A look at how six emeriti faculty are spending their “golden years”

By Steve Daniel

When alumni gather to reminisce about their college years, it isn’t long before they’re sharing stories of memorable professors. Just as students graduate and enter the “real world,” teachers eventually bid farewell to the classroom and head out into the world of retirement. It’s a transition that can elicit everything from mixed emotions to an adventurous spirit. Featured here are the stories of six familiar faculty – one from each of the colleges – who have retired from Old Dominion.

Robert Ake
Retirement is for the birds

Bob Ake earned a lot of frequent flier miles in his first year of retirement. Since stepping down a year ago last spring after 32 years at the university, he has visited Manitoba, Ecuador, India, Europe and Peru. All but one of the trips were taken in pursuit of his hobby of bird watching.

Well-known locally and around campus for hosting annual bird-watching excursions since 1980, Ake has seen about 2,500 of the world’s 10,000 species of birds since taking up the avocation in graduate school – everything from the spectacularly beautiful quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala, to the giant hornbill of southeast Asia.

Earlier this year he initiated a research project in connection with his hobby; he hopes to add new knowledge to the study of bird migration. It involves applying the process of stable isotope mass spectrometry to find out how far the migratory birds that visit Virginia’s Eastern Shore fly to get there. His study will complement the ongoing banding process, whereby birds are caught and banded as a means of determining their subsequent itineraries.

The goal, Ake said, is to develop a “cachement,” a mapping of the areas the birds came from on their migration south. The data will ultimately benefit wildlife management programs. “It’s important that the habitats these birds stop at be of sufficient quality, with plenty to eat.”

Determining the location of breeding grounds can be accomplished by collecting feathers during the fall banding and testing them via spectrometry, a technique that analyzes the ratios of atomic masses. Essentially, the isotopic makeup of a feather mirrors that of the rainfall from the area
the bird was hatched. This information will help in roughly determining the breeding location,
Ake explained.

He has been analyzing feathers from a half-dozen species of migratory songbirds and one species of hawk from the Eastern Shore, as well as those of a similar number of breeding birds from a banding station in the Dismal Swamp. He plans to publish his findings in hopes of attracting grants to finance further research.

In the meantime, he’ll continue his bird-watching travels.And just what is it about birding that has held his interest for so many years?

“I enjoy visiting new countries,” he said. “It’s about being outdoors, in nature. It’s the excitement of the hunt, getting to see beautiful and rare birds, studying their behavior and hearing their songs. It’s still thrilling.”

Nancy Topping Bazin
Discovering the artist within

It took retirement for Nancy Bazin to discover a talent that had lain dormant since eighth grade.

Bazin, who retired in January 2000, having served as women’s studies director (1975-85), English department chair (1985-89) and a professor of women’s studies and English (1978-00), registered in August 2001 for figure drawing and watercolor classes at the Studio of Fine Arts (SOFA) in Norfolk. Since then, she has sold two works, had paintings in a Chesapeake Bay Watercolorists exhibit and had drawings on display at the Norfolk Senior Center. Over the past summer, two of her paintings hung in Portsmouth’s Harbor Center performers area and three are currently for sale at the Riverview Gallery in Portsmouth.

Bazin admits that she surprised herself with her artistic talent.

“I love watercolor painting,” she said. “I do it a little differently than most people, because I use a white gouache that gives the work a more opaque look. I have a good sense of color, I think, and an intuitive ability to mix colors. Watercolor artists often layer colors, but I mix mine.”

Bazin said she also has been able to travel more since retiring. She and her husband, Robert Reardon, traveled in Turkey, Syria and the Republic of Georgia on one trip and Belgium and France on another. They visited Hawaii last year and plan to go to New Zealand and Australia
this winter.

On the home front, Bazin attends many cultural events and generally takes advantage of her free time to develop friendships and visit family. Jointly, she and her husband have six children and seven grandchildren.

She says she misses the “precious time” in the classroom, but not the evenings spent preparing for classes or grading papers. A 1994 winner of a State Council of Higher Education Outstanding Faculty Award, she stays in touch, mostly by e-mail, with as many as 25 former students. She said it is gratifying to know that, as a teacher, she played a role in helping change lives and introducing students to new areas of interest.

Bazin, who confessed she still reads the Chronicle of Higher Education, also maintains ties with the university. She has served on the presidential search committee, chaired an eminent scholars selection committee and helped write the faculty emeriti organization’s bylaws.

But mostly, she’s been busy immersing herself in the arts.

“I still don’t have enough time to read as many novels as I would like. Of course, now I’m reading art books,” she says with a laugh.

Reiko M. Schwab
Memoir recalls a painful past

Reiko Schwab has been a giving person throughout her life. Soon after joining Old Dominion in 1972, she became known for her free after-hours counseling sessions. As the only Japanese native on campus at the time, she also was in demand for identifying artifacts and doing translations.

In January 1978, she became associated with the Parents’ Group, a Hampton Roads support group for bereaved parents and those who have a seriously ill child. She spent countless hours writing letters “to help the parents understand what was going on in their lives and cope with their bereavement.” She was one of the earliest in her field to develop and teach a course on bereavement. For the first 2 1/2 years of her retirement, Schwab continued to serve the group as organizer and facilitator.

Schwab also has written and reviewed articles for professional publications since retiring in January 1998, but now she’s writing a memoir of her adolescent years, including the period during and after World War II when she lived in Shanghai, China, and southern Manchuria, and was expected to be part of the labor force under the Communist government.

“I was only 13 when I started to work,” she recalled. “I worked in a textile mill, helped take
careof Chinese soldiers in a field hospital, did seamstress work and peeled potatoes for construction crews.

“There were some scary experiences,” she added, not wishing to elaborate.

Schwab said she was prompted to resume writing about her experiences, which she began some years ago, after a high school classmate of hers from Japan (Schwab was able to return to her homeland after the war) contacted her recently. She had just read an account of Schwab’s included in William F. Nimmo’s 1988 book, “Behind the Curtain of Silence.”

“I realized that what I experienced is a relatively unknown part of history,” Schwab said. “People can hardly imagine the kind of life we had.”

Perhaps because of her experiences, Schwab savors the beautiful things in life. She enjoys gardening and treasures the trailing begonia given to her by a group of students in the late 1980s, which still thrives today. “I liked it so much and told them I would keep it going for many, many years.”

A couple of years ago, Schwab called one of her former students to ask if she remembered the flower and the promise made. Schwab then surprised her one day by presenting her with a cutting from the hardy plant. Like Schwab herself, a living symbol of survival.

William D. Stanley
Retirement? What’s that?

He officially retired in December 2000 after 34 1/2 years at the university, but Bill Stanley has yet to take the concept of retirement to heart. True, he no longer carries a full-time teaching load and finally stepped away from an ODU-record 27 years as department chair (“a dubious distinction,” he says), but he’s still around doing asynchronous course development, working with the Navy College and teaching an occasional engineering technology class.

Oh, and he also is writing. New editions of three of his textbooks were published recently, he is in the process of completing a new communications book, and he’s been negotiating with Prentice-Hall on writing a new applied engineering analysis text. Counting subsequent editions, he is the author of about 19 textbooks, some of which have become standards in engineering technology education.

“I’ve been sort of a workaholic all of my life, and fortunately I enjoy much of my work,” explained Stanley, who has been principal investigator on about 40 “small” [his words] development contracts with NASA in the areas of microwave remote sensing and signal processing. “I’ve seen people when they retire do nothing – they wind up just kind of deteriorating.”

A favorite professor among many students, Stanley was honored in 1996 with an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education. But in typical Stanley fashion, he deflected the attention away from himself, creating a scholarship fund with the prize money.

“I decided that since I had a lot of scholarship help when I was a student, this would be a good
thing to do.”

While he doesn’t miss the demands of a full-time teaching schedule, Stanley said teaching and writing were his real loves. “I never aspired to go to any higher level of administration, such as dean. I really didn’t even like the job of department chair. That was the least favorite thing I did, but somehow I got roped into it, and you get used to it after awhile.”

Stanley, who is a passionate fan of classical music and recently rediscovered bluegrass, the music
of his North Carolina roots, said he hopes to do some traveling out West some day, but in the meantime don’t look for him out on the lake or in a rocking chair.

“I’m not a boater, I’m not a fisherman, I’m not a hunter. At age 14, I got enthused about what was then vacuum-tube electronics, and I fell in love with it. That’s been a work/hobby kind of thing for me ever since.”

Albert Teich Jr.
Order in the court

When Al Teich left the Old Dominion classroom in 1992 after 35 years of teaching, he had no intention of retiring. Instead, he devoted full time to his law practice, which he had maintained along the way.

A few years later, however, his law background took a new twist. He ran successfully for Norfolk Circuit Court clerk, starting an eight-year term in January 1996. He supervises a staff of 55 people, coordinates court dockets and works with nine judges.

“There are over 850 duties,” Teich says. “There is no primary role. You run the administrative side of the circuit court as well as perform quasi-judicial duties. I often act as the probate judge, and I have the authority to appoint guardians and executors.”

The court also handles adoptions and divorces, wills and estates, and marriage licenses.

As a supervisor, Teich is tough but fair, and insists that his staff be responsive. He takes justifiable pride when lawyers comment that his is the best-run office around. “I don’t want anyone to stand at that counter for more than 30 seconds without someone offering to help them,” he said.

It wasn’t such a smooth operation when Teich took over.

“We were so far behind in the docket. We had a backlog of over 6,000 cases on the law side, including at least one civil case that was 17 years old. We got it down to where we’re now running a backlog of about 1,200 cases in law. That’s maybe a year’s worth of cases, and you can’t do much better than that.”

Teich, who earned an associate’s degree from Old Dominion in 1947, when it was known as the Norfolk Division, was hired by the school’s first president, Lewis Webb, “because they wanted a lawyer, a person who could teach what he practiced.” He enjoyed those early days in the classroom, but recalls a time in his mid-30s when he entertained thoughts of leaving teaching.

It was a group of students in a business law class that changed his mind. “They were older students – irreverent, but good and polite – who sat in the front row. They challenged me on almost everything. I so thoroughly enjoyed teaching them that I gave up any thought of leaving.”

Later, Teich, a Republican, served a two-year term in the Virginia House of Delegates (1972-74) while teaching.

Helen Yura-Petro
Of farming, genealogy and travel

It has been an eventful 14 years since Helen Yura stepped down as graduate program director of nursing in 1988, a program she established and ran for nine years.

She married retired naval officer Joe Petro, a World War II hero and Guadalcanal survivor, in 1989 and, up until last year, helped him take care of a 200-acre farm in Mecklenburg County, Va., near Clarksville. The farm, which he had acquired in 1985, consisted mostly of timberland, but the two planted peach, kiwi, pecan and crape myrtle trees, as well as tomatoes, grapes
and flowers.

“It was not a money-making venture,” said Yura-Petro. “We gave away the fruit. Peaches were our best crop, and we had a good amount of grapes. We lived there every other week. We kind of just fell into it and learned as we went along – and we learned a lot,” she added with a laugh. “We got really good at rehabbing a house. It was just a labor of love. Bluestone Creek runs through the property, and the scenery is magnificent. It was a place friends and family could come to visit and enjoy.”

In July, they donated the farm to the Byzantine Catholic Diocese – they are members of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Virginia Beach – and since then have spent time researching family and church history, and traveling. They have twice visited Slovakia, where they both have relatives.

The couple also has been to Alaska, and they traveled to the Canadian Rockies in August. In fact, they’ve visited all of the national parks in the western United States.

In the early years of her retirement, Yura-Petro did some nursing consultation at universities in Puerto Rico, California and Maryland, and she completed a four-credit computer course in April. At their home in the West Ghent section of Norfolk, she and her husband enjoy gardening and even have a thriving kiwi plant in their back yard.

Several years ago Yura-Petro established a lectureship through Epsilon Chi, the local nursing honor society, and continues to serve as a mentor for nurses interested in furthering their careers. She also writes references for former students and colleagues.

And, while she misses the interaction she had with her students, she takes great satisfaction in knowing that many of them have gone on to earn doctorates. “Some are now Old Dominion faculty,” she notes with pride.