Remembrances

Barbara Lee Soldmann Schadt, 83, of Vero Beach, Fla., Westport, Conn., and New York City passed away peacefully at her home in Vero Beach on March 4, 2022 with her son by her side. She was a fiercely independent force who will be greatly missed by all who loved her.

Barbara was predeceased by her best friend and beloved husband of 62 years, Jim Schadt. She is survived by her children, Lauren Schadt Baker (Charlie) and Andrew Schadt (Kristen); her grandchildren Charlie (Christine), AJ, Caroline and William; her sisters Pat Mollsen (Cliff), Michele Goodman and their families; brothers-in-law Tom Schadt (Sharon Reitveld) and Jerry Schadt; and many treasured close friends.

Barbara was born and raised in Chicago. One old friend wrote, “she grew up in a time when expectations for women were limited. Women might attend college, meet a nice man, have a family in their 20s and support their husband’s career. Barbara did all of that, but she always wanted more.” She was the first in her family to attend college and was accepted to Northwestern University on an academic scholarship. Standing in a line at freshman orientation, she met Jim Schadt who would become her best friend, husband and partner in life. They dated all through college, taught swimming at the same country club during the summers and were married just before their senior year.

Their life took their family to Cincinnati; Westport, Conn; Kenilworth, Ill.; and back again to Westport and Rowayton, Conn., where they lived for over 40 years. Barbara was always engaged in her community, but always felt there was more she could accomplish on her own. In Westport, she served as the president of the Young Women’s League and championed the funding and construction of the Levitt Pavilion, which remains a cultural center for Fairfield County. Barbara surprised everyone but her husband when, at the age of 40, she enrolled at the University of Bridgeport School of Law. In typical fashion, she excelled in the classroom and led the law review. Upon graduation, she joined the firm of Kelley, Drye & Warren in their real estate group. Determined to have a greater impact on her community, she became an assistant attorney general for the State of Connecticut focusing on environmental protection.  Several years later, she was appointed as a magistrate to the District Court of Connecticut where she served until she retired. On more than one occasion, she was known to bring a gavel to the dinner table. Barbara’s many professional and community accomplishments continue to inspire her family and friends. 

Outside of her career, she was also an avid tennis player, skier and world traveler. She  traveled extensively, sharing the experiences with dear friends and family including heli-skiing over 1 million vertical feet, exploring Hong Kong and Vietnam with girlfriends and sleeping in a tent in the Serengeti. She maintained a wonderful group of adored friends throughout her life, keeping the same holiday traditions, book group and bridge club for over 50 years!

Barbara Soldmann Schadt was a quiet force with a pioneering drive. She set high expectations for herself and expected nothing less from others. She inspired her children, family and friends to reach higher, to think and live independently, and to work hard to build a joyful, successful life. While her family and dear friends will miss her every day, she will forever live on in our hearts.

A private family ceremony took place in Vero Beach. A celebration of Barbara’s incredible life will be held this summer in Southport, Conn. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Westport Young Women’s League, the James P. and Barbara Schadt Swimming Scholarship at Northwestern University, or the charity of your choice.

Born Diane Margot Cody, Diane Beaurline ’68 grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y. She attended Northwestern University, graduating in 1968. In her freshman year she spotted Alan Beaurline in a class with her and asked for a date. They were married in 1969 and lived in Denver and Evanston before moving to northern Minnesota to open a cafe. After three years they moved to Helena, Montana, to open an award-winning Italian restaurant in 1978. In 1985 they sold the restaurant and moved to Maui.
On Maui, they built a house and then opened Kihei Wine & Spirits in 1991. They moved the store to Wailea and renamed it Wailea Wine in 2006. In 2012 they sold the business to Ed Mikesh but continued to work there until 2018.
Her love of food and her creative cooking abilities provided for over 50 years of wonderful food and successful businesses. She and Alan shared a special relationship by always working together and maintaining very private lives outside of their businesses. She was known for her radiant smile and her love of hugs. She loved to walk, swim, read and cook.
She loved dogs, and she loved life.
She suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke on Nov. 9 and died later that day without regaining consciousness. She was loved dearly and is terribly missed by her husband, Alan.

Lloyd John Peterson ’65, ’69 MD, a long-time resident of Greensboro, N.C., passed away on Oct. 25th, 2021, at the age of 78. The beloved only child of second-generation Swedish immigrants, Lloyd Frederick and Lois Emma Peterson, he was born on July 15, 1943, in Oak Park, Ill.  In 1951 the family moved to Itasca, Ill.

Lloyd was salutatorian of his graduating class at Lake Park High School in Medinah, Ill. The first member of his family to attend college, Lloyd earned a BA in chemistry from Northwestern University, where he was a member of the Phi Lambda Upsilon Honorary Chemical Society and the Phi Kappa Sigma Fraternity. In 1969 he graduated “with distinction” from Northwestern University Medical School where was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society.

Lloyd completed a fellowship in surgical pathology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., before he started as a surgical intern and junior resident in general surgery at Duke University Medical Center, Durham, N.C. He finished his time at Duke as a urology resident and fellow. In addition to his clinical training, he was active in basic research. He published numerous articles, made multiple presentations, and received several research prizes.

From 1975 to 1977, Lloyd served as a major in the U.S. Army and was a staff urologist at Letterman Army Medical Center, The Presidio, San Francisco. He received The Army Commendation Medal.  Following his Army service, Lloyd became an assistant professor of urology at Washington University School of Medicine and performed research at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis.  In 1979, Lloyd moved to Greensboro and joined the urological practice of Garvey and Hunt (which later merged with other practices to become Alliance Urology), but remained involved with clinical research throughout his entire career.  Lloyd served as chief of surgery, president of the medical board, and sat on the board of trustees for Moses Cone Health System. He also chaired numerous hospital committees at both Moses Cone and Wesley Long Hospitals in Greensboro.  Lloyd retired from practicing medicine in 2012.

During his years of medical practice Lloyd cared deeply about his patients, the nurses, and staff. With his wonderful sense of humor, he tried to keep things light even in the most serious situations. Many patients recall what he said to them to help them relax as they were about to undergo a procedure. His staff always valued his friendly, endearing demeanor and warm smile.

Lloyd also served as senior warden of the Vestry at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church and was on the boards of the Greensboro Country Club, the Wellspring Life Care Community, and the Wellspring Foundation.

Lloyd and his wife, Jane Houston Peterson, met at Northwestern University as freshmen. They married in 1967 in Kansas City, Mo., and honeymooned in San Francisco following Lloyd’s second year of medical school.  Lloyd and Jane lived in Chicago for the remaining two years of medical school and then relocated to Durham for his internship and residency at Duke University, where their daughter, Kristin, and son, Kirk, were born.

Lloyd was first and foremost a gentleman and a devoted son, husband, father, and grandfather.  He was proud of his children and grandchildren and loved participating in their activities, attending sporting events, getting to know their friends, babysitting, helping with schoolwork, running errands, cleaning, building and fixing things, mentoring and generally offering his loving service in any way he could.

Lloyd was a dedicated fan of the Northwestern Wildcats, Chicago Bears and Cubs and the Duke Blue Devils.  A love of golf was instilled by his father, and Lloyd cherished the camaraderie he found on the links throughout his life. Lloyd had several weekly golf groups at Greensboro Country Club with close friends. For 20 years, Lloyd and Jane traveled, dined and laughed endlessly with the couple’s golf group, the Easy Ryders.  He started taking his family on annual ski trips in the early 1980s which led them to Colorado, Utah, Vermont and Europe, often in the company other families. Lloyd loved to travel the world and found joy in taking pictures that he used to create photobooks which he shared with fellow travelers. While living in San Francisco, he caught the “jogging” bug while running across the Golden Gate Bridge and became an avid runner and competed in dozens of races including the New York City Marathon in 1985. Lloyd and Jane learned to sail together when they lived in San Francisco and being on the water was always one of Lloyd’s great joys. For many years he sailed and raced his yellow Lightning, Sneak A-Tack. He sailed with friends from Beaufort, N.C., to Bermuda.  Later he delighted in captaining their Scout outboard at Figure 8 Island, where he often pulled his kids and grandchildren on tubes and water-skis and was affectionately named Captain Lloyd.

He was an intellectual, a voracious reader, a jokester with a quick wit, a stylish dresser who could be found on the dancefloor at every party. He was known for his loving, humorous, and poetic rhyming toasts that he gave at birthdays, anniversaries and graduations. Lloyd belonged to the NNBC (No Name Book Club) for decades and appreciated the intellectual conversations they had trying to solve the world’s problems.  He adored walking and playing fetch with his black Labrador, Aiko, and his “grand-dogs” Stella, JoJo, Dixie and Maisie. Lloyd was a music aficionado, a collector of records, CDs and ultimately audio files.  He was thrilled to finally see The Rolling Stones and John Prine in concert with Jane in 2019.

Lloyd unexpectantly became ill in March of 2020 with a very rare, rapidly progressing form of Alzheimer’s and succumbed to the disease 19 months later.

Lloyd is survived by his beloved wife of 54 years, Jane; his daughter, Kristin Peterson Edwards; his son, Kirk Houston Peterson; a daughter-in-law, Kimberly Bolick Peterson; and five cherished grandchildren, Hayden, Lucie, and Gretchen Edwards, and Van and Louisa Peterson.

Roy Earl Howarth ’60 MA, ’71 PhD, Gilbert, Ariz., April 21, 2021, age 89.

Howarth was born in Dartmouth, Mass., to Roy and Elsie Howarth.

After high school, Roy enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served on the USS Oriskany (Mighty “O”) during the Korean War.  Following his service, he gained inspiration from his wife, Lissette, to pursue a career in teaching while an undergraduate.

Roy became a dedicated educator at Maine East High School in Illinois. He taught courses at all levels of English literature and composition and earned his master’s and doctoral degrees at Northwestern. He was an inspiring teacher and an encouraging mentor to faculty while chair of the English department at Maine East.

In his personal life, Roy’s favorite ways to pass the time included golfing, gardening, reading and travel.

Beloved by his family, he is survived by his wife of 70 years, Lissette Arnold Howarth; his daughter and son-in-law, Jennifer and Richard King; and his brother and sister-in-law, Donald and Barbara Howarth.

Great Expectations: A Guru's Life Lessons for His Chelas

John R. McLane, professor emeritus of South Asian history at Northwestern University, passed away on Jan. 24, 2020. This essay by Anupama R. Oza and Rajesh C. Oza, honors a scholar’s passion for India and a teacher’s commitment to his students.

If tenure-track academics are so blessed, they will move through three career stages: assistant professor, associate professor, professor. We like to think of this as striving, arriving, thriving. 

Professor McLane, known to family, friends, colleagues and students as Jock, experienced all three stages in more than half a century at Northwestern. After his undergraduate studies at Harvard (which included a three-month trip to India in the fall of his junior year), in 1961 Jock earned his doctorate in South Asian history at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies; at the SOAS, Jock studied with A.L. Basham, a professor who taught many budding historians and is perhaps best known for having written the classic introductory text The Wonder that Was India.

As a young man still in his mid-20s, Jock came to Evanston with his wife and their two children to teach history of the Indian subcontinent. He was at the very forefront of American scholars introducing India into undergraduate education. Indeed, only a decade before Jock came to Northwestern as an assistant professor striving to research and teach about the vast area called South Asia, the entire field of “Area Studies” was just beginning to take shape in the United States.

In the middle of the 20^th century, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and, subsequently, the National Defense Education Act funded more than 125 university-based area-studies units known as National Resource Center programs. In the Midwest, much of this funding went to the University of Chicago, which established its South Asia Language and Area Center (SALAC) as the preeminent locus of scholars concentrating on Indian civilization.

It was within this context of America’s outward gaze toward India and other Asian nations that Jock arrived as an associate professor and thrived as a full professor at Northwestern. During this time, he wrote Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress in 1977, which won the Watamull Prize awarded by the American Historical Association, and Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth Century Bengal in 1993.

While Jock can surely be honored for having progressed through the three stages of professorship (culminating in being distinguished as professor emeritus), we best remember him for a different tripartite aspect of his life cycle at Northwestern: to be sure as a teacher across generations, but also as a champion of non-Western cultures and as a lifelong mentor encouraging lives well lived. It is in these roles that Jock served as a guru to so many of his chelas, a guide who imparted knowledge to his disciples through enduring relationships.

Teacher Across Generations

Jock taught both of us — the father and daughter authors of this memoriam: Rajesh in 1978 and Anupama (who goes by “Anu”) in 2005. Much changed across that quarter of a century. To be sure, History 385 remained History of Modern India, but Professor McLane evolved his curriculum to reflect the significant arrival of new voices from the subcontinent; as his chelas changed, the guru learned from them and updated his teaching accordingly.

When Rajesh took History 385, the reading list included Stanley Wolpert’s A New History of India, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s Freedom at Midnight (all of which were sourced at the Great Expectations bookstore on Foster Street, quietly suggesting the great expectations Professor McLane had of his students). By the time Anu took the “same” course, the reading list had expanded to include writing by Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar and Sambuddha Sen. You’ll surely note that there is a reclaiming of history at work here: Western authors transformed into Indian authors. This is what scholars of subaltern studies call giving voice to the subject (or in India’s case under British imperialism, giving voice to the subjected peoples). Along with an evolution in whose perspective students read (Indian creators), the mediums (film, interviews) allowed for many more Indian voices to be shared as evidenced by Professor McLane’s use of Anand Patwardhan's documentary film “In the Name of God/Ram ke Naam.” 

Beyond the pedagogy of the classroom, Jock became more accessible; in part this had to do with the guru’s own evolution as a teacher; but it also resulted from the chelas finding their own voice on a more democratized campus. Perhaps a couple of anecdotes will bring life to this change. 

In the spring of 1978, while still a freshman, Rajesh reached for the stars and took Professor McLane’s class that was designed for juniors and seniors. He was distraught in discovering that he knew so little about the history of the country of his birth; and he was taken aback by the intellectual acuity of the dozen or so older students (all non-Indians) who shared the classroom in Harris Hall. But most of all, Rajesh was intimidated by the bearded professor with his Harvard and University of London pedigree; this professor had high expectations, and Rajesh’s midterm blue-book suggested that he was barely keeping up. Suddenly Rajesh had the flu and a dental problem. Given that his family could not afford dental care, he went to the free clinic at Northwestern’s School of Dentistry (subsequently closed in 1998) and learned from the dental students that he had periodontitis; to address this serious gum disease, Rajesh’s root canal treatment required that he make weekly trips downtown at the same time as Professor McLane’s class. Rather than explain his dilemma, Rajesh, for the first and last time, cut class. One day, while playing basketball in Blomquist Gym, Rajesh saw Professor McLane shooting hoops. The chela tried to avoid making eye contact with the guru, but the guru saw his chela and inquired about the absenteeism. With dental treatment completed, Rajesh was back in Harris Hall and made a modest comeback on the final exam.

Champion of Non-Western Cultures

Anu first met Professor McLane in her first-year dormitory, the International Studies Residential College (ISRC), where he had served as its first master in the 1980s. Student life outside the classroom was a cause that was close to Professor McLane’s heart. As a founder of the Residential College system, he believed that interaction between students and faculty was part of a robust college education; indeed, if the Northwestern University Press were to publish an illustrated dictionary, perhaps “collegial” would have a photo of Jock McLane, eyes twinkling with a hint of intellectual collaboration and shared merriment.

For many years, Professor McLane championed a global outlook on campus. He had a solid relationship not only with his students, but also with the University’s presidents, provosts and deans of the College of Arts and Science. While he was not successful in advocating for a substantial change to the curriculum that would have required that all students take one course on a non-Western civilization, he never stopped looking for ways to expand the worldview of Northwestern administrators and students.

By the time Anu took History 385, she had already developed relationships with Professor McLane and many other students at the ISRC and across campus who believed that an educated mind is an open mind. In Anu’s version of the History of Modern India, the classroom seated dozens of students from across the world who challenged each other and Professor McLane to consider and reconsider the reading and writing of Indian history.

It was this type of dialectic that the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen wrote about in his Argumentative Indian, a book that Rajesh reviewed shortly before Anu graduated. The review closed with this small tribute: “For Professor John ‘Jock’ McLane, the first of a long line of teachers who fostered in RCO a life-long learning about — and love for — all things Indian.”

The tribute led to Professor McLane and Mrs. McLane inviting the Oza Family to their home for tea and biscuits. Besides the evident love that our host and hostess had for each other, their home on Davis Street was steeped in history, including a grand portrait of a Civil War military leader to whom Professor McLane was related. The McLane family’s gracious hospitality in the middle of Anu’s education led to a deepening of the guru-chela relationship, a relationship borrowed from ancient India and translated into the heart of a university campus in the middle of America. 

Lifelong Mentor Encouraging Lives Well-Lived

For Anu, her guru always remained Professor McLane: She took one more course with him on the Indian Partition, introduced him to her grandparents at her graduation, asked him to inspire her students to pursue higher education when she was with Teach for America on Chicago’s West Side (please see attached photo of the Guru, his chela and a batch of Anu’s chelas), and requested that he write a graduate school letter of recommendation to Harvard (which she treasured since it enabled the two of them to share an alma mater).

But for Rajesh, shortly after the tea and biscuits, Professor McLane became “Jock” and Mrs. McLane was “Joan.” Over the past decade and a half, Rajesh has been returning to campus to serve on the McCormick School of Engineering’s Industrial Engineering and Management Science Advisory Board. After the tea and biscuits, Rajesh (who became “Raj” to Jock) always made a point to meet with his old professor. They talked about so much under the sun:

• Jock’s undergraduate days and his decision to study history to better understand social inequalities across the world, and in India, Gandhian non-violent civil disobedience against injustice
• Raj’s shift away from biomedical engineering to organizational change consulting and a lifelong commitment to understanding India, America, and the world through a Gandhian lens
• Jock’s happiness in his and Joan’s son, daughter and grandchildren
• Raj’s happiness in his and Mangla’s daughter and son (and in 2019 Anu’s daughter)
• Jock commiserating on how despite his best lobbying efforts (both on and off the tennis court where he parried with then Northwestern President Henry Bienen), he still could not convince the administration to require a course on non-Western cultures
• Raj sharing that he met President Bienen at Anu’s graduation and asked about how we can best make Northwestern a world-class institute through greater focus on Asia, particularly India
• Jock’s introducing Raj to newer members of the faculty like Rajeev Kinra to whom Jock had passed the baton of teaching South Asian history
• Raj fondly recalling the troika of Jock McLane, James Sheridan and Conrad Totman teaching the histories of India, China, and Japan when he was an undergraduate student
• Jock's perspective on how much the demographics and capabilities of Northwestern students had changed since 1961
• Raj’s musing on how Northwestern’s students had improved, only half-jokingly sharing that he would not have been accepted in the year that Anu matriculated
• Jock conveying his abiding interest in environmental history and “green Chicago”
• Raj proudly appreciating his son’s majoring in Earth Systems at Stanford
• Jock sharing his final academic writing on “Hindu Victimhood and India's Muslim Minority,” which was published in 2010
• Raj sharing his book Satyalogue // Truthtalk, which is a portmanteau of “Satya” (Sanskrit for truth) and “logue” (Greek for discourse)

In Jock and Raj’s final email discourse last fall, Jock was open about his condition. He wrote, “As much as I would like to see you, I think we should look forward to your next visit. I have several things going on at the moment with the cancer and a faulty heart valve, and I need to conserve my energy. I will regret not seeing you. It is a rough period in my life.” 

Raj responded, “So sorry about this rough patch and hoping it is just that, a patch; but I do recognize that you've previously shared that it is likely to be more of a longer stretch of road. All this talk about roads inspires me to watch Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) for the hundredth time. I saw my first Satyajit Ray film at NU; I was a freshman in my first quarter and felt quite confused by "Devi" and all that it represented. A couple of years later I was reading Bibuthibhusan Bandhopadhyay's Pather Panchali and by happenstance went to Facet's Multimedia with friends to see the Apu Trilogy a week after reading the novel. My life was transformed by the transformations that Apu experienced in those three films. Indeed, the film nudged me towards marrying a woman from Bengal, and life has been forever changed.”

Jock’s final correspondence ended with reference to the part of India where he began his studies and what connected him and Raj at deeper, humanistic level: 

“Dear Raj,

I loved the Apu trilogy, especially Pather Panchali. I saw it (or maybe them) in London while I was in graduate school. I was already drawn towards Bengal because my friends at the India Office Library were Bengalis. They included Barun De, Tapan Raychaudhuri, and Ranjit Guha, if you know who they were. Is there any prettier pastoral landscape with the pleasing hut shapes than Bengal’s, I do not know it …

With best wishes, Jock” 

In his preface to Introducing India in Liberal Education, the University of Chicago anthropologist Milton Singer wrote, “Leaders in the field of liberal education are now generally agreed that a student cannot be considered liberally educated if his undergraduate studies neglect the Asian world. The major question now is not whether to include the Asian world in the undergraduate curriculum but how.” Jock McLane learned that the answer to “how” came from being in ongoing dialogue with his students. And because of a dialogue that transcended the classroom, two generations of the Oza family (and we imagine multiple generations of Northwestern students) have benefited from having their worldviews enlarged to encompass India.

We will miss Professor McLane. Given Jock’s love for the Bengali countryside, perhaps it is fitting that we end by quoting the Nobel Prize–winning Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, whose Gitanjali (Song Offerings) reminds us that our guru’s undying values live on:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;…

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habits.

Anupama R. Oza ’08 is on sabbatical from teaching, committing herself to raising her daughter who turned 1 this year. Rajesh C. Oza ’81, ’84, ’86 MS is a change management consultant and also contributes to the development of interpersonal dynamics of MBA students at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Photo caption: Jock McLane giving a tour of University Library to Anu Oza and her students in 2010

Kristin Rose Lentfer Pancner ’61, 80, passed away Saturday, July 7, 2018, at Lake Wawasee, Ind.

Kristin Lentfer was born and raised in Livingston, Montana and attended Park County High School, graduating Valedictorian. She graduated from Northwestern University in 1961, majoring in nursing and sociology. Kristin further advanced her education, earning her master's degree in counseling psychology in 1978, and her doctorate in psychology in 1992 at Adler University of Chicago. She was employed at Pancner Psychiatric Associates throughout her career as a counselor and psychologist.

Kristin was a member of Pi Beta Phi sorority while at Northwestern. In Fort Wayne, she served as vice president of the Newcomer's Club, a camp nurse at the Episcopal Church Camp and volunteered at the American Red Cross as a mental health counselor. She was also co-chair of a national convention for the North American Society of Adlerian Psychology and President of the Pastoral Education Advisory Committee at Lutheran Hospital. She was a published writer for a number of publications, including The Individual Psychologist and the International Journal of Individual Psychology.  

Kristin was known as an intelligent, charismatic, caring and compassionate person. She was a devoted and caring wife, mother and grandmother who enjoyed travel, reading, learning and entertaining. Kristin particularly loved spending time at Lake Wawasee, Ind., and Sanibel Island, Fla., where she spent winters with her husband and family.

Surviving are her spouse of 58 years, Ronald J. Pancner; two children, Paul Pancner and Jennifer Ennis; as well as five grandchildren, Austin, Dominique, Cameron, Alexa and Olivia. Her companions Tux and Diablo survive as well.

Please send memorials to Fort Wayne Children's Zoo and the Fort Wayne Rescue Mission. There will be a private Celebration of Life scheduled at a later date.