naming ceremony was one of two events during Reunion weekend honoring Jenkins. A day later, a long-postponed memorial service for Jenkins was held in the Lewiston Armory.

�ֲ���ý friends were close by throughout the weekend, and a committee of alumni has been raising funds to endow the John Jenkins Scholarship Fund. There are enough memories of Jenkins to fill a book, and that was another task of the committee: supporting a biography, John Jenkins: The Mayor of Maine, written by Chuck Radis ’75.

Jenkins was also known as the “mayor of �ֲ���ý.” He was genuine and kind and everywhere; he acted in early modern dance productions for Marcy Plavin, and ran track for Walt Slovenski. He would​ keep everyone laughing on bus rides until the legendary coach stood up and yelled, “No belly laughing!” — he didn’t want someone pulling a stomach muscle by laughing too hard. 

Jenkins taught John Emerson ’73 how to be easier on himself as a student. “I felt pressure to succeed and to perform,” Emerson recalled. “It can overwhelm you. John would help you put all of that in perspective. He helped me believe that friendships and relationships and how you handled winning and losing is what really mattered.”

After �ֲ���ý, Jenkins’ talent as a competitive martial artist — he’s a member of multiple halls of fame. He was a community organizer and motivational speaker.

He was the first Black citizen elected as mayor of Lewiston, as a Maine state senator, and as mayor of Auburn, the latter as a write-in candidate, becoming the only person to serve as mayor of both Auburn and Lewiston. Last year, both city councils voted unanimously to name the footbridge, across which immigrants from Canada once traveled by train to Lewiston when the span was a railroad trestle, in memory of Jenkins.

He was a role model, said Mills. Physically fit and mentally fit, Jenkins “had an attitude toward life that inspired everyone,” including the many children who heard his talks.

Both mayors also spoke at the event, as did Ann Parker, Jenkins’ companion. She said that anyone walking across the Jenkins bridge will never walk alone.  

“I really hope that when you walk across that bridge, you feel the spirit of John,” she said. “If someone’s having a difficult day, walk across John’s bridge. I guarantee it’s going to lift you up. If you’re having a wonderful, awesome day, walk across the bridge, because John’s gonna be there with you in all his awesomeness.” 

An occasional roundup of what �ֲ���ý folks are saying about this and that.

Ever Forward

“What we do is go forward. Everything else is yesterday. There’s nothing wrong with yesterday — we learn from yesterday, or hopefully we learn from yesterday.

“You go forward with our dreams and hope for human beings. We embrace tomorrow. That’s what we should do. Most people are afraid of tomorrow. Don’t be afraid!”

— The poet Nikki Giovanni, speaking on Zoom offering the opening lecture for the Museum of Art exhibition on the life and work of Ashley Bryan.

Remembering the Mayor

“He was the mayor of Lewiston and he was the mayor of Auburn. But he was absolutely the mayor of �ֲ���ý College.”

— Bob Littlefield ’75, speaking to the weekly Bobcast and , his friend and teammate in football and track and field, who was widely known and loved during his students days and who also served as mayor of Lewiston and Auburn.

“I felt a tremendous amount of pressure to succeed and to perform. It can overwhelm you. John Jenkins would help you put all of that in perspective. He helped me believe that friendships and relationships and how you handled winning and losing is what really mattered.”

— John Emerson ’73, recalling Jenkins’ friendship and impact.

For the Love of the Game

“We rarely have the time just to focus on field hockey as it is — really enjoy the sport in a very different way. Our team is doing a good job of taking that mindset and not getting caught up in, ‘I wish we were playing.’ We’ve had a lot of fun working on our skills in a way that’s entirely different because you don’t have somebody to beat tomorrow.”

— Head field hockey coach Dani Ryder Kogut, speaking to the weekly Bobcast about of a season without games.

Wise Service

“I treasure the fact that young men and women I taught have joined the military and have taken some of their �ֲ���ý conversations and readings into lives that have no doubt demanded great wisdom and complicated decisions.” 

— Clark Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies Jane Costlow, speaking at the dedication of the Veterans Plaza on Oct. 9.

The More Things Change

It’s about relationship building. It’s about taking care of yourself: staying fresh, mentally sharp, and getting your grades in order, and all of those sorts of things. Much has changed but some things must stay the same.

— Head coach of men’s soccer Tyler Sheikh, speaking to the weekly Bobcast about .

Thank You

As an institution, we owe a debt of gratitude to them for carrying forward a student experience at a time when it’s harder than ever.

— Associate Dean of Students for Residence Life and Health Education Molly Newton ’11, praising the work of Junior Advisors and their support of first-year students this fall.

Hands Up, Don’t Shoot

“They were like, ‘So for a least 200 years we’ve known that hands up means ‘don’t shoot.’”

— Michael Boyd Roman, lecturer in art and visual culture and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, recalling teaching Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808 to Morehouse College students in 2014 as protests erupted in response to the police killing of unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. In Goya’s painting, the viewer’s eye is drawn to one man, clearly unarmed, his arms outstretched in submission.

Head Coaching

“For five or 10 minutes, I’d be intently focused on debits and credits. Then my mind would stray, thinking about coaching scenarios: How I’d handle this in a workout, what I would do if my star runner came down with an injury right before the state meet. I’d put myself through these scenarios time and time and time again.”

— Head coach of men’s cross country and track and field Al Fereshetian, speaking to the weekly Bobcast and recalling how, during his college days pursuing a business education at Bentley College, . He later transferred to the University of New Hampshire to pursue teaching and coaching.

Banning travel harms higher education and the economy — WGME-TV

 
Media outlets covering the local angle on President Trump’s executive order temporarily banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries zeroed in on President Clayton Spencer’s statement, the most forceful issued by leaders of the Maine colleges.

WGME-TV’s Marissa Bodnar did an on-campus who told the reporter that in “higher education in particular, knowledge knows no boundaries. Higher education is inherently international, and higher education has been what has fueled our innovation economy.”

President Spencer speaks to WGME-TV about the executive order’s potential impact on higher education.

As most did, the quoted the second sentence of statement: “I am appalled by the executive order and the inhumane manner in which it is being implemented. The order is antithetical to American values and the principles on which �ֲ���ý was founded and continues to stand.”

The first in its roundup story under the headline “Leaders of Maine’s private colleges denounce Trump’s immigration order,” reporter Noel Gallagher noting that “top officials” at the publicly funded University of Maine System “remained largely silent.”

Meeting King moved him from “burn, baby, burn” to “learn, baby, learn” — WCSH-TV

 
On the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, two Maine media outlets, WCSH-TV and The Boothbay Register, shared recollections from John Jenkins ’74 about meeting King in Newark, N.J., in 1968, just a week before King’s assassination.

“It’s one of those things that doesn’t leave you,” Jenkins told WCSH-TV’s Cindy Williams.

John Jenkins ’74 speaks to WCSH-TV’s Cindy Williams about how meeting Martin Luther King Jr. affected his life.
 

As president of the South Side High School student council, Jenkins introduced King when he spoke. Jenkins recalled that he and fellow students didn’t embrace King’s message of nonviolence.��King was saying to “turn the other cheek,” Jenkins recalled. “I’d say, ‘You hit me in the cheek, and it’s on.'”

The chant in the streets of Northern cities was “burn, baby, burn.” Jenkins said that King told his audience to abandon “burn, baby, burn” and believe in “learn, baby, learn” The message changed Jenkins’s mind. “It got me thinking more deeply about my dream, and what I wanted to get out of life.”

A teacher at Lincoln Academy who lives in Rockland, Jenkins has served in the Maine Legislature and as mayor of both Lewiston and Auburn.

Jenkins is one of the few �ֲ���ý alums to have met both King and, later while working at �ֲ���ý after graduation, King’s mentor, Benjamin Mays, Class of 1920.

“It was truly amazing meeting two men who had such a profound impact on the civil rights movement,” Jenkins told the

Teachers create a life-long value system — Maine Sunday Telegram

 
Robert McAfee ’56, former president of the American Medical Association and longtime Portland-area surgeon, wrote an essay for the about two of his high school teachers who later became his patients.

“Teachers are very special people,” he wrote. “They not only share knowledge in their field, but also, along with your family and faith community, create your value system, which lasts a lifetime.”

McAfee asked a former chemistry teacher who became a patient why he chose McAfee over more experienced surgeons.

“He replied, ‘Robert’ – for I was forever first and foremost his student, not just his surgeon – I remember that you could derive the Henderson-Hasselbalch chemical equation better than any student I ever had, so you must be a good doctor!”

Rus Peotter ’75

He’s “genetically wired” to help people — The Republican

 
The retirement of Rus Peotter ’75, the 15-year general manager of WGBY-TV in western Massachusetts who got his start at WCBB-TV in Lewiston, prompted a of Springfield, Mass.

At a gala to mark his retirement, “there was no absence of superlatives to describe Peotter. Awesome. Unconventional. Special. Networker,” wrote Cynthia Simison. His wife told Simison that “I’m married to a can-do, I-do man. Rus is genetically wired to help other people.”

Rus Peotter ’75 has retired as general manager of WGBY-TV in western Massachusetts. (Paul Schnaittacher / WGBY)

Peotter sees his retirement as a changing of the guard. “Our business is changing remarkably,” Peotter told Simison. “I think I’m smart enough to know what those changes are, and the things that need to be done are going to require two things: a lot of work and a lot of time.”

Poetter and his wife have recently lost parents. “Life is precious,” he told The Republican. “I know how precious it is, and I’m not sure I wanted to work 12 hours a day, six days a week. It starts to affect how you see things out the window, how you look (at life) in the rear-view mirror.”

In , writer Debbie Gardner recalled Potter’s start in public TV: running a camera as a �ֲ���ý first-year for Channel 10’s bygone Great TV Auction.

As Gardner described it, “suddenly the camera’s viewfinder caught fire. An engineer came over, ripped off the burning component, calmly replaced it, and reassured Peotter, ‘You’re doing fine.’ Peotter was hooked. ‘I loved it,’ he said.”

Acting means never staying still — Ellsworth American

 
“One of the cool things about acting is that you are always learning and you are always adapting,” said Nate Stephenson ’18 in a . “That’s what I’m still trying to wrap my head around.”

Stephenson, a graduate of Maine’s Ellsworth High School, is a theater and French double major, currently studying in Nantes, France.

Nate Stephenson ’18 of Ellsworth, Maine, performs a monologue in the �ֲ���ý production of The Pillowman on Dec. 7, 2016. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

In the �ֲ���ý production of The Pillowman, writes David Roza, Stephenson “memorized two-page monologues and managed the tricky task of being a character and a storyteller on stage,” a role that won him a nomination to the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival’s regional competition for the Irene Ryan Scholarship.

Jason Castro

Can’t you smell that smell? Maybe not, says a �ֲ���ý neuroscientist.

In 2014, a widely-reported study in Science suggested that the human nose is capable of distinguishing at least 1 trillion odors.

But something smells a bit funny about those findings, according to scientists Jason Castro of �ֲ���ý and Rick Gerkin of Arizona State.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Jason Castro is a neuroscientist who studies the sense of smell, focusing on the neural circuitry involved in odor processing among other areas. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Castro and Gerkin have , and the story has been picked up by a number of media outlets,

“The conclusion in the 2014 paper relies heavily on untested assumptions about smell perception,” says Castro, an assistant professor of psychology.

“And the equation used actually shows that the number of distinguishable smells is fewer than 1 trillion, not more, making the original claim inaccurate, and in fact the exact opposite of what the calculation actually shows.”

Gerkin notes that “the assertion that humans can discriminate between at least 1 trillion odors is based on a fragile mathematical framework…. So the result in question could be tens of orders of magnitude — a factor of one with dozens of zeros after it — larger or smaller than first reported.”

Owen Dodson ’36

Owen Dodson ’36, photographed by Nancy Carrick Holbert, 1969, courtesy of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, copyright Arizona Board of Regents.

, journalist and activist Cliff Boyd looks at the life of mid-20th century author, poet, and playwright Owen Dodson ’36.

Boyd quotes Dodson explaining one chapter of his life, his brief work in Hollywood, where he met with writers and others in an attempt to create movies that wouldn’t have black stereotypes.

“But they didn’t pick up our cause because there were so many things going on in the government — Joseph McCarthy — and they were afraid,” Dodson said.

He continued: “In my time I was a very eloquent and good-looking young man. I should have had rays to pull them into our cause.

“But the commercial world had sucked them in, and they would not let their careers go away with a Black cause, even though they believed in the whole damn thing.”

�ֲ���ý Museum of Art

The �ֲ���ý Museum of Art offers a photography exhibition that is welcome for being unusual, says The Boston Globe.

“We’re so familiar with artists’ self-portraits that it comes as something like revelation to see a major American painter shown over a span of years photographically,” writes the in his review of The Painter of Maine: Photographs of Marsden Hartley at the �ֲ���ý Museum of Art.

Marsden Hartley in Cannes, France, in 1925, in a gelatin silver print made by an unknown photographer. (Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection, �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art)

“The �ֲ���ý show is unusual, with its emphasis on the painter-subject rather than the quality of the images or identity of the photographers (all but two are anonymous),” Feeney continues.

“That unusualness makes the show all the more welcome. The fact that Hartley had such an unprepossessing appearance somehow makes the images all the more revealing — and poignant.”

Feeney reviewed both the Hartley exhibition and the exhibition Points of View, both of which continue through Oct. 24

John Jenkins ’74

John Jenkins ’74, who will be inducted into the International Black Belt Hall of Fame in the fall, spoke to about his path from Newark, N.J., to �ֲ���ý, and on to becoming one of Lewiston-Auburn’s leading citizens.

Mills notes that “what matters most to Jenkins is the impact karate has had on his life and how he has used it to make a difference in the world around him.”

Jenkins has been mayor of both Auburn and Lewiston and served as a Maine state senator.

Jenkins said, “I’ve got tons of trophies. They’re all sitting in storage. To have a change of life for folks in a positive way, there’s no better legacy than that.”

Tyler Mosher ’11, Matt Brockman ’08, Ross Brockman ’11

“there was a day not so long ago when this country had squat to offer as far as hard ciders. And for those of us who came of age on this deliciously dryly-sweet boozy beverage, it kind of sucked.”

Enter Boston-based Downeast Cider, produced by Tyler Mosher ’11 and brothers Matt ’08 and Ross Brockman ’11.

“The company produces a deliciously murky cider,” writes AP food editor J.M Hirsch. “Murky isn’t often a term associated with delicious. But roll with this one…. I balked when my first pint was poured. But then I tasted. Clean and crisp, a little sweet, a little dry. Which is to say, a balanced cider. The sort of drink Americans have shown themselves not particularly adept at producing.

Downeast cider, he concludes “is worth hunting for.”

Paul Heroux

In advance of the dedication of newly renovated Theodora Park, highlighted a contribution by Paul Heroux, a ceramicist and a senior lecturer emeritus of art and visual culture at �ֲ���ý.

Adding to his national reputation, Heroux contributed a set of decorative tiles for a park fountain, telling Spence that he’d been working on the commission, designing, glazing, and hand-painting 370 ceramic tiles, for more than a year.

Theodora Park in the Ansonborough neighborhood of Charleston, S.C. (Julia Lynn)

Paul Heroux's tiles in the fountain at Theodora Park in Charleston, S.C. (Julia Lynn)

Paul Heroux's tiles in the fountain at Theodora Park in Charleston, S.C. (Sam Spence/Charleston City Paper)

“My two inspirations for the piece are the formal boxwood hedges I see around town and the wonderful green glazes used on old Italian tiles, jars, and garden ornaments,” Heroux told the