Minnesota State University Moorhead News Releases December 2006

MSUM’S DIRECTOR OF ATHLETICS SEARCH IN PROCESS
A timeline has been set and a search committee has been selected to recommend who should lead the Dragon athletic program. The process will move into high gear after the holiday semester break.

Dr. Betsy Alden of Alden & Associates has been hired by the university to serve as the consultant for the search. Her firm is experienced in selecting personnel for higher education institutions that compete in NCAA Division II.

A list of semifinalists will be selected by the end of January. The list will be reduced to finalists during February and they will be invited to the campus for interviews. The selection schedule calls for the appointment decision to be made by early March.

President Roland Barden has appointed Warren Wiese, Vice President for Student Affairs, to chair the search committee. The other members are: Greg Peterson, Dragon Fire; Larry Scott, MSUAASF athletics representative; Dennis Aune, MSUAASF representative; Cindy Phillips, IFO (faculty association) representative; Benjamin Smith, IFO representative, Robin Abraham, AFSCME representative; John Haugo, MSUM Alumni Foundation representative; Tammy Blake, women’s volleyball head coach; Rollie Bulock, women’s soccer head coach; Eric Rosen, Student Athletic Advisory Committee representative; Megan DaPisa, Student Athletic Advisory Committee representative; Kathleen Enz Finken, Dean of Arts & Humanities; Yvonne Condell (faculty emerita), community member; and Kerstin Kealy (alumna), community member.

Sylvia Barnier has been serving as the interim Athletic Director since the departure of Alfonso Scandrett, Jr. earlier this year.

MSUM WILL GRADUATE 450 DURING
WINTER COMMENCEMENT DEC. 22
MSUM will award degrees to more than 450 graduates during its winter commencement program at 2 p.m. Friday, Dec. 22 at Alex Nemzek Fieldhouse.

Commencement speaker is David K. Martin, president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce of Fargo Moorhead. The Chamber is the region’s largest business and community services organization, with nearly 1,900 member private, public and non-profit sector firms that collectively employ more than 69,000 people.  Its mission is unifying and advancing business and community interests in the region.

A native of Pelican Rapids, Martin holds a bachelor’s degree from MSU Moorhead, a master’s degree from Colorado State University and a post-master’s degree from North Dakota State University.  An author of numerous published articles and a frequent speaker at the local, state and national level, Martin has devoted his career to helping people and organizations, companies and communities to succeed – together.

A reception for graduates, faculty, parents and guests will follow the recessional.

LAST LAUGH: DEC. 4-6, STUDENT ONE-ACT PLAYS
Three nights of One-Act plays presented by theatre arts students at 7 p.m. Dec. 4, 5 and 6 in the Roland Dille Center for the Arts Gaede Stage. It’s free with donations at the door.

There's something for everyone in these evenings of plays. Lots of laughs from playwrights like Durang and McLure(that's why we're calling it THE LAST LAUGH are mixed with edgier fare from the likes of Shepard and Stoppard. A variety of plays show each night.

For more information, please contact Kristin Larson at larsnkri@mnstate.edu

Lisa Leabo’s great, great, great, great grandfather
Composed the music on Christmas Eve 1818…
MSUM ALUM, FARGO TEACHER HAS SPECIAL
CONNECTION WITH ‘SILENT NIGHT’ COMPOSER
Gruber sang bass, Mohr sang tenor, and the sound they made that night in a small Austrian village church on Dec. 24, 1818 still echoes across the world during the Christmas season.

“Yes, that was my great, great, great, great grandfather Franz Xavier Gruber, who composed the music for ‘Silent Night,” says Lisa (nee Gruber) Leabo, a 1993 MSUM elementary education graduate who’s been teaching at Jefferson Elementary School in Fargo for the past 12 years. “I still get chills when I hear the song performed at church every Christmas Eve.”  

And while the tradition of singing “Silent Night” has been muted in many public arenas under the veil of political correctness, the Gruber clan still gets together each Christmas season to sing one of the most lyrical and hopeful carols ever written.

“It’s very special for us, considering our heritage,” Lisa said. “My grandfather Leo, now 89, and my father James are both fluent in German and they both inherited the talent for playing music and singing. Leo plays accordion, my dad plays accordion, guitar and piano, and I play the piano a little. So when we all get together during the holidays, singing ‘Silent Night’­­––in English and German––is part of the celebration.”

It’s a large gathering, she said. Grandpa Leo, who oddly enough was born on Christmas Day, has seven daughters, two sons, 28 grandchildren and 18 great grandchildren.

One of the most popular Christmas carols ever, “Silent Night” has been translated into more than 300 languages, recorded literally thousands of times and still resonates throughout the globe during the Christmas season, from remote Third World villages to the Vatican in Rome.

As the story goes, Lisa said, it was a cold Christmas Eve at St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf, Austria, located about 11 miles north of Salzburg, when a young assistant pastor, Joseph Mohr, discovered that mice had damaged the church organ by chewing on the bellows. (Another version hints that a flood might have caused the damage.)

That meant no music for the Christmas Eve Mass. But the young vicar had another plan, Lisa said. He’d written a poem that could be crafted into a decent carol, and he could play guitar. But the words still needed a melody. So he trekked three miles in the snow to the neighboring town of Arnsdorf, where a school teacher named Franz Gruber lived. He was also the church organist and choirmaster.

Within a couple hours, legend has it, Gruber wrote the melody and the two spent a few hours practicing with the choir before that famous Christmas Mass where Gruber sang bass and Mohr sang tenor and played guitar, for the first public performance of “Silent Night.” On each of the original six verses, the choir repeated the last two lines in four-part harmony.

In time, though, Mohr and Gruber were nearly forgotten, even in Oberndorf (although Gruber later wrote orchestra, French horn and organ accompaniments for “Silent Night”).

Except that an organ builder named Karl Mauracher who came to fix the St. Nicholas instrument somehow heard the song and brought it back to his native village in the Tyrol Mountains near Innsbruck, home to several popular traveling singing groups (forerunners to the Von Trapps of “Sound of Music” fame). Among them were the Rainers, who sang “Silent Night” to Austria’s Emperor Francis I and Russia’s Czar Alexander I, and the Strasser Sisters, who brought the song to Leipzig and sang it at the Royal Saxon Court Chapel in Pliessenburg Castle.

In 1839, the Rainers performed “Stille Nacht” for the first time in America at the Alexander Hamilton Monument outside Trinity Church in New York City.

Lisa said the melody was often mistakenly attributed at times to the more famous Austrian composers Haydn and Mozart. In 1854 the origin of “Silent Night” was documented by Gruber on a request by the Royal Prussian Court Orchestra in Berlin.

But the controversy was conclusively resolved in 1995 when a long-lost arrangement of “Stille Nacht” in the hand of Joseph Mohr was authenticated by handwriting experts and historians. In the upper right hand corner of the document Mohr wrote: “Melodie von Fr. Xav. Gruber.”

Mohr died penniless in 1848 after a career as a parish priest, giving all his earnings to youth and elderly programs. Gruber died in 1863, spending much of his life teaching, directing and composing music. Both are memorialized with museums created at their various homes and birthplaces in Austria.

Lisa said her great, great grandfather Stephen Gruber Sr. was the first member of the Gruber family to arrive in the United States. It was 1881 then and he was 24 years old. He finally settled and farmed near Lake Henry, Minn., because of the German Catholic population in that area.

“In 1987,” Lisa said, “Werner Gruber, my grandfather Leo’s first cousin, traveled to Austria and researched the family heritage and verified that Leo was in fact a direct descendent of Franz Gruber.”

Lisa, who also earned master’s degrees at NDSU and UND, spends some time each year teaching her K-5th grade English Language Learners at Jefferson Elementary about the history of the song. She currently teaches 31 refugee and immigrant students from a variety of countries.

One of the most significant events in the history of the song, she said, happened at the beginning of World War I, on Christmas Eve 1914 in Flanders Field. Both British and German soldiers called a spontaneous truce, the German’s singing “Stille Nacht” and the British “Silent Night,” then climbed out of their trenches and met briefly in no-man’s land before resuming hostilities.

One of her goals is to someday visit, with her husband Brent and their two-year- old daughter Lauren, the Silent Night Museum in Salzburg, the Silent Night Chapel in Oberndorf (the original St. Nicholas Church was destroyed by floods, but a new one was erected near the site) and the Franz Gruber museums at his former homes in Arnsdorf and Hallein.

Meanwhile, Lisa is looking forward to this year’s Gruber family Christmas, which will be held on New Year’s Eve. “The number of descendents of the ‘Silent Night’ composer is growing and spreading out every year, so we rotate the location and date of our celebration to accommodate everyone,” she said. “My father bought a new accordion for the occasion.”

MARV BOSSART RETIRES AFTER 37 YEARS AT MSUM
Long-time WDAY-TV anchor and news producer Marv Bossart, who’s been teaching in the MSUM Mass Communications department for 37 years, is retiring at the end of fall semester

A Fargo native, Bossart started writing for the Paul Harvey radio show in Chicago after earning his master’s degree from Northwestern University. When he returned to Fargo to raise a family, he began what would become a 42-year career with WDAY-TV. He officially retired from the television station in the spring of 2000, but continued to teach at MSUM.

In 1999, he received the Mitchell Charley award for his outstanding contributions to the field of broadcast journalism, an award he shares with people such as Tom Brokaw, Harry Reasoner and Eric Sevaried.

In honor of Bossart’s teaching tenure, the Mass Communcations department has created a scholarship in his name. Contributions can be sent to Marv Bossart Scholarship, Alumni Foundation, MSU, Moorhead, 1104 7th Ave. So. Moorhead, MN 56563.

NORDICK TAKES EARLY SEPARATION FROM HIS LONG ASSOCIATION WITH MSUM’S PARALEGAL DEPARTMENT
Larry Nordick, a 1973 MSUM business administration graduate and a long-time faculty member in the university’s Paralegal department (previous the Legal Assistant Program), took an early separation from his career here at the end of fall semester.

He and his wife Jen, a nurse at Prairie St. John’s in Fargo, are moving East to be closer to their family.

Larry grew up a few blocks from Nemzek Hall and after graduating from MSUM he earned his law degree from the UND School of Law. He spent most of his early career as managing attorney with Legal Assistance of North Dakota in Fargo and later as executive director of Northwest Minnesota Legal Services, both programs serving low-income, elderly and disadvantage people.

“Cindy Phillips, who spearheaded the development of the university’s Legal Assistant Program, invited me to become a member of the community advisory group back in 1980 that was charged with helping create the program,” he said. “So my connection to MSUM’s Paralegal program goes back about 26 years.

During that time he also became an adjunct faculty member here, discovered he enjoyed teaching, then became a full-time member of the faculty in the fall of 1990. He served as director of the Legal Assistant Program for 10 years, then was appointed to a three-year term as chair of the newly named Paralegal department.

Before moving next spring, he plans to pursue some volunteer or mission work abroad. Then he expects to find another teaching job when he and his wife settle in one of the Eastern states.

DANIELSON RETIRES AFTER TWO DECADES AS MSUM POLITICAL SCIENCE PROF
James Danielson, a Political Science professor at MSUMMoorhead, retired in December after nearly two decades on the university’s faculty.

Danielson taught at the University of North Texas for 20 years before coming to MSUM in 1987.

A former chair of the Political Science department and coordinator of the university’s master’s degree program in Public, Human Service and Health Administration, he holds a doctorate from the University of Minnesota.

Danielson and colleague Philip Bauman are founders and co-directors of the Public Affairs Institute, an arm of MSUM’s Political Science department that conducts a wide variety of public opinion polls.

After retiring, he and his wife plan to travel throughout the world. He also plans to publish a book that proposes significant new directions for public policy and will continue working with the Public Affairs Institute.