on this page:

• The Start of a New Year
• Best-selling Author Kathleen Norris Receives Honorary Doctorate
• Gifts Honoring Fred Gable ’70 Help Provide Athletes with ZETA Bus

The Start of a New Year

In August, the largest class in Albright’s history—513 freshmen—moved into their residence halls to begin the 2007-
2008 year. Albright’s Peer Orientation Leaders, the POPs, helped incoming students adjust to life at Albright.

Best-selling Author Kathleen Norris Receives Honorary Doctorate

Best-selling author and poet Kathleen Norris was awarded an honorary doctorate in September in recognition of her significant contributions to literature and religious thought. Norris was the featured speaker for the 2007 Ellen S. Hurwitz Presidential Lecture on Faith, Reason and the Imagination. She also spent time meeting with students while she was on campus.

Norris is author of New York Times bestsellers The Cloister Walk, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, and The Virgin of Bennington.

In 1986 she became an oblate, or associate, of a Benedictine monastery in North Dakota and spent two years in residence at the Ecumenical Institute at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minn. The Cloister Walk is structured as a diary of her monastic experience.

Norris has published seven books of poetry. Her first book of poems, Falling Off, was the 1971 winner of the Big Table Younger Poets Award.

Gifts Honoring Fred Gable ’70 Help Provide Athletes with ZETA Bus

Albright, athletics and Zeta Omega Epsilon fraternity meant a lot to the late Fred Gable ’70. “I think Fred majored in Zeta and minored in history,” joked his wife Jamie (Guensch) Gable ’72.

Fred Gable died in January 2007, but fellow ZETA fraternity brothers Glenn Gerber ’69, Trustee Chris Kraras ’69 and former Trustee Jim Stocker ’69 honored his memory this past year when they took the lead and raised more than $90,000 to purchase the College’s first 29-passenger bus. The ZETA bus is used to transport athletes to sporting events off-campus.

Gifts made in memory of Gable from Gerber, Kraras and Stocker funded nearly 50 percent of the cost, and more than 100 other brothers and supporters contributed the remaining funds.

“We miss our friend and brother,” said Stocker. “The bus is a fitting way to honor his memory and what Albright athletics meant to him.”

Jamie Gable, who met her husband at Albright, said, “Fred would be humbled that he was remembered with such high regard by his brotherhood and Albright.”

Fred was the son of the late Joseph Gable, M.D. ’39, for whom the Gable Health Center is named, and stepson of Health Center nurse Erma “Ma” Gable, R.N. Jaime’s father is Russel Guensch ’47. As second generation Albrightians, Jamie said Albright has always been a part of their lives. “Because of this gift, Fred will always be remembered at Albright. He would really have loved that.”