Buying Really Local
When Bill Mitchell ’75G was a grad student in the mid 1970s, a few classmates lived on an asparagus farm along the Connecticut River. When it was in season, recalls Mitchell, he and his friends were allowed to walk into the fields and pick their fill; “We discovered more ways to prepare asparagus than one could imagine, and we’d eat it until we turned green.”

Asparagus and the tobacco barns trigger his memories of UMass Amherst. Back then, amid Mitchell’s landscape architecture studies, teaching responsibilities, and raising a family, he loved the ability to buy food directly from local farmers.

Descended from a fifth-generation Maine family—his mother’s ancestors settled the Blue Hills region in the early 1600s—Mitchell knows farming. His aunt owned a blueberry farm in Hancock County, where he’d spend long summer days raking the tender fruit. Then he would travel north to work on a potato farm in Aroostook County, the northernmost region of the state. During Mitchell’s tenure as a grad student he was hired as an instructor. He won Outstanding Professor of the Year, quite an honor to take home. He spent the next 33 years at the University of Maine, Orono, teaching and practicing landscape architecture. As his career seasoned, he was drawn into administrative roles. Finally, it was time for a change—retirement? “And do what?” says Mitchell, “spend more time in the garden, golf, fish, go to Alaska?”

That’s when a national search to fill a newly endowed Stockbridge School directorship caught his imagination. Mitchell wasn’t sure how his wife, Linda, would react if he pursued the opportunity. When he told her she simply said: “I’m packed.”

Mitchell’s interest in the post dated back to his college days. He remembers his mentor, then Stockbridge director Jack Denison, asking the graduating Mitchell what he was “going to do when he grew up.” Mitchell told him in jest, “I want your job.” Denison had replied: “Well, then, you’d better prepare.”

After what Mitchell calls “a whirlwind year” since being offered and accepting the post, Mitchell can comfortably say he feels the best part of his professional life still lies ahead. He has met many alumni in the valley and beyond, connected with students, learned—and re-learned, with a wiser perspective—what the Stockbridge School is, and what it means to its alumni, to agricultural industries, to UMass Amherst.

Mitchell says what makes it great to return is the opportunity to give something back to his alma mater. And, at the literal end of the day he can buy his fill of asparagus, tomatoes, corn, squash…from the very person who grew it. “The difference now,” says Mitchell, “is I also know the majority of the farmers I visit are alumni, and we know each other by name.”

Health and Happiness
As an undergrad, C. Marjorie Aelion ’80, now dean of the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, relaxed by playing softball on a coed team called the Bats. One day, graduate student Thomas L. Leatherman ’87PhD stopped to watch the team practice on his way to the library. Shy a few positions, the players enticed him to join in. Later, Leatherman and Aelion would marry and each would build an impressive academic career—she in environmental public health and he in bio-anthropology.

Just as theirs was a chance meeting, it was a twist of fate that brought Aelion to UMass Amherst. She was a sophomore at Duke University in 1976, looking to transfer to a school with a strong environmental science program. She was enrolled at the University of California, Davis, but a friend suggested she check out UMass Amherst where she also was accepted. “The people who did the orientation really impressed me and I thought this is a great place to go to school,” she says.

The move proved propitious. “I was well trained and had a solid background in science and math,” says Aelion. Her undergraduate experience included a cooperative program at the National Marine Fisheries Service in Woods Hole, and the winning of a Fulbright that paid her way to northwest France, where she conducted marine research. She went on to earn a master’s degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Aelion’s return to campus in January was much like her decision to attend UMass Amherst—a serendipitous event. She says she was in “one of the best jobs” and uninterested in a major change.

Both Aelion and Leatherman were working at the University of South Carolina, she as the associate dean for research in the School of Public Health and he a professor in the Department of Anthropology. (He will teach in the Anthropology Department at UMass Amherst next year.)

In the end, she was encouraged by search committee members to consider taking over the leadership of the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, which had been under interim leadership for several years. “The more I visited, the more I was impressed with individual faculty members. And the more I talked to people the more I realized that the School of Public Health at UMass Amherst could be doing much better,” says Aelion. “I decided to become its leading advocate.”

A Family Affair
Greg Cannella ’88 grew up on Long Island, but home for him is Amherst environs; it’s where he landed his dream job, got married, and had children.

Cannella became head coach of UMass Amherst men’s lacrosse team in 1994. A year later, he deepened his connection to this area when he married his wife, Laurie, here. They’ve since had two children and have became a bona fide Western Mass. family that likes nothing better than dinner at Pasta é Basta followed by a race around the fountain in Amherst center.

Cannella came from Lynbrook, New York, to play lacrosse for legendary coach Dick Garber. After graduating, he returned to Long Island to coach. In 1992, the opportunity to be assistant coach at UMass Amherst lured him north again. Over the years, Cannella’s growing love of the region has rooted his family here as much as his dedication to his job. He says, “We enjoy the area’s rural character, combined with the quintessential New England college-town feeling of Amherst, and Northampton is a fun small city. This area has great entertainment, great restaurants, great hiking, and it’s a terrific place to raise kids.”

Another pleasure for Cannella is his single-stop-sign commute from his Hadley home. His children, Vance, 9, and Virginia, 7, attend public school and revel in the typical small-town rounds of sports and scouts. Not so typically, the Cannellas have easy access to the cultural and educational benefits of the five colleges. They can be found checking out the orchids at the Smith College greenhouse on a cold winter’s day, perusing the paintings at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, or examining the meteorites at the Amherst College Museum of Natural History. The Cannellas often hike Mount Pollux in South Amherst, where Greg and Laurie were married. The hilltop affords a 360-degree view of apple orchards, barns, steeples, forests, and mountains—the landscape they call home.

Back on Home Turf
For Anna (Ronghi) Symington ’76S, ’79, ’83G, the prospect of going to college was anything but a given. Eldest of five in a first-generation Italian-American family, her parents extolled the importance of higher education, even though they could provide little financial assistance.

Symington was a straight-A, National Honor Society student. She set her sights on Stockbridge School at UMass Amherst, just up the road from her hometown of Springfield. “I was drawn to the college’s blend of creative hands-on learning with business knowledge,” she says. When her application was turned down, she asked for a meeting with the Dean. “He explained it wasn’t my grades,” says Symington, “but my lack of experience…most of the students at that time had grown up working within agricultural families and businesses.”

Two weeks before fall semester, Symington was offered a spot. “I took it as a challenge, which it was,” she says. She worked hard those first few years, but proved a true academic, earning her Stockbridge degree, then a bachelor’s, and in 1983, a master’s in Plant and Soil Sciences.

As a grad student, Symington worked in labs and out at the research turf plots; she taught undergrads; she worked as a landscaper on the side. She helped maintain and operate the first plant cell tissue culture lab on campus, and researched salt-tolerant grass species. Symington wanted to pursue a PhD, but didn’t have the funding. Instead, she set off on her career path, by way of sludge.
Yes, sludge. The wastewater treatment byproduct launched Symington’s long and successful career with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). “During the interview they asked me a question about sludge and I knew the subject cold,” remembers Symington. “The state was looking at models of using sludge for land application at the time, and it was fortuitous one of my UMass professors had an interest in this area and incorporated it into a class discussion so many years prior.”

Symington’s unique knowledge and demonstration of being a quick study landed her an entry-level position with the Department. Twenty-three-and-a- half years later, she was heading up a regulatory bureau, overseeing cleanup of hazardous waste sites in 101 cities and towns in Western Massachusetts, and managing a staff of 27.

“Leaving that staff,” says Symington, “was the hardest part of deciding to circle back to UMass Amherst in late 2008 to become executive director of Alumni Relations.” She humbly admits she was at a career high point, “but it was almost like I was too comfortable,” she says. Over the years, she stayed connected with the campus through charitable donations and serving on Alumni Association boards and committees. When the post became vacant, Symington saw it as another way to give back. “I felt I could offer my strategic planning experience,” says Symington. “Having served on the board, I knew the challenges the association faced.”