1. Sodexo Food Service Manager Hank Strashnick and his staff call it “The Beast”: that moving conveyer belt onto which diners place their trays, dishware and cutlery after eating. Says Strashnick, “We go through 17,000-18,000 pieces of china, cups, glasses, and silverware a day. If we’re using trays, add 3,400 to the number. We serve a little over 19,000 meals a week.” For a few weeks during the fall, Alliot went “trayless” to see if that would save any energy used for dishwashing the trays.“Trayless saved the 3,400 trays and about 300 gallons of water a day,” Strashnick says. “The downside of trayless is we have to spend more time cleaning the tables.”
2. These skylights are atop the International Commons Building, a space used for international exchange programs, campus lecture series and conferences. Built in the 1980s, the Commons and surrounding 400-series townhouses residences originally were home for international students, in particular from the Seibo School in Japan.The students held classes in the Commons, which can be divided into four classrooms by partitions on tracks. These skylights allowed more ambient light into each partitioned section.
3. The soft-serve ice-cream machine in Alliot was installed in June 2003. The machine dispenses approximately 20 gallons of ice cream a day. Sodexho uses the premium level of 10 percent butterfat in their ice cream. (Regular Hood Ice cream is 10.5 percent, Ben & Jerry’s is 14 percent, and Haagen Daas is 16 percent butterfat, for comparison.) The ice cream “mix” is mixed with air, then fed into a cylindrical chamber that is 10 degrees or less and churned by a paddle until it thickens before it is forced out into a dish or cone.
4. The communications intercom panel in Alliot Student Center allows students to call campus extensions. The intercoms were installed during the 1996 “Route 96” technology upgrade project that wired student rooms for phone, video and cable. But with the surge in cell phone use in recent years, fewer students each year put a landline phone in rooms. In this respect, campus life is a far cry from when each floor had one phone that could only call on-campus extensions, and to order pizza you had to run downstairs to the only pay phone in the building.
5. Duffy Field at Doc Jacobs Complex is the artificial turf playing field built in summer 2005. It is home to Saint Michael’s field hockey team, in addition to men’s and women’s soccer and men’s and women’s lacrosse. The field was made possible due to a generous lead gift by John and Kathy Duffy, whose son, Kevin, played lacrosse at Saint Michael’s. The Duffys made their gift in memory of their son Christopher, who died in the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. This image is part of the helmet from the Purple Knight logo emblazoned on the field.
6. This is part of a piece of sculpture, over six feet square, that hangs on the red brick wall in the main stairwell of Durick Library. Entitled “Starship Alpha-Omega” and inspired by a poem of Emily Dickinson, the work is an homage to books, writing and learning and illustrates the major writing systems of the world, ancient and modern. Created by New Hampshire artist Thor Carlson and designed, modeled and gilded in collaboration with a master artisan and woodworker, the piece is fabricated from 160 small tiles and over 200 wooden fret-work pieces. It was commissioned by the Class of 1981 as a memorial to John Caswell ’81.
7. The study carrels in Durick Library offer a quiet refuge for students. The average Saint Michael’s student comes to the library 70 times a year, or more than twice a week. Students make about 4,500 visits to the library in an average week. The busiest day in the library is Monday. The busiest week is, of course, exam week. According to a student survey, 99.8 percent of students reported using the library. Students work alone in the library about 85 percent of the time and in groups about 15 percent of the time.
8. The home tennis courts next to Bergeron Hall are painted purple (the corner lines of one court are shown in the image), making them probably unique and surely uncommon. Purple Knight tennis squads have had much success in recent years, with the women qualifying for the NCAA Division II Tournament for the first time in program history in 2007-08, compiling a 15-7 season. The team has had a winning season every year since 1996. The men advanced to the Northeast-10 Conference Semifinals in 2007-08, and finished the year with nine wins, just one shy of the program record.
9. These vents atop Cheray Hall are connected to “fume hoods” in the building’s laboratories. These hoods, about the size of a desk, constantly draw air in from a room and out the vents, so the “bad smelling or dangerous stuff never gets out into the room” when professors and students are working in labs, explains chemistry professor Josh van Houten. These particular hoods and vents were installed during extensive renovations and improvements to Cheray in the mid-1990s that brought all the sciences under one roof, added research labs, expanded greenhouse facilities and wired labs and offices with contemporary technology. Cheray first opened in 1949.
10. These pipes are part of the organ in the Chapel of Saint Michael the Archangel, an impressive instrument manufactured by Casavant Freres in St. Hyacinth, Quebec. Its console is all-electric and detached from the organ; the metal pipe work is made of zinc up to 4 inches, and then “spotted metal” thereafter. The wood pipe work is of solid mahogany with a coat of clear lacquer. The organ has a blower and motor and 889 pipes. The chapel is the second-largest Catholic worship space in Vermont after the St. Joseph Co-Cathedral in Burlington.
11. This plaster statue of Saint Michael once sat in a niche on the south face of Founders Hall, and can be seen in old photographs of the building dating to the college’s earliest years. The statue’s current home is in storage at Sloane Hall, on North Campus. Greg Blasdel, associate professor of fine arts/art, said the statue had been discovered during a clean-out of storage space several years ago. Blasdel did a minimum of mending “and we used it for years in the still-life room.” Former art professor Roy Kennedy had done some repair on it too.
12. Anybody who once lived in one of the four quad dorms – Ryan, Alumni, Lyons or Joyce, might recognize the familiar look of this typical handrail from stairwells in these similar buildings. Ryan was named for Bishop Edward Ryan, bishop of Burlington from 1945-56; Alumni for the alumni who did the fundraising that financed the building, Lyons for the Very Rev. Daniel P. Lyons, SSE, eighth president of the college, and Joyce for Bishop Robert F. Joyce, bishop of Burlington when it was built.
13. This is the sign at the studio of campus radio station WWPV on the second floor of St. Edmund’s Hall. The call letters stand for “Winooski Park, Vermont,” according to John Sheehey, registrar and former adviser to the station, who also has hosted a regular folk music show there since 1988. The college had a radio club in the 1940s that did programming several hours a week on WCAX; an AM campus station, WSSE (Society of St. Edmund, naturally) began in 1954 with a weak “carrier current” signal transmitted through the college’s electrical system. In the ‘60s the college obtained an FM radio license for WWPV and set up shop on North Campus, before the 1986 move to the present location. Most student DJs now play songs off laptops and iPods, said Sheehey, who is considered old-school with his CDs and currently unplayable records (the old turntables need new needles).
14. This shows a dispenser for the dining hall tumblers. On average, a tumbler lasts about three months. “We buy about 4,000 a year, and with the price of oil going up, we went from 46 cents a piece to 93 cents last year (August to March),” reports Hank Strashnick, who adds, “It is number one on the Alliot ‘walk out’ list. You can find them anywhere on campus!!”
15. The Vincent C. Ross Sports Center is home to the Saint Michael’s basketball and volleyball teams, and saw its first contest on December 1, 1973. The Center has a capacity of 2,500 and also features a six-lane swimming pool, athletic training room, locker rooms and office space. It is widely regarded as one of the best Division II facilities in the Northeast, and has been dubbed the “Taj Mahal” of the Northeast-10 Conference. This is a tight view of one of the upper tier reserved seats that are accessible from the building’s second floor.
16. This shows part of the base of a clock on the campus green that was a gift from the Class of 2003. The Senior Class Gift each year is a demonstration of appreciation by the Class and shows their commitment to the college as they graduate and become members of the alumni body. Seniors invest their time and energy to give the college something which will be remembered and also reflects the needs of the school. Gifts have ranged from the very first Senior Class Gift to Saint Michael’s College, a statue of the Virgin Mary, to scholarships to support future Saint Michael’s students.
