Profiles

• Never Too Late: Veteran Receives Recognition
• Music and Business: In Perfect Harmony
• From Student Activist to Proponent of Public Schools
• Fossil Find
• In Memoriam: Paul Giloth’42
• In Memoriam: Dorothy Buell Gilbertsen’34
• In Memoriam: Barbara Ellett Taylor’43
  

Never Too Late:
Veteran Receives Recognition

A lifetime has passed since Robert Elsner’45 left the U.S. Army. So it came as a surprise when he attended a veterans’ reunion last year, and a cohort asked about medals he had been awarded for his service in World War II.

Photo by Bob Rashid

Robert Elsner’45 is pictured in his Milwaukee home, with some of the medals that he earned for his service in World War II.

“I had received a Purple Heart and several campaign medals,” recalls Elsner, who was wounded in action. “But I didn’t know about medals that were awarded after the fighting.”

Elsner arrived at Beloit College in the fall of 1941, only months before the United States entered World War II. With the advent of war, he enlisted in the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). As battles raged overseas, Elsner studied and waited for his call.

“I had two years of German, including one semester of military German,” he recalls, noting that Beloit soon felt the effects of war. “By the early spring of 1943, guys were leaving for service almost every week.”

The Army discontinued the ASTP in early 1944, so most of the former students who became soldiers were sent to infantry divisions as replacements. Private First Class Elsner was assigned to the 103rd Division, in a regimental intelligence and reconnaissance platoon. After five months of training, he was shipped to southern France in the fall of 1944.

“The 103rd joined the Seventh Army along the southern flank, which was held by allied forces,” he recounts.“We entered combat in the Vosges Mountains, with the objective of taking Strasbourg, France, through rough territory.”

Fighting was intense and difficult because of the steep terrain. “We were moving on logging roads,” Elsner says, explaining that the roads were easy for Germans to defend. “They would build roadblocks out of trees and dirt, then line them with booby traps or zero in [on allied troops] with snipers and mortar rounds.”

On May 3, 1945, on a narrow road in the Innsbruck Valley while probing the German defense of Innsbruck, Elsner and three fellow soldiers were wounded at one such roadblock. When the Americans were captured, Elsner drew on his language training and persuaded the Germans to drop them off at a local hospital.

With bullet wounds in his hip and shoulder from machine gun fire, Elsner was treated in the German hospital for a short time before allied troops captured the city. Five days later, the Continental war ended. The U.S. Army moved him through medical stations in several European cities before he was finally flown to a stateside military hospital.

Upon his discharge, Elsner resumed his education. “I had a wonderful experience at Beloit,” he says, but he was saddened by the loss of fraternity brothers to the war and sought a fresh start. After earning a degree in international relations from Brown University, he embarked on a successful business career. He married and raised five children with his wife, Barbara.

More than 50 years later, Elsner learned that—in addition to the Purple Heart, Combat Infantryman Badge, American Campaign Medal, WWII Victory Medal, and other medals he received in 1945—he was awarded a POW Medal and the Bronze Star. Elsner surmises that when the honors were originally bestowed on the soldiers of the 103rd Division, he was convalescing in another city and never received notification of the commendations.

The Army reissued the medals, and on Nov. 8, 2003, Elsner accepted them from Congressman Jerry Kleczka (D-Wis.) in a ceremony attended by Barbara, three of their children, and members of his extended family. He says the medals will be mounted and given to his grandchildren.

Today, Elsner is retired and enjoys volunteer activities, restoring the ecology of land he owns in the Kettle Morraine area of Wisconsin, and lovingly maintaining the family residence, a 1916 vintage Frank Lloyd Wright home.

While he rarely talks about his war experiences, he vividly recalls a defining moment that came as he recuperated from injuries in an American field hospital in France.

Looking out a window that day in 1945, Elsner watched the approach of French citizens who had been forced into slave labor by the Nazis. “When they saw the American flag, they cheered and waved,” he says.“And I finally realized why we were there. We freed those people. That is why we fought.”

— N. Marie Dries’92

Music and Business: In Perfect Harmony

Don Carson not only sings with a world-class orchestra, but he also helps manage its business affairs.

Photo by Jim Lyga

Don Carson’71 is pictured at a piano keyboard, one of his favorite places to be. For 12 years, Carson—a baritone—has sung with the internationally renowned Atlanta Symphony Chorus.

Back in the days when he studied at Beloit, Carson figured he’d eventually need a “day job.” A music composition major, this 1971 graduate hoped to build a career in music. Instead, he has made music his lifelong avocation.

Although early influences include polkas and rock’n’roll, Carson’s real love is improvisational jazz. A pianist, he was a “musician for hire” throughout his college years.

“I played in Veterans of Foreign Wars halls throughout southern Wisconsin,” he says. “I performed lots of weekend gigs with my own band, and sat in with other groups that needed a substitute. I made pretty good money doing that.”

Along with friends Mike Scavotto’69, Mike Kearsey’71, and Bob Corbit, Carson formed a jazz ensemble that developed a strong campus following.

“In 1969, we had a big concert in Eaton Chapel,” he recalls. “Another student, Jon Shimberg’71, recorded it, and we used the recording to press a record. We sold about 500 copies and cleared around $5,000.”

He laughs. “People who still have the album remind me about it.”

After graduating, Carson considered graduate studies in music. Concluding that he didn’t really want to be a “starving artist,” he enrolled in Thunderbird, The American Graduate School of International Management, and later the MBA program at the University of Chicago. Those experiences laid the foundation for a career in international finance and banking which sent him on business trips around the world.

But Carson’s musical interests never waned, and in 1992—after moving his family to Atlanta for professional reasons—he joined the Atlanta Symphony Chorus as a baritone. The 200-member chorus performs with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and has won multiple Grammy awards for its recordings of choral and classical music. Volunteer vocalists are recruited through a highly competitive round of auditions and commit to as many as 60 evenings of three-hour rehearsals and more than a dozen concerts each year. The chorus often performs internationally; a recent tour found 196 members singing with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. “It is amazing to perform at such a high level,” he says.

For Carson, it is a labor of love; so much so that he joined the ASO’s board in 1994. Eight years later, he became the chief financial officer for the organization at the onset of a campaign to build a new symphony center.

“I saw the project as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he explains. “I helped make a difference by being a strategic partner to the CEO and brought in financial and analysis techniques that helped them understand the business better.”

He found that handling finances for a non-profit artistic organization is not so different from working in the for-profit sector.

“Clearly, a lot of income is contributed, but you have to ‘sell’ people on making contributions,” he says.

In September 2003—with the building of a state-of-the-art Atlanta Symphony Center well underway—Carson returned to working in financial services in the private sector. “I am back on the ASO’s board, and still intimately familiar with and working on its finances,” he says.

Carson also contributes his talents to his alma mater. He is now a College trustee and has served on Beloit’s strategic planning committee.

And occasionally he joins former band-mates Kersey and Scavotto on stage. Years may pass between gigs, but they still enjoy making music together.

“It has been a real privilege to have had such experiences,” he says. “I credit my Beloit training for giving me the confidence and intellectual curiosity to pursue such interesting activities.”

— N. Marie Dries’92

From Student Activist
to Proponent of Public Schools

Anyone who looks at the Beloit College résumé of Jennifer Morales’91 shouldn’t be too surprised at where she is more than a decade later.

Photo by Bob Rashid

Jennifer Morales’91 in a Milwaukee Public Schools classroom.

Morales, a modern languages and literatures major at Beloit, was an activist, campaigning to save the Beloit prairie and helping organize students to promote multicultural education.

Thirteen years later, she has emerged as one of Milwaukee’s front-line progressive activists, a leading member of the Milwaukee (Wis.) School Board, and fierce proponent of what’s right with public education.

Morales came to Milwaukee planning to teach. Instead, she wound up volunteering and then working for Rethinking Schools, a national journal on progressive public education edited by teachers.

The experience sparked an interest in researching and writing on education policy. After her second son was born, Morales retired from Rethinking Schools but soon found herself working for Alex Molnar, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee education professor who had established research centers on education policy and commercialism in education.

Along the way, she continued to build a reputation in the community as an activist in education and local politics. Then, in April 2001, she was elected to the Milwaukee School Board.

Wisconsin’s largest public school district, the Milwaukee Public Schools have been at the center of debates over how best to resolve the problems of the nation’s urban schools. Milwaukee is home to the nation’s oldest private-school voucher program, which is limited to low-income families. It has attracted the attention of both fierce advocates and critics of private-school vouchers.

Morales is definitely a critic (more on that in a moment), but battling vouchers wasn’t her primary agenda, although the man she ran against, School Board President Bruce Thompson, was a voucher supporter.

Other interests included school financing and the ways in which corporations exercise undue influence on matters ranging from curriculums to soda vending in schools. School financing was a particular issue: Although the state now funds two-thirds of school budgets (a measure passed more than a decade ago to provide property tax relief), schools are restricted in how much they can raise their budgets each year, something Morales says harms challenged urban districts like Milwaukee’s.

“I know the difference money can make when it comes to resources for students,” she says. Growing up in Chicago’s poorer suburbs, she got a big break when her mother took a bookkeeping job that allowed the family to move to Downers Grove, Ill., where she attended a well-funded high school. “We had top-notch teachers, small classes, and resources coming out of our ears.”

She admits she didn’t want to go to college, but her mother insisted, and Morales toured several ACM schools, including Beloit. After her interview for a Presidential Scholars Award (which she won) she says she thought, “Wow, I’m going to be a different person when I come out of here.”

On the school board, Morales has stuck to her agenda, speaking out frequently on financing issues and networking with school board members in other communities. She has also worked on issues such as making the school district a better employer and expanding representation on the board itself. Among accomplishments she cites is the establishment of non-voting student representatives to the board.

“She does a really good job on the school board,” says Barbara Miner, former managing editor of Rethinking Schools and among those who encouraged Morales to run. “She’s a parent with kids in these schools, she’s very active in the community, she’s politically sophisticated enough to deal with issues on a state and national level, and she really straddles all those different constituencies and areas of expertise — mom, community activist, policy person.”

Private school vouchers are a false solution, Morales argues: The vast majority of public school students will never be able to use private schools, yet a blanket voucher system would likely lead to under-funded schools disproportionately populated by the poorest children.

Still, Milwaukee’s voucher program isn’t going to be eliminated anytime soon, she acknowledges. In light of that, the primary goal is to keep current income limits in place and to make voucher schools more accountable. “If I’m paying taxes for both systems, I’d better be able to get comparative data on both,” says Morales.

— Erik Gunn’78

Fossil Find

Courtesy of the Janesville Gazette

University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Professor Rex Hanger with T.C. Chamberlin’s 19th century hand-labeled teaching collection, which was discovered in a basement.

Covered in cobwebs and sprinkled with mouse droppings, the wooden box containing historic treasures easily could have been overlooked in the dark recesses of the basement at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater’s Upham Hall. After being stored for more than 130 years, the 3-foot-long box didn’t appear much different from other piles of discarded junk, rags, and forgotten rock collections.

But it was.

Inside were more than 130 fossil specimens and frayed handwritten labels that identified the collection as belonging to Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin (1855), a legendary turn-of-the-century American geologist.

Chamberlin taught at Whitewater Normal School, now the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, from 1869 to 1873, and founded the geology department there.

Chances are good, however, that only another geologist would have recognized the treasure-in-the-rough lying inside the box.

It was University of Wisconsin-Whitewater professor, Rex Hanger, a 41-year-old geologist and paleontologist, who had volunteered to sort through the dirty basement on the eve of a major renovation project at the science building.

And until he found the box, the chore had been anything but pleasant, Hanger said.

It started out as a directive from administration to have “the geology guy” look through the junk, Hanger said.

He was minutes from calling it a day and declaring all that was left as landfill, when the ratty old box caught his eye.

“I’m naturally curious,” Hanger said. “When I see a sealed box, I want to know what’s in it. It was covered in cobwebs and mouse poop. But I knew no one else was going to look through this stuff or even go in there.”

After opening the box, Hanger spent another hour in the basement staring at the collection and reading the labels, which represent a tangible connection to a man he sees as a hero.

“I was there with my mouth open,” Hanger said.

“They don’t give a Nobel prize for geology,” Hanger said. But if they did, T.C. Chamberlin would have been the first recipient, he added.

Geologists widely recognize Chamberlin as a leader in his field. After leaving Whitewater, he was a professor of geology at Beloit for nine years. He later served five years as president of the University of Wisconsin.

Chamberlin resigned his presidency in 1892 to serve as professor of geology and director of the Walker Museum at the University of Chicago. He held that position until 1919.

He also achieved international fame for developing a theory on the age of the solar system, which declared Earth to be far older than anyone living in the late 1800s could have imagined. In addition, he was the first person to fully define how glaciers formed and shaped most of North America.

Chamberlin grew up in Beloit and earned his undergraduate degree from Beloit College. In the 1860s, before pursuing a higher degree, he was principal at Delavan (Wis.) High School.

“He had several careers,” Hanger said. “But his first professional geology job was at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.”

The rocks Hanger found in the basement are nothing spectacular by themselves. They are good examples of teaching tools.

“There is nothing in the collection that makes you ooh and ahh. Any geologist would look at them and say, ‘Ya, a lot of teaching examples,’ ” Hanger said. “I think the labels are more valuable than the rocks.”

Among Chamberlin’s rock collection are specimens of trilobites, which lived in the ocean, embedded on the stones, Hanger said.

“Trilobites are very valuable for telling times,” Hanger said. “He also gathered glacial gobbled rocks that had been bulldozed by glaciers. To me, they are all old friends.”

Most geology professors from that era did nothing more than lecture to students. Few actually used rocks to teach, Hanger said.

Chamberlin was one of the exceptions, a pioneer in the field of classroom geology, Hanger added.

Although the rock collection was spared from landfills all these years, the collection wasn’t treated with respect, Hanger said.

But it will be now.

Excerpted and reprinted with permission from The Janesville (Wis.) Gazette.

Paul Giloth'42

Paul Giloth’42, a three-sport star athlete who was inducted into Beloit’s Athletic Hall of Honor in 1996, died Jan. 17, 2004, at his home in Wheaton, Ill.

Paul Giloth’42

An electronic engineer in research and development for Bell Laboratories for 40 years, Giloth led the department for planning, developing, and integrating all the company’s domestic and export applications of digital switching systems. He was best known for directing the development of the first digital switching system for telephones.

During his career, he published more than 40 papers, contributed sections to professional books, and held several patents.

Giloth received extensive training in radar and bombing navigation systems during World War II, some of it through a secret radar school set up by the military in McDowell Grove Forest Preserve in Naperville, Ill. He was interviewed about the project for a documentary that was made in 2002 for Naperville Community Television.

After training, Giloth served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the war, earning a Bronze Star and six battle stars.

At Beloit, Giloth was named the College’s outstanding athlete as a senior. He was a member of Sigma Chi and lettered in football, basketball, and track, earning a total of nine letters during his Beloit years. He studied political science at Beloit and went on to Northwestern University to study engineering.

He served on the executive board of the Alumni Association, including two terms as president. In 1982, he received the Distinguished Service Citation from the Alumni Association, which he dedicated to members of his class who were lost in the war and did not have the challenges and wonders of life that I have enjoyed over the past 40 years.”

Giloth was preceded in death by his wife, Frances Cramer Giloth’41. They had been married for nearly 60 years. He is survived by four children and nine grandchildren, including Elizabeth Hillbruner’04.

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Susan Kasten - Editor, Beloit College Magazine