 |
excerpts from feature story
By Donna Hoke
Meet the area’s makers and shakers, the people who run our colleges, cultural institutions, banks, and hospitals, resurrect our landmarks, and even sit at the judge’s bench. We’ve also talked to some influential couples and women leaders, just to find out what makes them—and WNY—tick. Prepare to be impressed by their stories of struggle, tips for success, and reasons for loving the region they call home.
KATHRYN COSTELLO
Willing to tango
 |
|
Photo by kc kratt.
|
Kathryn Costello brings more than thirty years of higher education experience to the UB administration, which she joined full time last year. As vice president for Development and Alumni Relations, she leads a division called “University Advancement,” which fosters lifelong and mutually beneficial relationships between UB and its alumni, as well as individuals, corporations, and foundations. “My time is spent in guiding strategy and planning for long-term success for UB,” sums up Costello.
What is your favorite spot on the UB campus?
The Commons or Founders Plaza, because they hum with student vitality.
Can you a describe a student encounter that was meaningful to you?
There have been many, but just last week, I met an undergraduate who had just come from chemo treatment. Although she wears a chemo fanny pack, she continues her studies and keeps stats during basketball games. She has such courage; it inspired me and reminded me that university communities provide an environment that nourishes and sustains students.
What is the last book you read?
The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood. It forecasts a world that has squandered its natural resources and in which people must live in fear and often in isolation. I loved it.
As a transplant, what aspect of Buffalo culture are you most enjoying?
Where to begin is the problem … Of course, the BPO, the Albright-Knox, the rich architectural history. I love the art deco. The Guaranty Building is a remarkable architectural feat, and I also found the Market Arcade building quite beautiful, and the Gold Dome. I was aware of the Darwin Martin house for many years as my first husband (deceased) was an architect, but seeing it in person was a breathtaking experience.
How has your life changed since you moved here?
[I dance less often.] I like most ballroom dances: waltz, foxtrot, quickstep, and tango. (I am seeking a partner for Argentine tango.) I love bolero and most rhythm and Latin dances, especially East and West coast swing, rumba, cha-cha, samba, meringue, and salsa. I do dance when I am back in Atlanta, but I am looking for opportunities to dance in Western New York.
MARSHA HENDERSON
Back to school
 |
|
Photo by kc kratt.
|
Created in 2005, the Division of External Affairs at UB includes three units: University Communications, which encompasses WBFO; Government and Community Relations; and the newest one, the Office of Economic Engagement. A UB alumna with an MBA from Canisius College and former KeyBank Western New York District president, Marsha Henderson assumed the newly created position of vice president for external affairs in September 2005.
What might you say to a student set on an Ivy League school to convince her to attend UB?
First, don’t equate value with price; just because it costs more doesn’t make it better. Second, you have to find the place that is right for you. Make up your own mind instead of being swayed by what a magazine says.
What is your favorite spot on the UB campus?
On occasion, I like to have lunch in the Student Union and watch all the interaction among the students. It brings back great memories of Norton Hall at South Campus in my student days.
Where are you likely to be on a free Saturday night?
While I enjoy the major offerings in Buffalo, I probably most enjoy just going out to a locally owned restaurant with friends, somewhere with a comfortable, casual atmosphere where I am likely to run into people I know and catch up with them—that’s just so Buffalo. Summertime, we’re at our cottage on Lake Erie, and you can’t pry me away from there. It’s the best getaway, but it often doesn’t seem relaxing, as I like to be doing something all the time—gardening, biking, cooking …
How about a snowed-in day?
Oh, a snow day … That is such a Buffalo bonus. I would spend the day on one of the many projects I start but never finish—[adding] music on my iPod, organizing photos, cleaning out a closet. I always think there is a better way to organize the stuff in my life.
What makes a powerful person?
A powerful person is someone who has the right values and acts on them effectively for the good of others.
DIANE CHRISTIAN AND BRUCE JACKSON
Buffalo’s favorite double feature
In 1970, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Diane Christian and SUNY Distinguished Professor Bruce Jackson met at a vending machine in the University at Buffalo English department. Neither envisioned spending their entire academic careers in Buffalo—he turned down Penn, MIT, and Yale to join UB’s top-tier English team; she turned down Berkeley—but forty years later, both are still teaching at UB and that vending machine story is practically campus lore.
“I thought it would be a vacation in the Midwest, that I’d come here for two or three years and then go to the Ivy League,” Jackson says. “But I really liked it. For a little city, there is a tremendous amount of creativity.” Certainly, their accomplishments have contributed to the city’s creative depth. In addition to solo work (Bruce has had nineteen photography shows and they both write prolifically), they’ve coauthored three books, articles too numerous to count, and made six documentaries that have been screened at major international film festivals.
That aside, Christian points out, “Where else can professors live like this?” “This” is an airy and comfortable Delaware district home—site of an annual chili party that hosts more than 300 of the couple’s closest friends and associates—with separate studies, a film editing room, a darkroom, an eclectic art collection, and expansive views of the park. Married in 1973, the couple bought the house in 1975 for $65,000; they moved in 1976 and have been there ever since. In the beginning, they shared the house with Bruce’s three children and, as time went on, with big dogs. “The first we had was a Samoyed; we thought that would be the right-looking dog for this house, so we got her,” Christian says. “We’ve taken in a couple of strays, then pound dogs. We like big dogs.” Of course, shelves and shelves and shelves of books and films have been permanent residents as well.
Off-campus, the couple regularly lecture at the Albright-Knox, but may be best known for the Buffalo Film Seminars, the course they’ve cotaught at the Market Arcade Theatre since 2000. With Jackson and Christian’s knowledge and banter nearly as entertaining as the films themselves, it’s not just a favorite class for students; the open-to-the-public seminar has attracted a dedicated following of auditors as well. “It was something we were going to do for one semester,” says Jackson, “but what keeps it going is bumping into people in Wegmans who say they’ve been coming for five or six years. We’ve just made all kinds of friends and it’s a lot of fun.”
Mixing so much personal and professional togetherness “isn’t normal,” Christian contends, but the couple seems to thrive on it. “We show each other everything,” Jackson maintains. “I don’t send out an article or a group of photographs without running it by Diane first. We’re constantly giving each other ideas.”
So who brings what to the table? “You’re more scholarly than I am,” Jackson begins. (Christian holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Johns Hopkins, and is an expert on William Blake, comparative religion, and mythology.)
“We’re both smart,” counters Christian.
“Diane has this really well-grounded education in literature, arts, philosophy, a much better classical education. So when I go wandering all over the place, she reigns me in. I’m a New York Jew; she’s a Rochester Catholic.”
“I was born in Brooklyn,” Christian insists.
“She went to the nunnery. I went into the Marines.”
“We both had total experiences. I was Sister Gertrude for almost eight years. He’s an artist. He’s brilliant. He’s fun. He’s sexy. He’s alive. I used to say that if I was doing one thing that was pleasurable, he was into many.”
“She’d come into the study where I had music going loud, was drinking wine, and working on an article, and say, ‘You’re supposed to just do one of those at a time.’”
“I wouldn’t say that, but I would sort of think that,” Christian admits.
“I’m the original multitasker,” her husband asserts, and once again she is quick to amend:
“Multi-enjoyer.”
It’s a label that could aptly apply to them both.
DRS. KELLI BULLARD-DUNN AND DAVID DUNN
From Minnesota with love for WNY
There aren’t many people who, when enumerating the pros of moving to WNY, list weather among them. Of course, it was the promise of exciting new job opportunities that first enticed Minnesota transplants Dr. Kelli Bullard-Dunn, associate professor and chief of the Division of Colorectal Surgery at Roswell, and Dr. David Dunn, UB vice president of Health Sciences, but the “better weather” and the sushi helped sell them on the region in 2005.
“I am a self-proclaimed food snob,” says Bullard-Dunn, “because I spent twelve years in the San Francisco Bay area, and we came here and had better sushi than I’ve gotten anywhere else. Any town that’s not on a coast and can do sushi has my vote.”
For Dunn, the city was reminiscent of his Detroit roots, and he was inspired by UB president John Simpson’s vision for the university: “The idea that the academic growth would have a downstream effect that would be very significant in terms of economic rejuvenation was very appealing, because I was looking at a city that was very similar to the urban core where I grew up.”
And so the Dunns packed up their seventeen-month-old twins and headed east, settling into an East Amherst neighborhood, indulging a Wegmans addiction, and becoming regulars at Ruzzine’s Rock Bottom Eatery. The move represents a big shift for Dunn, a general transplant surgeon with a Ph.D. in microbiology, who has given up hands-on practice in favor of full-time administrative work. Having spent twenty-eight years at the University of Minnesota, ten of them as chairman of surgery, Dunn was ready for the change. “I was very, very busy there,” he says. “I did my time in the trenches. And I’ve been so busy since I’ve been here that it would be impossible.”
The only board-certified colorectal surgeon at Roswell, Bullard-Dunn treats patients, and teaches medical residents, students, and fellows at both UB and Roswell. The shift for her? “I swore I’d never live on a cul-de-sac and drive an SUV,” she laughs, “and now I live in the suburbs.” And when they’re not working, that’s where the Dunns spend much of their time—cooking (Dunn is good at it, but doesn’t write anything down), enjoying their wine cellar (they’re big fans of South African reds), and spending time with their now-six-year-old son and daughter.
“We have so little time with our kids that we’d rather spend time with them [than go out],” says Bullard-Dunn. “We’ve taken them to Shea’s, and we belong to the Zoo and the Botanical Gardens; the kids love the Gardens.”
The Dunns also have a garden at home, where the twins grow vegetables, Bullard-Dunn digs where she’s told to, and Dunn hybridizes daylilies. “My favorites are called ‘spiders,’” he says. “One of the original ones from the 1940s is bright yellow, and I’ve been working on getting a red one. I don’t do it really scientifically.” Laughs Bullard-Dunn: “You don’t do it at all scientifically.”
In her free minutes, Bullard-Dunn has been enjoying Bikram yoga. “The first class I went to, I thought I was going to die, but then I got in my car and I felt like I’d had a massage and a martini,” she says. “It must be doing me some good because David makes me go.”
With children so young and no family in the area, the Dunns admit they haven’t explored much of the region as a couple. Visiting the Finger Lakes wineries is on their to-do list, but a day at Niagara-on-the-Lake would come first. “If we ever had twenty-four hours free with someone to take the kids,” says Bullard-Dunn, as her husband nods in agreement, “that’s where we’d go.”
LUCINDA FINLEY
Her “visit” lasted twenty years and counting
 |
|
Photo by kc kratt.
|
Renowned for her expertise in tort law and women’s issues and as an accomplished litigator, Lucinda Finley became the first Western New York woman to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court when, in 1996, she represented local health care clinics and the Pro-Choice Network of Western New York in Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network. Twenty years ago, she began her career at UB as a visiting professor; today, she is vice provost for Faculty Affairs, a position that Finley calls “the academic heart of the University.”
How did you come to leave your faculty position at Yale to accept one at UB?
When the law school asked me to come for a year as a visiting professor, I wound up liking the intellectual and personal atmosphere at UB much better than the one at Yale. During that “visiting” year, I also came to love the city. After living in several other supposedly more desirable places—New York City, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago—I am now a huge Buffalo booster. It would take a lot to get me to leave.
What aspect of Buffalo culture do you most enjoy?
The local contemporary art scene. Through my longtime involvement with Hallwalls—I was on their board for sixteen years—I have become friends and acquaintance with several supremely talented area artists, and I am gradually building an art collection. But I buy the art because I like it, not because the artist is my friend!
What is the last book you read?
I’m currently in the middle of two books, one escapist, and one serious. The first is Richard North Patterson’s Eclipse; I am a fan of legal mysteries and he is one of my favorite authors in this genre. The serious book is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Smoot. This book looks at modern biomedical research with cell lines, by focusing on the poor African-American woman who unwittingly gave her prolifically multiplying cancer cells to medical science. I wish I had more time to read for pleasure!
If you have time for a quick getaway, where do you go?
I am an avid wine lover, and we have become fond of the Beamsville area wine country just forty minutes away in Ontario. They are making some world-class wine there, and the countryside is beautiful. I am also an equestrienne [and own] a horse. Until the demands of my job at UB left me with too little time, I competed nationally in top horse shows in hunter classes over jumps. Now my horse gets to live a more leisurely life in the country, and going out to ride her and groom her is my cherished weekend activity.
Donna Hoke is the editor of Buffalo Spree Home and a frequent contributor to Spree.
SUBSCRIBE NOW
Back to the Table of Contents
Back to Top
|
|
|
