75 Years of Wagner Magazine

For 75 years - through 215 issues - Wagner College's alumni magazine has kept Grymes Hill graduates in touch with their beloved alma mater. In this special anniversary feature, we reacquaint you with the people who have made Wagner Magazine a reality, again and again, since 1948.

by Lee Manchester

IT ALL STARTED WITH AL

The year was 1948.

Al Krahmer '27 welcomes a student to campus in 1950.

World War II had been over for three years.

The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 — a.k.a. the G.I. Bill — had utterly transformed American higher education, funding the college educations of millions of veterans across the country. Enrollment at Wagner Memorial Lutheran College on Staten Island had more than quadrupled, rising from 440 in 1945 to nearly 2,000 in 1948.

Wagner's first postwar president, Walter Langsam, had demonstrated his leadership skills as a spymaster in America’s new intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, created during the war to root out Nazi secrets. Likewise, his three successors — David M. Delo, Richard H. Heindel and Arthur O. Davidson — had made remarkable contributions to the war effort as leaders in scientific manpower, public diplomacy and tactical training.

That same respect for leadership and expertise showed itself in the transformation of Wagner College’s postwar approach to serving its alumni community, including its communications.

That transformation was, to a large degree, thanks to the efforts of the college’s new alumni secretary and magazine editor, the Rev. Alfred J. Krahmer ’27 — known to everyone as just plain Al — who joined the Wagner administration in 1948.

Krahmer was a Wagnerian through and through. As a Wagner student, Al had been a member of the campus newspaper staff all four years. His father, the Rev. J. Christian Krahmer, was an 1893 graduate of the original Rochester, New York, incarnation of Wagner. After graduating, Vater Krahmer taught Latin in Rochester from 1897 to 1901, and again at the new Staten Island campus from 1923 to 1933 — which meant that Al and his family actually lived on the Grymes Hill campus in faculty housing while he studied for his Wagner diploma, his master’s in English from Columbia, and his credentials from the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

For 15 years, Al Krahmer held successive pastorates at two Lutheran congregations in Queens — but when his alma mater called in 1948, he answered.

For the next eight years, Krahmer dedicated himself to professionalizing Wagner College’s alumni services, joining the American College Public Relations Association as well as the American Alumni Council.

During his first year, Krahmer had the first promotional film made about Wagner College, “Beautiful Upon a Hill,” starring Robert Loggia ’51, a Wagner student and future film and television star.

But Krahmer’s biggest project was the transformation of the college’s periodical communications. The Wagner College Bulletin, which announced Krahmer’s appointment in March 1948, had not changed a great deal since its first issue was published in November 1920. The newsletter was nicely done, but it was nothing more than that: a nice newsletter.

The first issue of The Link: The Wagner College Alumni News, published in October 1948.

In October 1948, Al Krahmer published the first issue of The Link: The Wagner College Alumni News.

“This issue introduces something new to Wagner alumni,” Krahmer wrote in his introduction to the inaugural issue, “their own quarterly alumni magazine. We hope you like it. It isn’t entirely as we would like

it to be, but we’ll keep trying to make it a magazine Wagner alumni will look forward to and read eagerly.”

Krahmer edited 32 issues of The Link from 1948 through 1956 — more issues than any other editor has produced. The magazine’s cover went through four designs, and the contents evolved over the eight years of Al’s editorial leadership, but the purpose remained the same: to deliver news and features about Wagner College and alumni to our growing community.

When Al Krahmer resigned as Link editor in June 1956, the magazine sent mixed messages about his departure. In his parting editorial, Krahmer appeared to indicate that something was wrong, though he did not elaborate:

I am not going into the reasons why I’m leaving. I'm leaving because I feel I should, not because I’m mad at anybody. I have to confess to a little reluctance in leaving a work I loved, but my decision was based on a conviction that resignation was the only right thing for me to do.

A parting look at Krahmer’s record by alumnus Les Trautmann ’40, published in the Summer 1956 Link, contained no hint of discord.

A clue to the reason for Krahmer’s departure from his beloved Wagner surfaced the following year when President David M. Delo suddenly resigned. A front-page article in the Staten Island Advance quoted trustee president Frederic Sutter as saying that “a difference of opinion on administrative procedure led Dr. Delo to the conclusion that he has no alternative but to resign,” but Sutter did not elaborate, then or later. Delo himself said only that, “out of principle, I feel compelled to withdraw from the presidency at this time.”

An explanation for Delo’s 1957 resignation came nearly half a century later, in his son’s memoir:

Wagner College’s board of [trustees] was composed of Lutheran ministers, so for the first time, my conservative father found himself far to the left of governing fiscal thought. After [five] frustrating years, he concluded that you couldn’t improve without spending, and that for the health of his soul, he would be better off in another pond where the head fish were swimming in the direction he wanted to go.

One can only speculate how Krahmer was affected by President Delo’s conflict with Pastor Sutter and the trustees — but no matter the reason for his departure, Krahmer became the public relations director for the Lutheran Welfare Association of New Jersey on July 1, 1956.

Shortly thereafter he began graduate studies at Rutgers University for his master’s degree in library science, the next step in yet another career change. With M.L.S. in hand, Krahmer joined the library staff at Susquehanna University in 1960, retiring 10 years later.

Alfred J. Krahmer died in Dec. 1981. He was buried at Fairview Cemetery on Staten Island.

DICKERT BECOMES THE FIRST, TWICE

Editor-in-Chief Lois Dickert sits in the bottom row center of this Wagnerian staff photo from the 1945-46 Kallista.

VERY FEW EDITORS work alone. Al Krahmer was no exception.

When Al was putting together his plan for the college’s brand-new alumni magazine, he turned to Lois Katherine Dickert ’46 for help.

Like Al Krahmer, Dickert came from a Wagner family; she was the daughter of Rev. Henry B. Dickert, an 1899 Wagner College graduate from the old Rochester campus. Henry Dickert was serving as the pastor of Zion Lutheran Church in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, when his daughter Lois was born in 1925. When it came time for Lois to go to college, she naturally chose Wagner, where Henry was on the board of trustees.

From December 1944 until her graduation in June 1946, Lois Dickert served as the student newspaper’s first female editor-in-chief.

Before the war, it was almost unthinkable that a top student leadership position would go to anyone but a man. But during the war, when men were being drafted to fight in Europe and the Pacific, women began taking up the reins on Grymes Hill.

In 1945, Wagner College students elected their first female president, Evelyn Schaefer ’45, a year after the Wagnerian named Lois Dickert as its first female editor.

After graduation, Dickert worked as publicity director at Hartwick College. She resigned in July 1948 to join Al Krahmer and became the Wagner alumni magazine’s first assistant editor. From that time on, Lois Dickert worked for the rest of her life as a journalist, and a fairly high profile one at that.

Dickert left The Link in September 1950 to pursue a graduate degree at Columbia full-time, then worked as a freelance journalist in Paris for eight years. When she returned to the States, she moved to Los Angeles where she worked as a correspondent for Time magazine.

In late 1962 Dickert was in L.A. when an international crisis set the entire country on edge. The Soviet Union had begun placing missiles on the territory of its new ally, Cuba, capable of striking the United States in a matter of minutes — and, suddenly, the end of the world seemed like a real possibility.

In the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a “false alarm” at Miraleste Elementary School in suburban Rancho Palos Verdes, California, led teachers to believe that a nuclear strike on Los Angeles was imminent. The school’s dramatic evacuation became the subject of multiple news stories, including an L.A. Times article by Paul Weeks, titled “How Morning of Terror Hit War-Alerted School.” Lois Dickert’s interpretation of that story for the April 1963 issue of McCall’s, a prominent women’s magazine, struck a nerve with screenwriters Frank and Eleanor Perry. Dickert’s story became their inspiration for the 1964 antiwar feature film, “Ladybug Ladybug.”

Lois Dickert — who married Moses Bloom Armstrong in 1964 — continued working for Time magazine until she was recruited for the inaugural staff of a new celebrity-profile magazine called, simply, People. Over the remainder of her career, Dickert — now Lois Armstrong — wrote numerous cover stories for People, with subjects including Doris Day, Henry Winkler, Patty Duke and John Astin, Lee Majors and Farrah Fawcett, Shelley Duvall, and Marjoe Gortner. Armstrong became People magazine’s L.A. bureau chief.

In September 1996, while living in Santa Monica, California, Lois Dickert Armstrong ’46 died from cancer.

THE BIRTH OF WAGNER MAGAZINE

AFTER FOUNDING EDITOR Al Krahmer left The Link in 1956, a series of four editors took responsibility for the magazine.

Editor Gene Wilburn photographed at his typewriter by Burk Uzzle, October 1984.

But in the fall of 1964, a new face appeared in Wagner College’s information office: Gene Wilburn.

While he did not make any big changes in The Link for the first issue he edited (December 1964), his second issue was a groundbreaker. Working with associate editor Sal Asselta and art directors Fred J. Sklenar and Joe Knox, Wilburn waited until his second issue (April 1965) to launch what, in many ways, was a whole new alumni magazine, including a new name: Wagner.

Today, the name change seems like a no-brainer. After all, what college would not want its own name to prominently appear on the coffee tables of its alumni?

But to change the name of a beloved publication that had been around for 17 years — that was no small thing. Which is probably why that inaugural issue of Wagner magazine made a point of emphasizing that the new name and format were fully supported by not only the college’s trustees but also the alumni association.

The publication was completely redesigned, from front to back, starting with the page dimensions — from the old 8½ by 11-inch rectangle to a roughly 9 by 9-inch square. Modern graphics and page-design principles were applied throughout, giving it a “mod,” Sixties feel.

Another big innovation spearheaded by Gene Wilburn was the hiring of a young documentary/news photographer from Brooklyn, Burk Uzzle, for an extended shoot of everyone and everything on the Wagner College campus. We don’t know how many days Uzzle spent on Grymes Hill, training his eye on our classrooms, laboratories, athletic fields and public spaces — but we do know that the shoot took place almost immediately after Wilburn’s hiring in October 1964, and that the images he captured were nothing short of iconic.

Uzzle’s photos first appeared in a two-page photoessay published in the December 1964 Link, Gene Wilburn’s very first issue, and in all six issues of Wilburn’s Wagner magazine (April 1965 through June 1966) — even in the 1965 issue of Kallista, the college’s yearbook.

Uzzle would become one of America’s best-known documentary and news photographers.

In 1960, at the age of 22, he became the youngest photographer ever to be hired by Life magazine — and he had already been working for several years as a staff photographer for his hometown daily newspaper, the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer, and as a contract photographer for the internationally renowned Black Star Agency. In 1967 he was voted into the Magnum Photos cooperative, the famous member-owned agency; a decade later, he served as its president.

The Burk Uzzle “brand” had two guiding principles: complete immersion in his “shoot,” and deep respect for the humanity of his subjects.

From the earliest days of his career — including his very first magazine assignment for Jet magazine in 1958 to photograph young civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. — he was a dyed-in-the-wool believer in the campaign for equal rights for all Americans.

His personal commitment to civil rights did not prevent Uzzle from visually examining the other side of the equality equation. The spring after Uzzle’s Wagner College shoot, Life magazine gave him an assignment that could have been very dangerous: to photograph Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Robert Shelton at a rally in the mountains of his native North Carolina. Shelton himself, convinced of Uzzle’s integrity, instructed Klansmen at the rally to let Burk do his work.

Today, two sets of his photos are instantly recognizable: the poignant shots he took at the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and his emblematic 1969 photograph of Nick Ercoline and Bobbi Kelly embracing amidst the crowd at Woodstock, used on the cover of the movie’s soundtrack album.

When a reporter for the Bitter Southerner, a digital publication, asked Uzzle how he got such intimate, authentic photos from such varied subjects, he told her, “You spend time. You have enough meals with people, they know who you are. You tell them about your kids and all that — so you’re just taking candid photographs and they’re not invasive.”

That is, no doubt, how Burk Uzzle gathered such personal, truthful images from his shoot on the Wagner College campus — although, truth be told, he could not remember the assignment well enough to comment on it when we spoke with him at the end of last year.

“That was so long ago,” he said, “I don’t even remember exactly where I was living then!”

In 2020, Emmy Award-winning director Jethro Waters released his loving documentary film, “F11 and Be There,” about Burk Uzzle’s remarkable life and career.

The complete photographic record of his Wagner College shoot — all 2,627 individual images of it — is on file in the 22-box Burk Uzzle Photojournalism Collection at the Library of Congress in Washington. Those several days in the fall of 1964 on Grymes Hill, as seen through the lens and the mind of this extraordinary photographer, had been preserved for all those years, just waiting to be found and examined again.

Selected photos from Burk Uzzle's Wagner College photography, housed in negatives at the Library of Congress. Notable Wagner figures pictures include Suzette Meyer, a biology professor (*top left photo*), and Spiro Loucas, a chemistry professor (*top center photo*).

NEVER A BETTER JOB

Russ Johnson '67 M'72 in the 1980 Kallista.

RUSS JOHNSON ’67 M’72 may have been the only Wagner editor to have written his first article for the magazine while he was still a student, in the January 1967 issue. At the time, Russ had a work/study job in the college’s Publications Office. Time magazine had named its “Man of the Year” as, collectively, American youth — and Wagner Magazine editor Jim Telfer wanted Russ to write a response.

“I think the article failed,” Johnson wrote. “The big mistake is to assume that one can write about young people in general.”

Russ Johnson, who edited a total of 29 issues of Wagner’s alumni magazine and newspaper — from 1975 through 1979 — was born and raised in Graniteville, on the north shore of Staten Island, just a mile or so south of the Bayonne Bridge. A 1963 graduate of Port Richmond High School, a state regents’ scholarship combined with a Wagner scholarship covered Johnson’s tuition, and his work-study job helped with his other expenses. His father had died while Johnson was in high school; he lived at home throughout his college years with his mother and an older brother.

“Although I commuted all four years,” Johnson says, “I spent almost all day and night on campus, and I never missed living in a dorm. I prefer peace and quiet.”

The combination of a full course load as an English major, along with his work/study job, membership in Kappa Sigma Alpha, work on the Wagnerian staff, leadership as Student Association president and competition on the track team kept Johnson more than busy.

It was at Wagner that Russ Johnson met his future wife, Nancy Pelcak ’70.

“I was a senior, and she was a freshman that September day,” he recalled of their fateful meeting in the parking lot in front of Cunard Hall. Nancy, moving into Towers on her first day, had driven down to campus with her parents from their home in the Hudson Valley.

Something must have clicked between Russ and Nancy, immediately and almost visibly. Her mother cautioned the newly minted collegian against getting too serious about anyone with four years of college life ahead of her, but to no avail.

“I met her that night in the dining hall,” Johnson said, “and we’ve been together ever since.”

After being awarded his B.A. the next spring, Johnson continued his studies at Wagner, working as a graduate assistant toward a master’s degree in English. The following spring in 1968, Russ and Nancy became engaged — an engagement interrupted that October when Russ joined the Air Force. Commissioned in February 1969, Russ married Nancy the following December, though she would not join him on base in Missouri until graduating the following June. Major R.H. Johnson finished up his military service with a two-year stint (1972-74) teaching English at the Air Force Academy in Colorado before returning to Wagner as director of communications. The following year, when Earl Johnson (no relation) left Grymes Hill after editing Wagner Magazine for seven years, Russ Johnson took over.

The September 1975 issue, Russ’s first, marked numerous transitions:

John Satterfield was introduced as the successor to Wagner College’s then-longest-serving president, Arthur Ole Davidson.
Former registrar, admissions chief and night-school director Marguerite Hess, a fixture on Grymes Hill since 1935, died.
And the format of the college’s alumni publication, which had been a magazine — and only a magazine — since its creation in 1948, underwent a fundamental shift.

Beginning with the September 1975 issue, a new plan called for a brand-new alumni publication, Wagner News, to be mailed five times a year, starting immediately, while the more traditional Wagner Magazine would be published three times a year. Wagner News, while still including several feature and alumni profile articles in each issue, would focus on campus and alumni news-type stories, including the traditional Class Briefs section (now called Class Notes). The publication format for Wagner News was also a departure: It was a tabloid-style, newsprint periodical.

“All along, I felt the tabloid was more important than the magazine,” Johnson said in a recent interview. “We got lots of Class Notes — and, now, that’s what I look at first. With alums, that was more likely to resonate than the magazine.”

But the magazine was still an important aspect of the college’s connection with its alumni community. The biggest components of Wagner Magazine under Russ Johnson’s editorial leadership were the profile stories. Most of those profiles featured alumni or current faculty members, but Johnson added another element to the magazine’s lineup: Each issue featured a prominent guest interview, with personalities ranging from William F. Buckley to Walter Cronkite to Ronald Reagan.

“That was my idea,” Johnson said. “Because the magazine took more time to produce than the tabloid, I wanted it to be sort of like Wagner’s version of People magazine.

“Wagner College was suffering from sort of a lack of respect. It wasn’t a Harvard; it probably wasn’t even a St. John’s — it was ‘little Wagner.’ In addition to profiling successful Wagner alumni, I thought the guest interviews might lend a little extra pizazz to the lineup,” Johnson said.

Sophomore Russ Johnson recharging his batteries, October 1964 (photo by Burk Uzzle)

Johnson continued as editor of Wagner News and Wagner Magazine through the June 1979 issue, when he was asked to take on new responsibilities.

“When [director of development] Dave Cornell left, [President] John Satterfield said, ‘We need to have you come over and be head of the fundraising area. Wagner needs to raise $15 million or we’re going to go bust.’ And I said, ‘You know, given that, I’ll give it the old college try.’ That was the origin of the Second Century campaign,” Johnson said.

Russ Johnson served as vice president for development from the summer of 1979 through the fall of 1981, when he joined Merrill Lynch, an investment bank. Initially he wrote about the firm’s mutual funds, but he says that “eventually, I knew more about them than anybody but the marketing director and the CEO, so I became sort of a marketing guy on the road — kind of like being kicked into the fundraising job at Wagner.”

His jobs in the finance industry kept “snowballing into better positions that were in marketing or management, which kept taking me farther away from the writing. By the end of my career, I was managing a bunch of investment advisory services,” he said.

Johnson became a managing director at Kidder Peabody in 1986, and founding chairman and CEO of Tower Square Securities, a Citigroup subsidiary, in 1995.

“I never had a better job than the one I had at Wagner, where I started in public relations and publications. I loved being on campus — the people I met during the day, the people I had lunch with, the kind of people I liked being with,” Johnson said. “I could write almost anything I wanted, and it was just a lot of fun. I never had more fun than at that job.”

Since retiring in 2001, Russ Johnson has maintained a fairly full schedule in two careers of his own choosing: writing and self-publishing novels, and painting watercolors.

“If you had to pick two occupations that are least likely to make any money, I doubled up on them,” Johnson said. “I do it now because I like it.”

At last count, 20 of R.H. Johnson’s novels were available on Amazon.

MONTANA REVISITED

Read the 1977 article at wagner.edu/saffords

“LIFE AT THE BAR DOUBLE J,” which Jeff ’56 M’59 and June Safford ’59 wrote together for the June 1977 issue of the Wagner News, recounted their family’s adventures as New York City outer-borough transplants in rugged, rural Bozeman, Montana. Jeff and June, who bonded during a three-week tour with the Wagner College Choir, were married at Trinity Lutheran, the college church, by Pastor Frederic Sutter, Class of 1894, founder of the college’s Grymes Hill campus.

Jeff, who coached the Seahawk baseball team as a graduate student, returned to Grymes Hill after his military service to work in the college’s public relations office, where he not only wrote a story for The Link about the Cunard villa but was instrumental in acquiring the Anchor in 1963 as a gift to the college from the Cunard Steamship Company.

In 2019 June published a new book, “Bozeman from the Heart,” a beautiful, street-level visual and literary tribute to her adopted hometown. The book’s essays were by local Bozeman writers recruited by June; the illustrations were paintings June Billings Safford had made of scenes on Bozeman’s Main Street.

Revisiting the Saffords, a dyed-in-the-wool Wagner College couple if there ever was one, provides a unique perspective on what it meant to be lifelong alumni.

Between Jeff and June, Jeff was the first to enroll at Wagner.

Born in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in 1934, Jeff Safford’s family moved to the south shore of Staten Island when he was a toddler. He attended P.S. 8 and Tottenville High, then won a baseball scholarship to Wagner College, where he majored in history and music. He enrolled in Wagner’s graduate program for teachers after earning his B.A. in 1956, but was drafted before he could finish.

Sent to Baumholder, Germany, as a chaplain’s assistant, Jeff married his Wagner College Choir crush, June Billings, while on home leave for Christmas 1957. Jeff completed his master’s degree after the Army and taught in Plainfield, N.J., before joining the Susquehanna University staff as assistant director for public relations and sports information.

Two years later, in 1962, he returned yet again to Grymes Hill, working in the P.R. office, “a very stressful job” (according to June) with lots of travel, since he was also serving as the choir’s tour director in 1963, ’64 and ’65. Finally, he enrolled in a doctoral program in history at Rutgers with his eyes on an academic career. Once he’d earned his Ph.D., in 1968, he accepted a spot on the faculty at Montana State University in Bozeman, and the family — now including the first two of their four children — was on the move cross country.

“For Jeff, moving to Montana meant fishing,” she said. “He had an uncle who took him fishing to the Penobscot River in Maine when he was a teenager, every summer, so he came to Bozeman just dying to get into the rivers. That was one of the reasons he took the job.”

But the job itself, and teaching, was Jeff’s biggest motivator.

“The most important thing to him was the fact that he was a teacher,” June said, “which he revered. Nothing came close to that calling. When we spoke about our tombstone, he wanted it to say something about that calling: ‘Blest to be teachers.’ ”

June had the same calling.

Raised in a Swedish family in Brooklyn, she said, “I came out of working-class people who didn’t know women went to college.” She attended Prospect Heights High School, previously known as Girls’ Commercial High School, which still had a strong curricular bent toward vocational training.

“People didn’t talk to me about school much,” she said. “They asked me at school what I wanted to major in. When I saw there was an art diploma, I thought, well, that would be really nice. It was four periods of art a day; that meant I wasn’t getting too much of a lot of other things. It was preparing me to become a graphic artist.

“Toward the end of my second year, a student who sat in front of me, Francine, showed me a form, saying, ‘I’m out of here, June. I want to go to college — and you can’t, not with this art diploma.’

“Well, I wanted to go to college, too!” June said. “The next day, I got a form for an academic diploma, and I had to make up classes. I was so lucky that I did it when I did; Francine saved my life.”

June says that her Swedish Lutheran heritage played a big part in choosing Wagner for her college education. Once enrolled at Wagner and singing in the choir, she found a strong supporter in director Sigvart Steen, who helped her stay enrolled at Wagner.

“My father had only promised me the first year,” June said. “I went and told Dr. Steen that, since I had to leave school, I would not be able to continue singing. He showed me much sympathy, not because he could not get another alto to replace me, I believe, but because he knew the importance of a college degree to this young woman, the first in her family to matriculate. Dr. Steen changed the trajectory of my life by giving me a voice scholarship, which meant I could go on to my sophomore year.”

June Billings majored in history — “and if you major in history,” she said, “the chances are you’re going to wind up teaching.”

And once the Safford family had settled down in Bozeman, Montana, she entered the education field as a substitute teacher, in 1970.

“The woman I subbed for was pregnant,” June said. “She was teaching a new elective course, creative writing. I had no background in creative writing, but she had a textbook … When she finally quit, there was a job opening, and that’s how I started.”

One of her responsibilities was to serve as faculty adviser to Bozeman High School’s literary magazine, Scribbling, which had been published since the 1930s.

“It published all kinds of poetry from all kinds of young people,” June said.

One of those students was Sarah Vowell, who graduated from Bozeman High School in the late Eighties before enrolling at M.S.U. Vowell became a well-known humorist and essayist, working as a contributing editor on the public radio series, “This American Life,” for a dozen years.

“Anything she turned in was amazing,” June said. “I don’t know that I added anything to her creativity, she came so loaded with it.”

Meanwhile, in addition to teaching, June continued painting, using skills she first honed mostly in high school.

“At Wagner, I took one art class,” she said. “It was watercolor with Tom Young.”

During his Wagner years — from 1953 to 1969 — Tom Young “became one of the founders of a group of up-and-coming artists in the Tenth Street Scene, which flourished in the 1950s and 1960s,” according to the short biography of Young prepared for a 2008 exhibition of his work at the University of New Orleans. “This post-World War II group of artists were influential in the development of American art, particularly the Pop Art movement that started in the early 1960s. … Established artists such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Marc Rothko were friends of Young, and museum-goers will see the parallels between their works.”

June recalls one particular episode in her class with Tom Young.

“I started a watercolor, a still life, and it was coming along nicely,” she said, “and he came by and just decided to finish it! So I have a Tom Young hanging on my wall — he even signed it for me — though I don’t know how much of it is June and how much is Tom.”

June associated with other artists working in Bozeman, but didn’t always think along the same lines.

“I remember somebody saying to me, ‘I’m going to Florence and paint,’ ” she said. “I thought, well, why not stay here and paint — and that, in a way, is how my book got started. I didn’t really have a book in mind, just self-expression, but that’s why I got so involved in painting our town.”

Two oil paintings by June Billings Safford, published in "Bozeman from the Heart."

June’s particular catalyst for painting streetscapes of Bozeman’s Main Street was a catastrophe that occurred on March 5, 2009, “the tragic explosion that took down three beautiful buildings on Main Street,” she explained in her foreword to “Bozeman from the Heart.” “The iconic IOOF building — International Order of Odd Fellows — had captured my attention for years, and now that it suffered destruction, I felt compelled to transform a photo of it into a colorful subject in oils. The impetus to paint Bozeman kept me busy for six years.”

By the time she finished, June Billings Safford had an extraordinary collection of oil paintings, street scenes capturing a moment in the life of a rapidly evolving mountain community. Fortunately for her, the Bozeman Public Library had an excellent exhibition space, the Atrium Art Gallery, where she was able to display the entire series.

“I had a very good response from the community,” June recalled, “and another artist said, ‘Well, I hope this will be a book.’ I thought, ‘I don’t know — a book? That would be pretty boring.’ But I began thinking about our town … We were having articles in the newspaper a lot about how the town was growing without any plans, and the huge population — it’s maybe the fastest growing community in the country. Bozeman has something that’s so spectacular; I’m going to make sure we have some history of it.”

And that’s when the idea for “Bozeman from the Heart” really took hold, combining essays about the small city from resident writers with her Bozeman streetscapes as illustrations.

“Because I was asking writers to write, I didn’t have to do too much editing,” June said, “but I knew I couldn’t do the book alone; I needed help.” Paula Beswick joined Billings as co-editor.

Beswick, a local expert in nonprofit organizations, was of particular help in lining up grant support, which was crucial. In the end, the book was published by Sweetgrass Books, the custom publishing arm of Farcountry Press, and was made possible by grants from the Bozeman-based Gilhousen Family Foundation and the Montana Arts Council.

Copies of “Bozeman from the Heart,” both new and used, are still available on Amazon.

June Billings Safford and Jeff Safford, taken around 2011 near Freiburg, Germany where they saw a "life bird," very important for Jeff, who kept meticulous notes on birds. (A life bird is a species that a birder has seen and identified in the wild for the very first time in their life.) Jeff's lifelong interest in birding goes back to his childhood in Staten Island, when his mother took him birding. The bird they saw was a Bienenfresser or Bee eater.

While June Billings Safford’s Bozeman book was coming to life, her husband Jeff was beginning to approach the end of his.

Jeff Safford spent his entire academic career in the history department at Montana State University and retired with emeritus status.

It wasn’t until Jeff was around 75 years old, in 2010, that major health problems began, leading to a crisis while he and June were visiting Britain in 2016.

“He’d probably had Parkinson’s for maybe five or six years before,” June said, “but it wasn’t really evident until we were in Edinburgh, Scotland, and he got very, very sick. He had to be taken to the Royal Infirmary with, like, a 104-degree temperature and hallucinating and everything. He was there for five days, and when we left it was evident that things were going downhill for him; that was sort of the beginning of the end.

“He died on New Year’s Day 2021. He was ready and peaceful about it, totally, and he was very prepared and caring about my being taken care of. He left me a sheet of paper, ‘What to Do when Jeff Kicks the Bucket,’ and there were 14 things he had typed there,” she said, holding it up.

“I’ve been alone in a four-story house, a split-level, that’s adjacent to a park that nobody uses,” she said, “and the deer come … I have so many deer in my yard. I just saw a couple of them waiting for me to come feed the birds, because they like the seeds that I put out. I have a lot of animals in the yard, but I am alone.”

This new experience is feeding June Billings Safford’s creativity.

“I’ve written quite a few poems about him, particularly about his passing,” she said. “In fact, I’m working on a book with art and poetry. He was a real force in my life and in our children’s lives; we had four children, very wonderful young people who are making contributions to this world.”

One of her poems drew its inspiration from Jeff Safford’s love of birds and bird watching. Jeff recorded sightings of 654 North American species throughout his lifetime. In the poem, June says, she imagines him present, somehow, in the song of one of his beloved birds:

FROM UNDER A WOOLEN CAP

This February morning
from a shorn ash tree
above where I shovel snow
I keep hearing a singular song
sending winter a trilling message.
Despite wearing a woolen cap
I hear the notes of a bird
so-in-love as to up-end
my season of disbelief.
I’m still cold from the loss.
Who sent this bird anyway?
One solitary chickadee
on a naked limb above
announcing something so remote
a secret I could live with
from a sparked bird, unafraid
to issue his wild call
to a mate
still shaking the snow
from her feathers.

‘WAGNER MAGAZINE IS DEAD! LONG LIVE WAGNER NEWS’

Sheila O'Mara, far left, and Erin Urban, second from the left, in the 1983 Kallista.

“IF I COULD TRAVEL back in time and make one business decision over again, it would be to hire Sheila,” former Wagner Magazine editor Russ Johnson wrote recently. “She was simply the best. And we lost her way too soon.”

Johnson was not alone in his admiration for Wagner News editor Sheila O’Mara, who became Russ’s assistant editor in 1975. O’Mara became editor in her own right in 1979. She edited 29 issues of Wagner as Johnson’s assistant, and then another 26 herself.

Born in Manhattan in 1943, Sheila O’Mara earned her bachelor’s degree in English at the University College campus of St. John’s University in Brooklyn in 1964, where she worked on the staff of the student newspaper, The Downtowner. She taught eighth-grade English for a while at the Elias Bernstein Intermediate School 7 in Huguenot, Staten Island, before becoming a reporter at the Staten Island Advance. She joined the Wagner Magazine staff in 1975.

“She was the strongest #2 I ever worked with, before or since. Period,” Johnson wrote. “Sheila and I turned out five tabloids and three magazines per year. She and I wrote nearly 100% of the articles and features. We didn’t take bylines for everything, because that would have looked silly — but, together, we wrote it all.”

Following Russ Johnson’s move to the college’s fundraising operation in 1979, Sheila O’Mara presided over the mothballing of Wagner Magazine. For her first issue as editor of Wagner’s alumni publication (September 1979), she wrote an “obituary” for the old format, which had thrived for 31 years.

“The Wagner magazine, a three-time-a-year favorite, has been ‘done in,’ ” O’Mara wrote. “Born of the Wagner Alumni Association, late ’40s, a bright, informative magazine of campus life and life after the campus. Originally christened The Link. Led a genuinely successful life, changing its name to Wagner in the mid-60s, taking on a few different appearances as styles changed, and finally, in most recent years, introducing a new member of the family, the Wagner newspaper, a perfect complementary companion to the magazine, both timewise (appearing five times a year) and costwise.

“The perpetrator of the demise of Wagner magazine is a familiar foe: inflation. Wagner magazine is survived by Wagner newspaper, which will take up the slack and hit the mailboxes seven times each academic year,” O’Mara wrote.

The change in publishing format was obvious — from a letter-sized page to a tabloid page, and from plain or calendared paper to newsprint — but the content was not downgraded. Instead, the two publications that had been almost completely separate for four years, magazine and newspaper, were simply combined. The magazine’s in-depth feature articles, mostly about Wagner alumni or current faculty members, persisted, and so did the shorter news stories about current events on Grymes Hill as well as the Class Briefs section from the newspaper.

“I was Class Briefs editor from 1979 to 1983,” said Dawn Defibaugh Seaman ’83, a Staten Island native and a work/study student in Sheila O’Mara’s Office of Public Information and Publications. “I also wrote simple press releases and a few pieces for the magazine and spent plenty of time proofreading and poring over news-service clips for Wagner mentions.”

“Sheila O’Mara was smart, creative, meticulous and a great writer,” Seaman continued. “She was kind and soft-spoken, yet had a steely, determined manner when advocating for me, the magazine or her department’s budget. I rarely saw a hair out of place, and she was always well dressed — except when deadline approached. Then, Sheila would spend hours and hours poring over the layout of the pages at her drafting table.”

Seaman graduated into a 27-year career in the New York City public schools, followed by work on a divinities degree at New Brunswick Theological Seminary and 11 years as pastor of the Community Church of Keyport, New Jersey, from which she is retiring this summer. “Staten Island can be a small world,” she said. “I eventually married Bill Seaman ’72, another Wagner alum.”

Erin Urban, O’Mara’s assistant editor, joined the Wagner News staff about one year into the new editorial regime, in September 1980.

“I wasn’t a graphic designer,” Urban wrote recently, “I am a writer, like Sheila. With grace and humor, she let me grow into the work, writing and doing work on the college’s announcements, while I watched her, sometimes in awe. No one could ever surpass her cool, almost prim carriage; she had dignity.

“I was especially lucky in my later career at Wagner to watch the Second Century campaign and learn from it,” Urban wrote, referring to a major fundraising campaign inspired by Wagner College’s centennial celebration in 1983. “Sheila conceived the idea of each of us asking a ‘famous’ person to grant a 30-minute interview, with 10 questions, the answers to which they could edit. I suggested James A. Michener, and the college flew me to Austin, Texas. Sheila interviewed Mayor Ed Koch. Janet Skidmore [another O’Mara assistant] interviewed Joe Papp, founder and director of the Public Theatre.

“A friend of mine, artist Bill Murphy, suggested that we interview John A. Noble, an artist living on Staten Island — and I stumbled onto my next career and founded a maritime museum,” Urban recalled.

Murphy began teaching art part-time at Wagner College in 1984, joining the full-time faculty in 1994. He retired in 2019.

Erin Urban wrote in more detail about her interview with Noble:

One night in 1982, Bill Murphy and I were driving along the Richmond Terrace waterfront when he spotted John Noble walking his dog on a rope.

“Someone should talk to him before he dies,” he said. “He’s got all of New York Harbor in his head.”

Bill had met Noble from time to time, and Noble admired his art. They traded prints, and Noble inscribed one of his, “Coal Pirate,” “to the etcher Bill Murphy, and the glory of his future plates.”

I knew nothing about Noble or New York Harbor, but when I suggested we interview him as one of the celebrities in our centennial-year issues of Wagner, Sheila O’Mara, its editor, was intrigued. She sent Bill Higgins, one of her photographers who happened to know Noble, and me to interview him, and what we expected to be “a 30-minute interview with 10 questions” turned into an all-day affair.

Looking back on that day, I laugh as I recall my first question: “So, Mr. Noble, what brought you to Staten Island?”

“The Harlem River brought me to Staten Island,” he growled, and I suddenly felt very far out of my league. After several hours at his home, he suggested we visit his houseboat studio, which was docked in Bayonne. … We crossed the Bayonne Bridge in his Jeep convertible, which had not had a top in many years.

I was smitten, and so was Noble, I think.

Out of her league or not, she led a great interview with the artist and the two bonded.

Sadly, their connection was not meant to last.

“As the June [1983] issue of Wagner was going to press,” Urban wrote in her preface to the published interview, “we learned of the death of John Noble on May 15.”

“He haunted me,” Urban said.

The following year, Urban left Wagner College for a position with Noble’s estate.

“Alone in the Noble House on Richmond Terrace, I gradually awoke to Noble’s depth as an artist and writer,” she said. “Noble’s sons felt his houseboat studio was not what it had been. They wanted me to scuttle it, but people who knew it persuaded me to apply for not-for-profit status so that I could raise money to preserve it. When the state historian came to review my application, he said, ‘Erin, there is so much history here, the art, the writings, the artifacts — you could apply to become a museum.’ ”

The state granted the Noble Maritime Collection a museum charter, and today Noble’s houseboat studio is the centerpiece of the 28,500-square-foot facility that celebrates the people and traditions of New York Harbor. It is one of the anchor institutions of the Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Gardens on Staten Island.

Erin Urban left Wagner College in May 1984, just a few months after Sheila O’Mara edited her last issue of the Wagner newspaper in December 1983. When politician Ralph Lamberti became borough president of Staten Island in November 1984, O’Mara joined his staff. Following Lamberti’s term in office, which ended in 1989, she and her husband, journalist Chris Olert, moved upstate to Warwick, New York. She died in 2011 at the age of 68.

THE CONSUMMATE PRO

FOR 35 YEARS, from 1948 to 1983 — ever since Wagner College started producing a full-fledged magazine for its alumni — Seahawk grads received a new issue, on average, every 2½ months.

After Wagner News editor Sheila O’Mara left the college, at the end of 1983, alumni communications slowed significantly. Over the next couple of years, only two issues of the Wagner tabloid newspaper went out — to the surprise of no one. The college’s resources were becoming steadily more scarce, and alumni communications were not the only area of Wagner operations to take a hit.

In January 1986, the tabloid became a newsletter, Wagner Alumni News — just 12 pages, and smaller pages at that. It was easier to produce, and it allowed the college to keep in touch with its grads more frequently. Another four newsletters were mailed over the next two years.

And then … they weren’t.

Just as Wagner College drew dangerously close to the brink in 1988, so did the college’s alumni periodical. If you’re not familiar with this alarming era in Seahawk history, read President Emeritus Norman Smith’s memoir, “Top Tier.” For more than a year, from early 1988 to spring 1989, all grads heard from Grymes Hill was the chirping of crickets.

And that’s when Alumni Association leaders took things into their own hands. Raising the necessary funds and writing their own stories, they brought alumni communications back to life, just as a new Wagner president was rebuilding the college’s fiscal underpinnings and beginning the long process of revitalizing our beautiful college upon the hill.

That first alumni newsletter of the Norman Smith era, dated Spring 1989 (right), was only four pages long — but they had to start somewhere.

“It’s been a while since you received an alumni newsletter from Wagner College,” a message on the front page read. “Too long, the Alumni Association decided. And so, with this issue, we are re-introducing the Wagner Link.”

Claire Regan H (Staten Island Advance/Jan Somma) Staff-Shot

The roster of association officers featured several alumni legends, starting with President Mildred Olsen ’50, backed by trustees Fred Witte ’49, Al Palladino ’61 and Kevin Sheehy ’67 — and supported by recording secretary and newsletter editor Claire Regan ’80.

BORN AND RAISED on Staten Island, both of Regan’s parents were teachers. Her father, James F. Regan, had been president of the New York City Board of Education as well as a Wagner College trustee.

Regan began working on the staff of Wagner College’s student newspaper, the Wagnerian, as a sophomore. By the time she was a senior, she had become the Wagnerian’s managing editor — experience that set her up for a job interview with the local daily newspaper, the Staten Island Advance. When the Alumni Association decided to revive the alumni newsletter, in 1989, Regan had been a working, professional journalist for the better part of a decade.

Initially hired by legendary editor and fellow Wagner alumnus Les Trautmann ’40 to write wedding stories, Regan quickly learned as much as she could about the newspaper business. She told us about one unexpected incident at the Advance that opened up a whole new career avenue for her.

“I came in to the newsroom one morning and there was a note on my typewriter from Mr. Trautmann telling me I had been reassigned. He took me out of Lifestyle and put me on the night copy desk,” Regan recalled. “It kind of felt like I was being banished — but he was actually doing me a favor, because that’s how I learned to be an editor.”

Claire Regan put those editorial skills to work as an alumna volunteer, editing six issues of Wagner’s alumni newsletter from 1989 to 1992, until the Alumni Office assumed responsibility for the periodical for another decade — sometimes with layout and design help from Regan. Her design work for the Staten Island Advance later won multiple honors from the New York State Associated Press Association, in 2009 and again — twice — in 2013.

In the meantime, Regan expanded her involvement with her alma mater.

In 1989 — the same year Regan helped revive the alumni newsletter — she became the faculty adviser for the Wagnerian, a responsibility she continues to fulfill today. Overnight, the Wagnerian’s design improved, going from pasted-up typewritten copy to professional-looking layouts.

Five years later, when United Nations journalist Peter Sharpe joined Wagner’s English Department, Regan worked with him to establish a journalism minor on Grymes Hill. Since then, she has taught two journalism classes each semester, winning the college’s first adjunct faculty excellence award in 2009. Her experience in the field — most recently as national president of the Society of Professional Journalists — has benefitted multiple generations of Wagner students.

But it wasn’t until 2002 that Claire Regan took up the editorial reins again at Wagner’s alumni newsletter, the Wagner Link. It was one of the most critical junctures in the college’s history, as the front-page headline made clear: “President Norman Smith to End 14-Year Tenure.”

The lead story in the following issue, dated Summer/Fall 2002, was equally momentous, introducing Smith’s successor: Richard Guarasci, the provost Norman Smith had hired five years earlier from Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

WAGNER MAGAZINE AS WE KNOW IT

IN HIS NEW ROLE as president, Richard Guarasci ushered in change for the communications team. New staff was hired, including the editor for The Link … but only two issues of the magazine resulted. John Ross, a communications consultant, produced one more issue while he conducted a search for Wagner’s next marketing chief: Joe Romano, who had been heading up the communications operation at Sewanee, the University of the South, in rural central Tennessee.

Romano’s first job: put together a new marketing team on Grymes Hill. His easiest decision was who to hire as the next editor of The Link.

Laura Barlament in Bangladesh with Wagner professor Mohammad Alauddin and a group of students. The trip was detailed in the Summer 2012 feature story "Water Water Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Drink.:

“I thought I was going there for an interview,” Laura Barlament remembers, “but actually President Guarasci did it like a sales job. I thought I would be grilled by the president, but instead he was just telling me all about Wagner College and why it’s so special and what his vision is for the college.”

Guarasci said, “My goal at that meeting was to say, I really want to have, not just a good magazine, but a great magazine. I want it to be not just a mirror of the campus; I want it to be a real piece of journalism, a real model of what a liberal education produces.”

Laura Barlament had never really thought, specifically, of looking for a job in New York City — but she had been thinking about making some kind of a move.

“When Joe took the job at Wagner, he told the entire department [at Sewanee] that if anyone wanted to come with him to New York, let him know,” Barlament says. “I was the person who took him up on the offer.

“I had been at Sewanee for four years and, although I loved the community, I also felt like I needed to live in a bigger city again. When Joe brought up this opportunity, I just kind of said, wow, New York — I could live in New York. That could be really cool!”

LAURA BARLAMENT was actually born in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her father, a retired Army officer, had gone to work as a professor at Sewanee Military Academy, a private residential school (now known as St. Andrew’s Sewanee); Barlament’s mother,

whose family came from nearby Lebanon, Tennessee, taught French. Barlament’s parents married in 1970, and she was born the following year.

“We moved to Frankfurt, Germany, when I was about to start second grade,” Barlament said. “We spent just a short time on the base there, and then we moved out to a small town about 20 miles away. My mom decided that my little sister and I would go to the local German school, where I went through the fifth grade. We were the only non-German kids in my school.”

For college, Laura Barlament enrolled at Agnes Scott, a women’s college in metropolitan Atlanta, where she double majored in English and German and edited the student newspaper. During her senior year, she won a Dow Jones newspaper fellowship, copy editing at USA Today in Arlington, Virginia, the summer after she graduated. That fall, a Fulbright fellowship took her back to Germany for a year at the University of Constance — coincidentally, just across the Bodensee (about 70 km) from Bregenz, Austria, where Wagner College operated an overseas campus.

“Constance is such a beautiful place, the most beautiful I have ever lived in my life — it’s just spectacular,” Barlament said. “Years later, when I got to Wagner, I understood the affection of Bregenz alumni for that experience.”

In 1994, after returning to the States from her Fulbright year, Barlament enrolled in a Ph.D. program in English at Emory University in Atlanta — but it took her so long to finish her doctorate that her support at Emory ran out. When her boyfriend went to Purdue University to work on a graduate degree, she followed, taking a part-time job in Purdue’s marketing and communications office while she completed her dissertation.

“I really loved that,” Barlament said. “Once I finished my dissertation, Purdue offered me a full-time job, and I kind of just left the whole academic track I had been on. I had always been interested in writing and editing and journalism, which naturally flowed into marketing and communications and publishing work.”

WHEN IT CAME TO RESTARTING Wagner College’s alumni magazine, early in 2007, Laura Barlament was working from scratch.

As a theme for that first issue, Barlament and her new teammates — which included this writer — took a close look at the year’s hottest topic in higher education: the Spellings Report, a new policy document produced by the Bush administration’s Department of Education. What made Barlament’s approach uniquely Wagner were the people she chose to interview for the story: both new and well-established faculty personalities like religion professor Walter Kaelber, education scholar Mapy Chavez and Spanish professor Marilyn Kiss.

An early alumni survey also helped guide content decisions.

“The first choice for our readers was to read about other alumni — in their professions or in their lives,” Barlament said. “We also looked for content that would tug on people’s heartstrings, and stories you don’t want to put down because there’s some suspense or there’s something heart-wrenching that touches you emotionally. Those were the criteria.”

Those ideas were borne out by an editors’ readership survey put out by CASE, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

“During my time at Wagner, the CASE editors group created a broad set of standards for alumni magazines,” Barlament said, “for what they should strive to be. I was very influenced by those ideas.

“The basic idea was that the alumni magazine competes for the attention of readers with all other media outlets and magazines and other forms of media, so it needs to be worth the paper it’s printed on. It needs to be competitive in the broader media marketplace, so you should have compelling storytelling and beautiful photography and be thinking about the reader’s interests and not just the interests of the institution; that’s something I always kept in mind.

“I think I benefited so much by being in the New York City media market,” Barlament said. “I was able to hire some super-talented photographers and writers, because we didn’t have an in-house photographer for most of the time that I was editing.”

One of those creative pros hired early on by Laura Barlament was graphic designer Nina Ovryn, who created a complete template for the magazine, one that Barlament continued to lean upon well past her first four issues, when a full-time staff designer was hired.

IT WAS IN HER SECOND alumni magazine issue that Laura Barlament decided to unveil a major change, this one in the periodical’s name.

The magazine began its life as The Link, a name it used for 16 years and 56 issues. When the Sixties, a decade of change, arrived, so did editor Gene Wilburn, who rallied the college behind a new name for its beloved alumni magazine: Wagner. Just Wagner. Like Barlament, Wilburn waited until his second issue to unveil this innovation.

And the name stuck — for 97 issues over a span of 20 years.

Laura Barlament and Lee Manchester sit in front of a poster that reveals students' fascination with the man who sends daily email bulletins.

And then came “the newsletter era” and a shifting array of names for the college’s alumni mailing. But the name in longest use during that period, in one form or another, was The Link — in variations that included Wagner Link, Wagner College Link and Alumni Link — which continued into the resurrection of the alumni magazine. All told, this era spanned 18 years and a total of 30 issues of either the newsletter or the magazine.

It was in the Fall 2007 issue that the Wagner Magazine name was revived. The “new” name, Barlament explained in her editorial column, “aims to represent all aspects of Wagner College: the intellectual stimulation of the classroom; the engagement of Wagner’s faculty, students and alumni with our contemporary world; the warm sense of ‘family’ that binds the community together through thick and thin.”

And it stuck.

The resuscitated Wagner Magazine name has now been in use for 16 years, featured on the cover of 27 issues, including this one.

“I had a lot of support,” she recalls. “I was kind of concerned about switching the name, because sometimes people get very attached to names, and then they get offended and upset if you change anything, but Joe and Richard just said, ‘Do it.’

“I just thought this was a lost opportunity, to have the name of the school on the cover of its magazine. Why wouldn’t you feature the school’s name, very large, on a beautiful magazine that’s going to be sitting on people’s coffee tables for a week or two?”

ALTHOUGH THE LAST THREE YEARS seem like the longest in history, it has been just three years since Laura Barlament took the next step in her career, accepting an appointment as executive director of strategic marketing and communications at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Her last day on Grymes Hill was Feb. 14, 2020.

Very few people had any real sense that Valentine’s Day of the chaos that was about to be unleashed by the Covid pandemic. After all, the disease had only been named three days earlier.

But just a little over one month later, on March 17, Wagner College announced that the campus would be closing for the foreseeable future; classes would be conducted online for the remainder of the semester, and administrative staff would start working from home.

In addition to the nebulous atmosphere of fear that prevailed in the suddenly empty streets of New York City, Wagner College and universities across the world faced an immediate, existential threat to their fiscal viability.

The impact on Wagner Magazine was significant — but not fatal. But it would take a new team of familiar faces to champion its return.

IN MARCH 2020, students were preparing to leave for spring break, unsure of how long Covid-19 might keep them off campus. President Joel W. Martin called on Jonathan Harkel to lead Wagner’s communications and marketing efforts.

Harkel was first hired by Barlament as director of digital media in 2016. As the principal photographer on campus, his work was quickly integrated into Wagner Magazine. He left Wagner in 2019 but accepted the call to return amidst an imminent crisis.

“The magazine wasn’t the top priority during a global emergency,” Harkel recalls, “but we were starting to hear from people who didn’t understand why they had stopped receiving the magazine, and they were the same people not receiving our weekly updates through the website and email. Many still connected with Wagner only through print, and they needed to hear from us.”

Harkel also sensed that the longer a magazine wasn’t produced, the more likely it was that it would be removed from the budget entirely.

“It’s too easy to cut projects and never bring them back, and the magazine was an easy target for budget relief,” he says. “We still trimmed costs, but we found a way to go to print and let everyone see we were going to be OK.”

In March 2021, more than 20 months after the last issue had been published, Wagner Magazine returned. The cover story, “Leading the Way,” featured Wagner alumni who helped the college survive the pandemic.

Harkel assumed the role of publisher — supervising content, design, freelance support, and print and digital distribution. Lee Manchester became editor and reported, wrote or edited the stories.

Both say, with equal emphasis, pointing to each other, “I couldn’t have done it without him.”

“Most importantly,” says Harkel, “all the compliments should go to Lee. I’ll take the complaints.”

LEE MANCHESTER, you already know — and you’ve known him for a while. He was one of the new Communications team members hired by Joe Romano in 2007, and he’s been a staff writer for Wagner Magazine for many years, writing alumni profiles and digging into Wagner College history.

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Manchester was raised in Detroit, Chicago, Ethiopia and Charlotte, North Carolina. His father, a lifelong YMCA executive, had served as an adviser to the Ethiopian Y for three years, before the revolution that overthrew the monarchy.

In 2007, when he was hired, Manchester had spent the last 20 years working in either nonprofit communications or the newspaper business.

He began his communications career at the Narcotics Anonymous World Service Office in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, editing the organization’s international membership magazine, helping develop new recovery literature and acting as the fellowship’s liaison with researchers, national government agencies and the U.N.

Manchester’s newspaper career took him first to Lemoore, California, where he edited the town’s weekly newspaper, the Advance. In West Covina, California, he was a copy editor on the news desk at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune before moving cross-country to work as a feature writer and general assignment reporter for the Lake Placid News.

Initially hired by Wagner College to write stories for our online newsroom as well as the alumni magazine, he quickly became involved in planning for Wagner’s upcoming 125th anniversary in 2008, in the process becoming the college’s official historian. He created two books for the 125th anniversary: a collection of alumni essays along with his own research, “Wagner College: Four Histories,” and a second volume based on a display of archival photographs he curated, “Founding Faces & Places: An Illustrated History of Wagner Memorial Lutheran College, 1869 to 1930.” He recently published a third volume, “Joy and Purpose: Profiles of the Presidents of Wagner College, 1883 to 2022.” All three are available to download from wagner.edu/books-about-wagner.

While he has served as the college’s press representative for many years, Manchester is probably best known on campus as the editor of Wagner College’s email newsletter, the Daily Bulletin, first distributed on Oct. 12, 2010.

Last year, Manchester announced his plan to retire this summer.

“When the 75th anniversary issue finally goes to print,” he said, “that will be my last day.”

The next issue of Wagner Magazine will have a new team, and the current duo looks forward to the publication’s evolution.

“Wagner has the best people,” said Harkel. “The care and investment in the magazine, both in print and online, is a tribute to those people. We honor them through this work, and we want its quality to reflect our community.”