A 1972 graduate of the MSUM accounting department, Meidinger will lead a board of 28 community members who help the university with fund raising and alumni relations.

Mark Vanyo, a 1975 MSUM health and physical education graduate and now president of Coldwell Banker/1st Realty Encore Realty, was named president-elect. And Hal Wentzel, a 1978 MSUM accounting graduate and now  vice president and branch manager of Bremer Ban in Moorhead, was named treasurer.

Last year the Alumni Foundation raised more than $1,064,000 in support of the university.

During the past year, Bakke restructured and now manages the organization’s web site, www.navpa.org. NAVPA is an organization of institutions and individuals who are involved or interested in the operation of veterans affairs programs or the delivery of services to veterans at our colleges and universities.

NAVPA provides input and testimony to the U.S. House and Senate committees on veterans education and works closely with the Department of Veterans Affairs in providing service to veterans.

Bakke, also MSUM’s director of veterans affairs, served as a member of the VA’s Education Business Process Reengineering committee that recently completed a review of how students, schools and the VA process G.I. Bill education benefits. He helped the VA develop a strategy for moving that process from paper to on-line.

Sixty years ago, 29 Navajos were recruited by the U.S. Marines to create an unbreakable code using their native language. It helped keep troops one step ahead of the Japanese and emerged as one of this county’s top weapons in the South Pacific.

The code, created from the Dina language, the Navajo native tongue, was the only code never broken by the Japanese, nor was it revealed until 1968 when the military declassified the secret. Last year President Bush awarded Congressional medals to the surviving Code Talkers for their pivotal roles in America's victory in the Pacific.

Zonnie Gorman, now living in New Mexico, is a member of the Navajo Tribe and is the daughter of the late Dr. Carl Gorman, a famous Navajo Code Talker and noted artist. She grew up   surrounded by stories of the Navajo Code Talkers and the subsequent honors they have received. She began serious research about their deeds in 1989 and   continues to collect and add information to the Gorman collection.

This event is sponsored by MSUM Cultural Diversity, American Indian Student Activities and Multicultural Affairs. For more information, contact Jody Steile at (218)291-4272 or steilejo@mnstate.edu

“It’s as good as it gets,” he said. “This is just where we want to be.”

* Total head count is 7,661 (up .3.2 percent from last fall).
* Total credits taken by students are up 4.6 percent.
* New entering freshmen total 1,268 (up about 1 percent).
* New transfers total 677 (down 2.3 percent).

The 30th day count is the most significant snapshot of enrollment the university tallies before releasing final semester numbers. It does not include 234 Tri-College University students attending classes at MSUM.

Tandberg had predicted a fall semester enrollment of 7,657.

It will include music by Fargo-Moorhead’s premiere jazz big band and the 17-member Jazz Arts Group.

The show focuses on a soon-to-be-shuttered nightclub during the heyday of swing, featuring era classics ranging from the frenetic “Bugle Call Rag” to Louie Prima’s thumping “Sing, Sing, Sing.” The thirties segment includes songs from the pen of Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman and Johnny Mercer while America’s involvement in World War II are echoed by the red, white and blue ditties of tin pan alley.

At 6:30 p.m. before the concert, a panel discussion will explore the jazz/swing music phenomenon in the Center for the Arts Fox Recital Hall. And after the concert, Craig Ellingson from the MSUM theatre department and some of his students will teach you how to dance to swing rhythms.

The events before and after the concert are free and open to the public. For tickets to the Five by Design show, call the MSUM box office at 236-2271.

Cost of the project: mere bird seed, considering the structure features 16 separate apartment suites.

Kivi Hall, of course, is a birdhouse, a big birdhouse originally built by a Wakefield, Mich., man who modeled it on the church in his hometown, Lapua, Finland.

Retired MSUM librarian Karen Kivi received the birdhouse as a gift in 1950 from her mother, who also lived in Wakefield, Mich.

When Kivi, now living in a Brainerd nursing home, decided the 36-inch-tall birdhouse was too large for her back yard, she gave it to Rodney Erickson, another MSUM librarian now retired, who discovered it was too big for his backyard too. So he had the birdhouse mounted on a wooden pole behind MSUM’s Livingston Lord Library.

It was dubbed Kivi Hall.

The birdhouse was taken down 15 years ago, partly to make way for a library expansion project, and partly because its poll was rotting. Kivi Hall has been in storage ever since.

That’s where Carl Carlson, a retired MSUM mathematics professor, enters the story.

“My wife Carol, then chair of MSUM’s speech and theatre department, came up with the idea of refurbishing the birdhouse,” he said. “After she died in 1994, I decided to follow through and honor her request. So I spent several years in my garage making a replica of the original birdhouse using plywood and some old shingles.”

When he was disassembling the original birdhouse to figure out some of the details, Carlson found a board in the roof imprinted with “Danger: High Explosives.”

“It looks like the original was made out of an old dynamite box,” he said.

Carlson’s replica will be erected near its original location behind the library.

Also that Friday, at 2 p.m. in the Center for Business atrium, the university will dedicate another piece of memorabilia that’s been kept in storage: a three-ton, nine-foot-tall sculpture carved from the roots of a tree planted in 1889 by Livingston Lord, the university’s first president.

Lord planted the tree in front of Old Main, the first building on campus, soon after the school opened. The American elm grew to nearly six feet in diameter, the largest and oldest on campus. But by 1981, it contracted a fatal case of Dutch Elm disease, forcing the university to cut it down.

Norm Buktenica, then an MSUM special education professor, now retired, spent more than four years cleaning the root and then sculpting it. “I wanted to give the tree new life and at the same time preserve a part of the university’s past,” he said.

Using a backhoe and front-tend loader, the root was pried from compacted gumbo clay and dragged to the Center for the Arts, where Buktenica spent a year just cleaning off the dirt. After three years of carving, planning, sanding, filling, cutting and oiling, the piece was finished. He named it “Livingston Lord Legacy” in honor of the university’s first 100 years.

Buktenica mounted the sculpture on two huge concrete bases that matched the shape of each root section. The two pieces are separated by about two feet, enough space to stroll through and examine the eloquent details of the interior grain.

Embedded in parts of the sculpture are bricks from Old Main, which was destroyed by fire in 1930.

The sculpture was placed in Owens Hall in 1986, where it stood for seven years. Taking up too much space at a time when enrollments were rising, it was moved into storage in 1993.

The sculpture, refurbished by Ken Brown, shopmaster in the university’s Art & Design department, will now become a centerpiece for the Center for Business atrium.

The announcement will be made at the IASPM annual business meeting in Cleveland this weekend.

Gracyk’s book shares the award with “A Pocketful of Dreams” by Gary Giddins. One of the top jazz writers of his generation, Giddins is best-known for his longtime work as a columnist for the Village Voice, which he joined in 1973. His books include “Ridin' On A Blue Note,” “Celebrating Bird”, “Satchmo” and  “A Pocketful of Dreams,” a biography of Bing Crosby.

Released last year by Temple University Press (304 pp., $22.95 paperback), “I Wanna Be Me” looks at rock as a mass art, drawing people together in communities of listeners who respond viscerally to its sound and intellectually to its message. From the Sex Pistols and Eminem to Bonnie Raitt and the Rolling Stones, Gracyk says, rock music contributes to our cultural capital.

In a nutshell, he argues:  What you listen to is who you are, but the context in which you listen alters what the meaning of what you listen to.

This is Gracyk’s second book that takes a philosophical look at rock music. His first, “Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock,” which reasoned that rock music is an art form in its own right, was released in 1996 by Duke University Press.

IASPM-US represents the United States branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. It serves as a forum for a range of scholarly areas and approaches to popular music, publishing a peer-review journal dedicated to research on popular music.

Seeger will deliver a lecture and performance of “Southern Banjo Sounds: From Africa to Appalachia” Friday, Nov. 8 at 1 p.m. in the Roland Dille Center for the Arts Fox Recital Hall.

Then he’ll be in concert Saturday, Nov. 9 at 8 p.m. in Weld Hall Glasrud Auditorium. Both events are free and open to the public.

Mike Seeger has devoted his life to singing and playing music from True Vine—the home music made by American southerners. True Vine music grows out of hundreds of years of British traditions that blended in our country with equally ancient African traditions to produce songs and sounds that are unique to the United States.

Seeger is a five-time Grammy nominee, most recently for Southern Banjo Sounds in 1998 and for Solo: Oldtime Country Music in 1991.

Seeger accompanies himself on an array of instruments, including banjo, fiddle, guitar, trump (jaw harp), mouth harp (harmonica), quills, lap dulcimer, mandolin and autoharp.

Both performances are free and open to the public.

As part of the agreement, Microsoft Business Solutions has donated eEnterprise software, technical support and training valued at $308,600.

MSUM is one of more than 200 colleges and universities involved in the Education Alliance Network, which helps schools utilize technology in the classroom.

"The new partnership between Microsoft Business Solutions and our School of Business underscores the vital relationship between private enterprise and public universities like MSU Moorhead,” said Pres. Roland Barden. “Our students' educational needs and professional ambitions are well-served by this kind of collaboration."

MSUM saw eBusiness as a strategic future direction for businesses and recognized an opportunity to serve area organizations that needed skilled workers in this area.

“We are lucky to have Microsoft Business Solutions right here in Fargo as it gives us a unique opportunity to work closely with them on a program that benefits both MSUM and Microsoft Business Solutions, “ said Kathleen Paulson, coordinator of the university’s Customized Training Program.

“What’s really exciting about this agreement is that in addition to the software, training and support received, Microsoft Business Solutions has dedicated a team of employees who have helped design the program. Several Microsoft employees have already been guest speakers at the Introduction to eBusiness class I’m teaching, which brings the real world into the classroom,” Paulson said. “Students who enroll in these classes will leave MSUM with real-life experience and knowledge on what it takes to implement eBusiness strategies and solutions in an organization.”

The initial donation of $308,600 is the first software gift MSUM will receive. Additional software and training donations have been approved and will be received in time for the new spring 2003 eBusiness courses.

For more information on the eBusiness Certificate Program, visit web.mnstate.edu/ebusiness, or call 218.299.5837