Alumni Association to recognize four during Great Lake State Weekend

NEWS RELEASE

LAKE SUPERIOR
STATE UNIVERSITY

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LSSU Alumni Association to recognize four during Great Lake State Weekend

SAULT STE. MARIE, MI - Lake Superior State University and the LSSU Alumni Association will pay tribute to four highly accomplished alumni and friends at the annual Alumni Awards Banquet beginning at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, October 24, in the Walker Cisler Center.

The banquet is part of Great Lake State Weekend 2014.

The public is welcome at the banquet to honour Joseph Breed ’85, Cheboygan; Aaron Mize ’02, Albuquerque; Sault native Mary Jane Alexander, Oklahoma City; and David Knowles Ph.D., Sault Ste. Marie.

Tickets, $20 each, must be reserved for this event.

They are available at lssu.edu/glsw, the Norris Center box office, Fletcher Center cashier’s counter, Lukenda Alumni House, or by calling the LSSU Alumni Office at 906-635-6219.

Joe Breed

Breed is this year’s recipient of the Outstanding Alumnus Award.

He has taken a leadership role on campus since the early 1980s, when he was a student and president of the Lambda Sigma Beta business fraternity.

He has stayed involved ever since, serving on the LSSU Foundation board of directors, helping to raise funds for projects such as Considine Hall, and much more.

He is a lifetime member of the LSSU Alumni Association.

Joe graduated with a degree in business administration/management.

After working in Fort Wayne and Chicago, in 1990 he took a management position with Barnich, Kavanaugh and Cooper Inc., an insurance firm in Cheboygan, not far from Onaway, where he spent the second half of his childhood after his family moved north from Detroit.

BKC is a full-service insurance agency with a branch in Indian River as well as the main office in Cheboygan.

Joe, who is a chartered property casualty underwriter and holds other professional designations as well, oversees a staff of 26 who provide service throughout Michigan and the Midwest.

“I credit my parents for instilling a strong work ethic in me as well as the need to further my education and to never stop learning,” Breed said. “Professors such as Bart Michelson, Bruce Harger, Madan Saluja, Phil Valenti, William Dickinson and Margaret Howe created an environment where I became fully engaged in the learning process of a university setting. Three of my brothers – Vic, Matt and Pete – as well as a nephew, Nick, also attended LSSU, which is testament to the great quality education it provides.”

Fellow alumni who nominated Joe for the award note that he “embodies the LSSU mission statement” of launching students on paths to rewarding careers and productive, satisfying lives.

He is very active in his community and with a number of professional organizations.

Breed and his wife, Teresa live in Cheboygan and spend time boating, traveling, biking, kayaking and downhill skiing.

He also enjoys hunting, especially waterfowl with his two dogs.

The LSSU Outstanding Alumnus Award, the highest honour that the LSSU Alumni Association presents, recognizes personal and professional accomplishments and involvement with LSSU.

It highlights significant achievements of alumni who serve as leaders in our region, state and nations.

Aaron Mize

The LSSU Ripley Young Alumni Award recognizes alumni who have graduated within the past 15 years who have enjoyed exceptional personal and professional success early in their careers.

One look at the resume for Aaron Mize confirms that he has been the recipient of both.

“My career is my passion!” says Mize, and he means it. “I love to conserve, enhance and promote national wildlife refuges.”

Mize is manager of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge just outside of Albuquerque.

The refuge encompasses nearly 60,000 acres with 8,000 acres of intensively managed floodplain and 30,000 acres of wilderness area.

He supervises the staff and oversees a base budget of more than $1.5 million.

His work includes administering more than 1,000 acres of cooperative farming for wildlife, and coordinating with refuge and regional biological staff in the development and management of moist soil units, riparian restoration and methods to control invasive species.

All the while, he and his staff need to keep the more than 200,000 annual visitors satisfied by enhancing visitor facilities, implementing auto tour loops, maintaining blinds that photographers use to get images of wildlife, overseeing the design and construction of the visitor centre’s interpretive displays, managing the volunteer program and much, much more.

Mize has also worked at Maxwell NWR, a small refuge at the crossroads of Rocky Mountain front-range and short-grass prairie in Maxwell, New Mexico, and at Big Lake NWR in Manila, Arkansas.

He has held several positions with the USFWS Devil’s Lake Wetland Management District in North Dakota.

Mize said his success was set by the education he received at LSSU and the experiential learning he received through LSSU by working with the U.S. Forest Service and Michigan Deptartment of Natural Resources.

“The obvious advantages of learning to be a wildlife biologist and manager with the north woods and Great Lakes as your backdrop, classroom and playground cannot be understated,” said Mize. “The education, experiences and people at LSSU instilled a passion for science and conservation. This has been the foundation for my career.”

Mize has been recognized for his work many times and continues his involvement with the university.

In his spare time, he enjoys hunting waterfowl and big game, growing an organic garden, unsuccessfully attempting to catch large trout and playing the banjo.

Mary Jane Alexander

Sault Ste. Marie native M.J. Alexander, of Oklahoma City, is an author, poet, playwright and photographer who documents people and places of the Great Plains and American West.

She is being presented with the Kenneth J. Shouldice Achievement Award, which recognizes personal and professional successes that serve as outstanding examples to LSSU graduates.

The International Photography Hall of Fame describes Alexander as “combining the vision of an artist with the skills of a storyteller.”

Her work has been featured on national magazine covers and exhibited, published and performed here and abroad.

Oklahoma Today magazine selected her portrait of 103-year-old Thomas Jefferson Brown as one of the top photographs in Oklahoma history.

Alexander said she “looks for the extraordinary in the everyday, and gravitates toward projects that pay heed to the overlooked and the underestimated.”

Alexander has received many awards through the Society of Professional Journalists, including best magazine reporting portfolio, feature writing, photo story/essay and feature photography.

She received the best magazine portrait in an eight-state region through the Great Plains Journalism Awards in 2014.

She is the only artist whose work has been chosen for five consecutive tours for 24 Works on Paper, a biennial traveling exhibit of juried work by state’s top artists, under the auspices of the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition/IAO.

She received the Oklahoma Center’s Oklahoma Book Award and the Independent Publishers Gold Medal Award for her 2011 book, Portrait of a Generation: Sons and Daughters of the Red Earth.

Alexander was the only U.S. photographer honoured at the 2009 UNESCO-sponsored World Humanity Photography Awards in Guangzhou, China, for her photographic series on Apache crown dancers. 

Her portraits of Alice Walker and Gloria Steinem were featured on the cover of the fall 2009 issue of Ms. magazine, commemorating Steinem’s 75th birthday.

A second portrait of Walker by Alexander was the cover photograph of the October 2010 Writer's Digest.

Alexander is also a poet, playwright and lyricist.

With her husband, composer Edward Knight, she wrote two full-length musicals: Strike a Match (1999) and Night of the Comets (2001), both of which premiered at the Bass School of Music at Oklahoma City University.

Their work for chorus and orchestra, Cradle of Dreams, was commercially recorded by the Kiev Philharmonic and the Chamber Choir Kyiv.

Alexander and Knight’s song cycle, Tales Not Told, is based on her poems, has been performed in New York, Oklahoma and California, including a performance by the San Francisco Cabaret Opera, and published by Subito Music.

Alexander is a dual citizen of Canada and the United States.

She attended Cambridge, Vassar College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism after attending LSSU, going on to work for northern Michigan newspapers, including the Cheboygan Tribune, and the Associated Press in New York City.

She is the former head of the journalism department of St. Michael’s College in Vermont.

Alexander and Knight are the parents of two children, Alexander and Allegra.

David Knowles Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus David Knowles has a history with LSSU that goes back to the university’s beginnings.

He was a student of Professor Emeritus Ernest C. Kemp at what was then the Sault Branch of Michigan College of Mining and Technology before going on to earn a bachelor’s degree in geological engineering and a master’s degree in geology from MCMT, now Michigan Technological University.

Toward the end of a 14-year career with Canadian Javelin Ltd., where he directed mineral explorations in Canada, the U.S. and Central America, he received his Ph.D. in structural geology from Columbia University and shortly afterward started teaching with his mentor, Kemp, at LSSU.

He retired in 1996.

For his impressive career, and especially for his work at establishing the C. Ernest Kemp Mineral Resources Museum at LSSU, Knowles is being presented with the Donald and Catherine Finlayson Award.

The award is presented to an individual who has enjoyed success in his profession and community, and who is a strong advocate of the university, its programs, faculty, staff and students.

The Kemp Museum is a unique, self-guided, educational facility that focuses on the relationship between geology, resources and society.

Knowles said it demonstrates why our industrial standard of living is in jeopardy due to the declining availability of the Earth’s limited and non-renewable geologically formed mineral and energy resources.

The museum brings the visitor to a number of recommendations for the future, while driving home the inevitable conclusion that "gone is gone," a phrase that was often heard from Professor Kemp.

It also includes an impressive collection of minerals and crystals, including many donated by the Winton and Margaret Chance family and the late Lawrence Robinson of Petoskey, and a display of mineral, energy, and industrial resources of the Upper Great Lakes region.

"The history of this museum began 61 years ago, on October 30, 1946, when Ernie taught his first class on campus," said Knowles in his introductory remarks before the museum ribbon-cutting in 2007. "It is designed for people of all ages. Its educational mission includes explaining the basic truth that our society is dependent on the proper utilization of Earth’s finite and irreplaceable mineral resources. This precept is one that Professor Kemp consistently taught during his tenure at Lake State."

A longtime professor of geology and dean emeritus at LSSU, Kemp taught at the university until he retired in 1980, and then taught part-time until 1995.

He was the founder of the original mineral museum in Crawford Hall, prior to the building's renovation, and was instrumental in the development of the university’s bachelor of science degree in geology, first offered in 1977.

The Kemp Museum is host to many tours for Eastern Upper Peninsula students and is open by appointment.

Knowles, a veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy, lives in Sault Ste. Marie not far from campus.

He and his late wife, Shirley, are the parents of two children, Brian Knowles and Leslie Hewer.

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