- By Candace Page -- Free Press Staff Writer

The University of Vermont took big strides during Edwin Colodny's 13-month interim presidency, from launching a quarter-billion-dollar capital campaign to reforming its academic structure.

But UVM people say they remember the small things most vividly -- Colodny's chats with the custodial staff, for example, and his insistence on spiffing up the paint on the front door of the Waterman building.

The small things, they say, show how Colodny succeeded at the big issues: through extraordinary people skills, a commitment to serving the customer, an ability to make clear decisions and an instinct for action.

Friday, trouble-plagued Fletcher Allen Health Care chose the 76-year-old retired airline executive as its interim CEO.

The hospital faces a set of problems uncannily like those at UVM when Colodny arrived in June 2001: a recent scandal, low employee morale, a brand-new union, a damaged reputation.

"Ed is a class act. He's brimful of people skills and integrity. He's a wonderful selection for Fletcher Allen," said John Bramley, UVM's interim provost.

Grumbling initially greeted Colodny's UVM appointment in the spring of 2001. Faculty, staff and students feared the corporate CEO -- who acknowledged he knew relatively little about universities -- would not understand academia.

"I expected a hard-boiled businessman and what I got was a real gentleman," UVM Vice President Tom Gustafson said. "He was unbelievably curious about everything and everybody."

Math professor David Dummit, vice president of the Faculty Senate, said, "I'm not sure he understood the faculty in the traditional sense, but he had an amazingly quick sense of what was important to us."

Colodny is heavy-set, dresses formally and speaks with a deliberate, almost ponderous, style. That's camouflage for a man who genuinely enjoys most people he meets and whose eyes twinkle a lot of the time, say those who know him.

Colodny soon disarmed most of his campus critics and moved quickly to make decisions on issues that had been hanging fire at UVM for years in some cases.

Acting decisively


Within months, he and Bramley announced a modest academic restructuring proposal, proposed a $170 million renovation of UVM's drab dormitories and kicked off a $250 million fundraising campaign. Colodny pressed constantly for action, asking impatiently at meetings why a plan couldn't be moved forward faster or pressing hesitant trustees to commit to a new student center.

"He's a decision maker," said Karen Meyer, a former UVM trustee and now an aide in the president's office. "He leaves no ambiguity at the end of a discussion."

Colodny was a reassuring presence, she said, partly because of his deep experience.

She recalled, for example, how Colodny was pressed during his UVM job interview about how he would deal with the media during a crisis. UVM was recovering at that time from a hockey hazing scandal that had made national headlines.

"He talked about the time a USAir plane went into the Hudson River," she said. The hiring committee realized the problems Colodny had handled at US Airways dwarfed those at UVM.

"He has faced so many crises and challenges. Things that appear insurmountable to some of us seem manageable to him. His wisdom and calm are something I learned from," Meyer said.

The 4-20 kibosh


Half a dozen UVM faculty, students and administrators cited Colodny's handling of the annual campus marijuana-fest, 4-20, as an example of his leadership style.

Colodny was personally offended by the lawbreaking, but also thought the revels damaged UVM in the eyes of Vermonters and their leaders. He made 4-20 the topic of one of his first meetings with top administrators.

Colodny told them that simply cracking down with more law enforcement wasn't the answer.

"He said the only way to fix this is to have the students change it," Bramley recalled.

Colodny won the support of the Student Government Association -- then asked them to come up with a plan. Some administrators were taken aback by the students' solution: a big outdoor party the administrators feared would encourage more illegal substances.

"The whole thing was definitely a risk, but he took us seriously. He backed us," said former SGA President Bill Tickner.

The event, Springfest 2002, succeeded in entertaining students and preventing a mass smoke-in like the previous year's.

It was Colodny's biggest public relations coup. There was loud applause in many quarters around Vermont -- particularly at the Statehouse, where some lawmakers had questioned the wisdom of giving more money to a university that allowed such goings-on.

At moments during Springfest planning, though, a 55-year age gap yawned between the president and the students.

There was the time Colodny sat in on a student meeting to discuss what bands to hire. They had in mind the latest jam bands.

"How about the Dixie Chicks? I met them once. They're nice ladies," Colodny suggested, Tickner recalled.

There was a moment of stunned and disapproving silence around the table. "We were like, um, the Dixie Chicks?" said Tickner in a tone of disbelief.

Colodny went with the jam bands -- though he wasn't sure what they were -- and turned up at the concert himself.


Serve the customer


Colodny's attention to detail extended to the paint on the doors of the Waterman Building. He thought they looked shabby and left a bad impression on prospective students and their families. The doors were repainted.

"With Ed, the cardinal sin is not to serve your client well. That is a fatal problem," said Gustafson.

Colodny was also known for prowling the campus, dropping in to talk to the grounds staff, custodians, students and prospective students visiting the campus.

Meyer recalled a summer visit he made to the kitchen of the Waterman Manor dining room.

"He went in to introduce himself and heard them talk about how really, really hot it was in the kitchen. He said, 'This is silly. Let's get them some fans.'" Meyer said.

He became famous on campus for his accessibility and willingness to listen, then resolve problems. Tickner recalled trying to solve a problem for weeks with lower-level administrators, then getting an answer from Colodny in less than a day.

As a result of this kind of handling, though UVM was in contentious labor negotiations for much of his tenure, the faculty union president at the time praised Colodny to the skies.


Triumphant goodbye


Colodny left UVM to apparently universal sadness. But the good-bye Meyer remembers best was his last appearance before the Senate Appropriations Committee.

"They were still arguing about whether to give us our money," she recalled, referring to the 2002-03 UVM budget. "But the committee started with every member asking for a moment to thank him for his service to the state. It was wonderful."
Contact Candace Page at 660-1865 or at cpage@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com
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- By Candace Page -- Free Press Staff Writer

Once upon a time, when the baby boom was young, dozens of Burlington families started life in a new "garden" apartment complex at the crest of Main Street.

Most kitchens were tiny. The casement windows leaked, water pipes froze and the noise of other people's children seeped through the thin walls.

No matter. In a hundred family photo albums, University Heights in the early 1950s is a place of happy beginnings, where sweethearts married, children took their first steps and young mothers cinched lifelong friendships over laundry and long days of child care.

"We all thought University Heights was the nuts," Betty Little-Royer, 77, said Monday, laughing as she recalled her midnight trips to the tiny communal laundry room in hopes of finding a free machine.

"It was a wonderful community of young couples struggling toward home ownership," she said. "The people I met there have remained my lifelong friends."

Soon, only their photo albums and fading memories will be left.

The University of Vermont will begin dismantling the 54-year-old apartment complex this week. Nine buildings will come down immediately. The remaining 16 will be leveled as soon as UVM can relocate the offices now housed there.

By 2005-2006, an 850-bed dormitory will open on the site.

$78 a month

In 1949, the UVM campus marked the limits of city living.

Farm fields stretched south from Main Street where campus dorms now stand. Spear Street was a dirt road and Interstate 89 hadn't been conceived.

Only one little building, radio station WJOY, stood at the crest where Main pitched down towards South Burlington.

Burlington apartments were scarce and still governed by post-war rent control. To help ease the crunch, UVM leased 12 acres to builders Hamilton Shields and John Doherty to build 23 low, wood-frame buildings housing 92 one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments.

Shields and Doherty built the apartments in two little horseshoes, each with a circle of grass in the middle.

The first families moved in just before Christmas 1949. Renters paid $59 for a studio, $78 for a two-bedroom.

Betty and Jack Little -- he a biochemistry professor, she the mother of infant Ernie -- settled into 22A.

"We chose the one apartment with a tree outside," she recalled.

Medical student Cornelius Granai and his wife, Lorraine, arrived soon after, first to a small apartment, later to the roomier 36B.

"You could throw a stone from the back stoop and hit a cow," Lorraine Granai, now of Barre, recalled.

Dozens more families followed, some older couples, but mostly young doctors, lawyers, university professors, firemen, schoolteachers, salesmen.

Some came as couples -- Burlington insuranceman Duncan Brown and his wife, Georgie; future federal judge Albert Coffrin and his wife, Ann; UVM agronomist Win Way, and his wife, Jane; pediatrician Jim McKay and his wife Liz.

Others married into University Heights, like Mae Johnson, who married businessman Joe Corbett in November 1952 and had her wedding picture taken in the front yard of his Heights apartment.

Twenty-year-old UVM student Mary Tuthill came to baby-sit for widower Art Tuthill's two little boys and married their father.

"Nobody had any money and everybody had a wonderful time," she said.

The baby boom

These families formed a community of shared experiences: Young fathers worked long hours, young mothers, many of whom held college degrees, stayed home to bear and care for children.

Nearly everyone remembers the revolutionary radiant heat in the floors, so that mothers getting up to walk babies in the night stepped on warm floors.

(They also remember the heat dried out any rug left down too long, softened the linoleum in the kitchen and caused potatoes stored under the sink to rot.)

But in most memories -- as in most of the photographs -- buildings are in the background. Children dominate the foreground.

Mary Tuthill, now of Williston, remembers preschoolers darting in and out among the rows of diapers hung out to dry; Georgie Brown, the clothesline full of wet snowsuits.

The little development was a cul-de-sac, with sandboxes, a sliding board and a homemade baseball diamond out in the cow pasture.

"Nobody had any quantity of possessions. The children had to make up their own games," Georgie Brown recalled.

Mothers walked downtown to buy groceries ("Hamburg, 59 cents a pound") at the First National on Pearl Street and housedresses ("$8.95 on sale") at Abernathy's department store.

All they had to do was cross the street to UVM to buy eggs from the chicken coops on East Avenue or ice cream from the school dairy on the campus green.

"Life those days was getting your housework done so you could get outside with the kids," Jane Way recalled.

The Loeb romance

Long on children, short on privacy -- that was life at University Heights.

The apartment complex buzzed over the romance of Nackey Scripps Gallowhur, occupant of 37B. She was a scion of the Scripps newspaper family and in the process of divorce -- an event worth a newspaper headline in November 1949.

That was enough to make her stand out at the Heights, even without her relationship with newspaper publisher William Loeb. Loeb already was making a name for himself with his ultra-conservative editorials in the Burlington Daily News.

"He'd come calling on Nackey on weekends, you'd see him in his big camel-hair coat," Joe Corbett of Burlington recalled.

Some of the young mothers sniffed a bit. They wondered aloud who was taking care of Gallowhur's young daughter when she went out for an evening. Gallowhur and Loeb married and moved on, but there was plenty else to talk about.

When one seven-year-old fed her friends a bottle of aspirin (a trip to the hospital resulted) everybody soon knew.

If a couple argued too loudly about children or money, their neighbors on the other side of the wall could follow along.

Mothers debated endlessly: Should children be tethered to keep them from toddling off toward Main Street? What was the suitable punishment for the children who picked the prize tulips growing in one yard?

(At 50 years distance, four mothers separately recalled the tulip-picking fiasco).

The lack of privacy was balanced by the plethora of help.

Lorraine Granai found that out when her three-year-old, Skipper, was put in a half-body cast to immobilize his too-soft hip bones.

"We managed with a lot of love and help from the neighbors," she recalled. Skipper's little wheeled cart became a fixture on the sidewalk, and so did the arguments among his friends over the privilege of pushing him around.

A new generation

For Duncan Brown, the little post-war community captured more than the beginning of the baby boom.

"University Heights was symbolic of the change that came over Burlington in the 1950s," he said.

It was the educated, optimistic, enthusiastic young men and women in places like University Heights who helped organize the Vermont Forum, a group that sponsored lively debates on public issues; who stocked the League of Women Voters and other civic groups with volunteers; who helped organize an industrial development group to seek new businesses like IBM.

"It was a group of truly dynamic people thrown together. We shared a feeling in that post-war ferment that we had to make a better world," Duncan Brown said of Burlington at that time.

For most of these couples, University Heights was a brief stop on the road to somewhere else.

A few, including music teachers Ippocrates and Jean Pappoutsakis, would stay on, in Mrs. Pappoutsakis' case, for 45 years.

Most saved their money, had more children and built houses in the new North End, like the Corbetts and the Littles, or in South Burlington, like the Browns.

The friendships remained, through business success, moves away from Burlington, the death of a husband or wife.

University Heights, once alone on its hilltop, faded from view among the high-rise dormitories of UVM. Generations of families passed through until, in 1994, UVM converted 16 of the buildings into offices.

As the first buildings are torn down and recycled this summer, two university students will compile an oral history of the place.

Mary Lou Adsit of South Burlington lived in 22B for three or four years in the early 1950s, when her sons John and Brown were little.

Her memories sum up to a simple conclusion.

"It was a very pleasant time in our lives, a very happy time," she said.
Candace Page lived at 36B and 28B University Heights from 1949 to 1952. Contact her at 660-1865 or 229-9141 or cpage@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com
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- By Emily Stone -- Free Press Staff Writer

The University of Vermont police officer who was fired last year after handcuffing a student at gunpoint is appealing to get his job back through the state Labor Relations Board, claiming he was following his training when he detained the wrong suspect.

Officer Matthew Sheehan, an 18-year veteran of the department, was fired in December, according to papers filed with the board by his union. The papers state that Sheehan was "terminated without just cause" and asked that he get his job back.

Sheehan, whose name had not been released previously by the university, was the officer who pulled his gun on and handcuffed a female student in November while responding to an armed robbery in a dorm. The alleged robber was described by the victim as a black male. The student was a black female. The incident launched discussions and raised concerns about how police treat minorities on campus.

Ronald Rabideau, the union secretary treasurer who is representing Sheehan in his appeal, said Sheehan did not know the student was female until after he had handcuffed her. Rabideau said other officers identified the student as a suspect, and Sheehan then stepped in to detain her.

"He detained who he was told was the suspect," Rabideau said. "They didn't know if it was a man or woman. They didn't realize until she was actually stood up after the detention occurred."

Sheehan could not be reached for comment Thursday.

UVM Police Chief Gary Margolis said he could not comment on the specifics of the incident because of the pending case before the Labor Relations Board. He said he and the school are standing by their decision.

"I'm confident that the decision I arrived at was a good decision," Margolis said. "We're looking forward to defending our decision in the appropriate forum, which in this case is the labor board."

The Nov. 6 incident prompted a quick, public reaction from UVM President Daniel Fogel, who sent out a campus-wide e-mail, held a public meeting, and appointed groups to look at the incident in particular and at broader diversity issues on campus. The Police Department responded by holding diversity training, which was attended by all UVM police officers and by about 80 officers from other Vermont departments as well.

Rabideau said he did not believe Sheehan's actions that day had anything to do with race.

According to Rabideau, Sheehan drove to Main Street after hearing the call about the robbery come over the police radio. When he arrived near University Place, three other officers were watching the student, whom they considered a suspect, Rabideau said. Sheehan asked if the student was the suspect, the other officers said yes, and Sheehan made the decision to handcuff the student, Rabideau said.

The entire episode, from the moment the call came in about the robbery to the moment Sheehan handcuffed the young woman, took two minutes and 37 seconds, Rabideau said.

"His opinion is that he was doing nothing more than he was supposed to as a police officer based on what he knew at the time," Rabideau said.

The papers filed with the labor board March 28 state that Sheehan was fired for breach of professional standards, inappropriate use of force, failure to follow orders, unreasonable exercising of his own judgment in detaining a civilian, and failure to follow procedures in using mobile video recording equipment.

Rabideau said Sheehan has been looking for another police job and collecting unemployment insurance since December.

UVM has 20 days to respond to the grievance filed by the Chauffeurs, Teamsters, Warehousemen and Helpers Union No. 597. The board will then set a hearing date, which could be several months from now. The board will issue a written decision about a month or two after the hearing.

Contact Emily Stone at 660-1898 or estone@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com
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