FEATURES

    Playing polo, says E. Lance Vetter, B.A.'85, is “a little like being in the middle of a cavalry charge.”  It's also exactly where he likes to be.
    Vetter, a 36-year-old financial adviser based in Boca Raton, Fla., took up polo four years ago as a hobby.  He is now so immersed in it that he sponsors and plays on his own polo team - an unlikely scenario, he admits, for someone who played football as an undergraduate at the University at Albany. 
    A wide receiver, Vetter was recruited by Albany football Coach Bob Ford from Corinth High School, about one hour north of the University. Vetter suffered what turned out to be a serious hip injury as a freshman, and consequently saw only limited gridiron action.  But he has stayed in touch with Ford over the years.
    “I put him in the same class as (Penn State football Coach) Joe Paterno. He sees you as a person first and as a player second,” says Vetter, who brings his “SaraBoca” Polo Team to Saratoga Springs each summer to compete.  During his last visit to the Spa City, he gave Ford a check to support University athletics. Vetter is now working to combine his love of polo with his support for the University by sponsoring a polo match at Saratoga this summer to benefit both.
“He was a total 'team' kid who contributed to our success,” Ford says of Vetter. “He was truly a class act, and I am happy to see that he went on to great success after he left Albany.  Despite that success, he has remembered his origins.”
    Following his graduation from Albany as a geography major, Vetter went to Officer Candidate School and became a Marine Corps fighter pilot for four years.  He mustered out of the Marines after suffering a detached retina as a result of extreme gravitational forces during flights, returning to graduate school to earn an M.B.A. from Boston University.  Today, he is a marketing director for Citigroup, a New York City financial firm, helping to create and distribute financial investments to other brokerage institutions. 
    For a change of pace, Vetter recently started inventing toys designed to teach children about money.  He has patented two of them so far.  One toy, called “The Savings Toy,” is designed to show children the value of savings.  It resembles a colorful piggy bank, but one with four compartments for “retirement,” “college,” “house” and “spending.”  A child who receives a $20 bill from a grandparent for birthday can calculate how much money to put in each category to meet a goal.
    “It teaches you to save before spending and also teaches the future value of money,” says Vetter, who came up with the idea after leaving the Marine Corps and realizing how little he himself knew about saving for retirement. “Children who don't get into the habit of saving by the age of 14 have little chance of ever doing so.”
    Vetter expects “The Savings Toy” to hit the market early this year, with a retail price of $29.95.  Another toy patent teaches children geography.  He is now developing a game, called “What Goes Around Comes Around,” designed to teach children about morals, relationships and values.
    Vetter made headlines in 1991 when he rushed up to a burning car to help a New York State trooper pull an injured woman to safety in the Town of Clifton Park.  He was awarded the New York State Medal of Honor for “conspicuous gallantry and courage at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty.”  Former Congressman Gerald Solomon called Vetter's actions “heroic” and saluted him with an entry in the Congressional Record.
    Vetter has also made himself something of an unofficial ambassador for the polo community.  He was featured last August in a full-page story in The Saratogian newspaper after volunteering to give reporter Michael Korb a lesson in polo.  “Picture golf at 35 miles an hour with eight people trying to hit the ball,” Vetter said.
    As an undergraduate, Vetter lived on Colonial Quad for three years and helped pay for college by pumping gas at a station on Washington Avenue.  His part-time shift began at 5 a.m. 
    “College was an awakening for me,” says Vetter.  “It was scary at first.  It was more of a social learning event for me than anything.  I know I did not have perfect attendance, and I wasn't very focused.” Through it all, he says, Coach Ford was his rock.
    “I believe he is going to be remembered for the impact he has on people.  He cares about you genuinely,” Vetter said of Ford.
Another important figure to Vetter was geography Professor Stanley Blount, now retired.  “He made learning what it should be - fun,” recalls Vetter.
In addition to football, Vetter ran indoor track for one season and played on the club rugby team.  None of those sports, he says, prepared him for the rigors of polo.
    “You can take the most demanding aspects of all of those sports, multiply them in intensity by three, and you've got polo,” he says.

Mary Beth Winn, Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
By Carol Olechowski

    Professor Mary Beth Winn of the French Studies Program, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, sees teaching as an opportunity not only to “engage students in learning,” but to help them “to value not simply the answers but the quest itself.”
    A graduate of Vassar and Yale, Winn taught one semester of acting at the latter institution, then embarked upon her full-time teaching career at UAlbany. In the 25 years since her arrival, she has taught both undergraduate and graduate students while developing courses on 15th-century France, medieval women, literature through music, and other topics based on her research interests. In fact, Winn cites “the opportunity to teach at all levels and to launch new courses in my areas of interest” as “the best thing about Albany.”
    The professor modestly declines to discuss her achievements as a faculty member, claiming they are “hard to measure.” She concedes, however, that “I am gratified that my research has received international recognition and that my students seem to appreciate my classes,” noting that, in a recent evaluation, one of her students wrote, “Mme Winn loves what she does.” Her greatest accomplishment, “Mme Winn” hopes, is “to have challenged and inspired my students and to have been an active advocate for faculty and students.”
Winn's research, which focuses on late medieval and early Renaissance France - the 15th and early 16th centuries - emphasizes “interrelated areas, including literature, the history of the book, music, and art. She explains: “I've always been interested in interdisciplinary studies:  poems set to music, the visual illustration of texts, the publication history of literary works and their material presentation in manuscript or print. My biggest problem is to limit my scope, because my research goes in lots of directions, with what I like to think of as 'intertwined threads' rather than 'loose ends!' Because my field embraces the invention of printing, I spend a lot of time in rare book and manuscript collections, and I love books as aesthetic objects as well as intellectual products.”
    This self-proclaimed lover of books is also a highly respected writer. Winn, whose previously published works include Anthoine Vérard, Parisian Publisher, 1485-1512: Prologues, Poems, and Presentations, is collaborating with two musicologists on finalizing the second of seven volumes of the critical edition of chansons (songs) by 16th-century composer Thomas Crecquillon. In addition, she has contributed chapters to several books, including Manuscripts in the Fifty Years after the Invention of Printing (The Warburg Institute, 1983), and written articles for such publications as Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance and Musica Disciplina. An accomplished musician who has traveled as far as New York City to perform concerts on the cello and viola da gamba, Winn admits to “always seeming to have too many projects” in progress. Currently, she is preparing two papers: one on texts and images in French books of Hours (a type of devotional book which was the medieval “best-seller”); the other on French women patrons of books - for presentation at conferences in Italy and France this spring.
    Winn's work has attracted the support of such organizations as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington and Newberry libraries, UUP, and the State University of New York. Their support is important;  “since rare books and medieval manuscripts are hard to access - no Web sites or inter-library loan! - I find myself constantly planning a trip to a collection, or ordering microfilms and photographs,” says the 1996 President's Award for Excellence in Academic Service award recipient.
    Although her writing and teaching keep her busy, Winn has found other opportunities to be of service to the University and to her field. She has served on numerous examination and dissertation committees for the D.A. in humanistic studies and the M.A. and the Ph.D. programs in French, as well as on the Task Force on Faculty Roles and Responsibilities (1997-’99), the Committee on Educational Policies and Procedures (1991-’92), the International Programs Selection Committee (1994-’95), the Honors Program Advisory Board (1988-’91), and the campus chapter of Phi Beta Kappa (1994-2000).