Therefore, we do not envy those in Stockholm, Sweden, who must isolate all the variables and single out particular scientists for every Nobel Prize.

Nineteen scholars with UW–Madison ties have won a Nobel, including alumni and faculty members (past or present at the time of the award). This number places the UW in elite company — by most counts, among the top 20 universities in the country.

And still, it doesn’t seem enough for all the Nobel-worthy work that takes place on this campus.

Some observers were stunned when UW biologist James Thomson, who first derived human embryonic stem cells in the lab, was not among the stem cell scientists who shared in the 2012 Nobel Prize. That same year, the “God particle” Higgs boson was discovered with critical contributions from UW physicists Sau Lan Wu and Wesley Smith and computer scientist Miron Livny. But the following year, the Nobel Prize went to a pair of international researchers who had first theorized about Higgs’s existence. So it goes.

The UW’s last Nobel Prize winner came in 2015, when William Campbell MS’54, PhD’57 earned recognition for discovering a popular antiparasitic medication. Who will be next? We can’t say for sure, but sources tell us that several UW researchers remain in serious consideration for the world’s most prestigious award.

With federal research funding at risk here and elsewhere, it’s time to celebrate the Nobel-winning Badgers who — sometimes in dramatic fashion — made life-changing break-throughs for the benefit of us all.

A Heretic Turned Hero

Howard Temin had a hunch. It would lead the UW–Madison virologist to a Nobel Prize in 1975 and later contribute to the discovery of HIV. But first, it earned him the scorn of the scientific community.

Prior to 1970, the field of molecular biology operated on the central dogma that genetic information in cells is transferred in one direction — from DNA to RNA — to produce proteins. Never the other way. But closely studying the anomalies of a cancer-causing virus in chickens, Temin theorized in 1964 that some viruses — later classified as retroviruses — could reverse this process to spread.

For six years, this stance caused him ridicule. A former Cal Tech colleague gave a professional talk on these viruses without citing any of Temin’s seminal contributions. When pressed by the audience why not, the researcher responded: “I’ve given Temin’s work the amount of attention it deserves.” Intellectually fearless, Temin never wavered. “All of these doubts were based not on experimentation or alternative hypotheses, but merely arguing from the central dogma that viruses don’t behave that way,” he later told the UW Oral History Project.

Then in 1970, Temin discovered the enzyme — reverse transcriptase — that does, in fact, allow genetic information to flow backward. When he went home that evening, his excitement was so palpable that his wife, renowned UW medical geneticist Rayla Greenberg Temin MS’58, PhD’63, knew instantly that he had proven his hunch right.

Practically overnight, he reflected, “I went from being a rebel to establishment.”

Temin’s discovery revolutionized molecular biology, opening doors to new areas of cancer research, drug development, and gene therapy applications. It also provided the roadmap for researchers to identify HIV, the retrovirus that causes AIDS, early in the epidemic and to eventually develop effective antiretroviral treatments. Temin played an active part in research and public policy efforts related to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and early ’90s.

When he accepted his Nobel Prize, he proved again that he was not afraid to speak his mind. Toasting a banquet audience filled with cigarette smokers (including the king and queen of Sweden), Temin expressed “outrage” that, while his fellow researchers were tackling cancer in the lab, so little was being done to address a leading and preventable cause of it.

“And then I sat down,” Temin recalled, “and everyone in the audience, including the royalty, put out their cigarettes.” (In a cruel twist of fate, Temin died from a nonsmoking form of lung cancer in 1994 at age 59.)

Temin joined the UW’s McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research in 1960 after finishing graduate school and a postdoc fellowship. He claimed that the center had reached out to “practically every young virologist, as many as 40 or 50, and none would come,” since, nationally, viruses were not viewed as a particularly important aspect of cancer research. We now know that viruses cause up to 20 percent of all cases.

When Temin arrived in Madison, he found his first lab to be unsuitably located in a dark basement surrounded by steam pipes and next to an open sump pit. From that inauspicious start, he went on to become a giant in his field and the UW’s only individual Nobel Prize winner to finish out his career at the institution. Upon being named a Nobel laureate, he thanked the university “for having provided … an environment in which unorthodox ideas could be considered and established.”

Cracking the Genetic Code

Har Gobind Khorana grew up in poverty in the small village of Raipur, India. His family home was partly a courtyard, shared with cows and horses. There was no schoolhouse, so the future Nobel laureate learned to read under a tree from his father. When Khorana, at age six, owned his first pencil, it was a life event.

“Although poor, my father was dedicated to educating his children, and we were practically the only literate family in the village inhabited by about 100 people,” Khorana wrote in an autobiographical entry for the Nobel Prize.

Eventually, Khorana attained formal education in India, proving himself a genius. In 1960, he came to the UW to be a professor of biochemistry and codirect the Institute for Enzyme Research. Here, he and his colleagues discovered how genes direct the production of proteins — groundbreaking work that cracked the genetic code and resulted in a 1968 Nobel Prize.

Khorana was the last of his family, including his kids, to learn of the award. Harking back his humble childhood, he often retreated to the Wisconsin countryside to collect his thoughts. Khorana was watching the sun rise when his wife, having failed to reach him several times by phone, drove over to relay the news. In 1970, Khorana created the world’s first synthetic gene, demonstrating that the basic unit of heredity can be constructed with organic chemicals in a lab. His discoveries helped clear the way for modern gene therapy and genome editing, which have resulted in revolutionary treatments for those with severe genetic diseases.

Apparently, Khorana’s understated personality made him easy to miss in the public eye. In 1969, just a year after he had earned the Nobel Prize, Wisconsin state senator Ernest Keppler ’49, LLB’50 took to the chamber floor to lament that some public employees were making a higher salary than the governor. Referencing a list of names, he sneered: “How about Har Gobind Khorana? Any of you know him?”

MIT leadership certainly did, hiring Khorana away from Madison after a decade of work that changed the scientific world forever.

An Electronic Miracle

A quartet of UW alumni have earned Nobel Prizes for their work in supercharging the digital revolution and the many electronic devices in your home, at work, in your hand, and on your wrist.

John Van Vleck 1920, the “father of modern magnetism,” laid the foundation with his novel theories on the magnetic properties of solid-state materials. Alan MacDiarmid MS’52, PhD’53 discovered polymers (think plastics) that conduct electricity, with applications that now span from rechargeable batteries to electronic sensors to LED displays. Before creating the handheld calculator, Jack St. Clair Kilby MS’50 helped invent the integrated circuit, or microchip, an essential component of modern computers and the key to our miniaturized devices.

But only one Badger brainiac has won a pair of Nobel Prizes: John Bardeen ’28, MS’29.

Bardeen was born and raised in Madison, where his father served as the UW’s first medical school dean. He lived at home while studying electrical engineering at the university and enrolled in one of the first quantum theory courses in the country with Professor Van Vleck. He continued his graduate work at Princeton under Eugene Wigner, a theoretical physicist who would later work at the UW and earn a Nobel Prize himself. Being surrounded by such brilliance paid off. After serving in World War II, Bardeen landed at Bell Labs and coinvented a semiconductor device called the transistor. Hailed as an electronic miracle, it replaced the much larger and less efficient vacuum tube that amplified early radios, televisions, and computers. (Today, an iPhone 15 Pro has some 19 billion transistors in its main processor alone.)

When Bardeen came back from the lab after his breakthrough on the transistor, he told his wife in his typically understated way: “I think we discovered something today.” The invention earned Bardeen and two colleagues the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956.

At the Nobel Prize ceremony, the king of Sweden teased Bardeen for only bringing one of his three children. The scientist responded, presumably in jest, that he would bring all of them the next time he won a Nobel Prize.

Remarkably, 16 years later, that’s exactly what he did. He won his second prize for the fundamental theory of superconductivity (when electrical resistance vanishes below a certain temperature) — knowledge that is now applied in technologies such as the MRI scanner.

Bardeen is one of four laureates who have earned more than one Nobel Prize, and the only to double dip in the physics category.

Mr. and Mrs. Lederberg

It started as a picture-perfect story. The Wisconsin State Journal called the UW geneticists “one of the top husband-wife science teams in the nation” who “spend many more hours together in the laboratory than in their home.” And together they earned the 1956 Pasteur Award for their joint contributions to microbiology.

But in 1958, Joshua Lederberg won the Nobel Prize, while Esther Zimmer Lederberg PhD’50 was barely a footnote. In a famous picture of the couple from the ceremony, an expressionless Esther stares blankly ahead at the camera. Fittingly, she’s now the face of the Matilda Effect — a term coined by historian Margaret Rossiter MS’67 to describe the historical bias against recognizing the contributions of female scientists and instead attributing their findings to male colleagues.

Joshua Lederberg won the Nobel Prize at the young age of 33 for his field-altering discoveries around bacterial reproduction, producing an understanding of how traits like antibiotic resistance can spread. He was the UW’s first active faculty member to earn a Nobel Prize, sharing the honor with his mentor Edward Tatum MS’32, PhD’34.

Esther Lederberg met Joshua while she was finishing up her master’s degree at Stanford, and they both moved to Madison when he accepted a professorship at the UW in 1947. After earning her doctorate, she became a research associate in her husband’s lab. In a 1998 interview with the UW Oral History Project, Joshua called Esther a “superb” and “very meticulous experimentalist” who organized and executed many of the lab’s studies. During this time, Esther discovered the lambda phage, a stealthy bacterial virus that could stay dormant in an infected host until suddenly striking. It’s become a go-to model organism in the study of other viruses and in the work of genetic engineering. She also helped to develop a modern research technique called replica plating — using velvet cloth to efficiently transfer colonies of bacteria from one dish to another. Until recent years, the scientific community had primarily attributed replica plating to Joshua.

During his Nobel Prize lecture, Joshua noted that his research “enjoyed the companionship of many colleagues, above all my wife.” But the award marked the start of their divergent careers. When Joshua was offered a position to lead the genetics department at Stanford in 1959, Esther had to settle for an untenured research faculty position there — and then fight to stay employed at all after the couple split in 1966.

“Esther, in her life, had to face a number of hurdles that had been placed in her way by the times,” her former colleague Stanley Falkow said at her memorial service in 2006. “She did so with extraordinary grace, gentleness, and with a respect and love for science that is important to remember and emulate, especially in a time when the pursuit of basic knowledge is becoming so very difficult.”

A Wonder Drug

Last January, the World Health Organization announced that Niger was the first African country to eliminate the transmission of river blindness. Before the 1980s, the disease — caused by a parasitic worm and spread from blackflies — became a public health crisis in developing nations and caused blindness in hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Now the disease is on a steep decline, thanks to the mass distribution of an antiparasitic medication called ivermectin — the wonder drug first discovered by UW alumnus William Campbell. Campbell was a scientist at the pharmaceutical company Merck in the mid-1970s when he found that an active substance in a new species of soil bacteria was extraordinarily effective in killing roundworms in mice and other parasites in farm and domestic animals. A more potent derivative called ivermectin was released as an animal health product in 1981 and is a commonly used drug for heartworm prevention for dogs and cats today.

Not yet satisfied, Campbell advocated for potential human applications and identified river blindness as a promising target. Ivermectin was approved for human use in 1987, and since then Merck has donated some five billion doses to combat river blindness. The drug has also been used to treat scabies, head lice, and other tropical diseases such as elephantiasis — benefiting hundreds of millions of people, many in the poorest parts of the world. In 2015, Campbell shared a Nobel Prize for his heroic contributions.

Campbell grew up in Ireland and sailed to the U.S. for graduate work in veterinary science and zoology at the UW. He was hooked on parasites all the way back in high school, when an outing to an agricultural show introduced him to a common liver parasite in sheep and cattle. He was fascinated that a drug could so easily treat it.

His adviser at the UW, veterinary science professor Arlie Todd, encouraged Campbell to apply to Merck after earning his doctorate. At first, Campbell had “considerable misgiving” about starting off in the pharmaceutical industry.

“I only wanted to work on science for the sake of science and not for utility,” he said after earning a 2023 UW Distinguished Alumni Award, “but I discovered the tremendous joy and excitement of doing something that might actually be useful.”

UW Nobel Winners

How many Nobel Prizes can UW–Madison claim? It depends on how you’d like to count them.

Nineteen UW faculty and alumni have won a Nobel. Because John Bardeen won twice, the university can (and does!) use the nicely rounded number of 20 Nobel Prizes. But a pedant could point out that Edward Tatum and Joshua Lederberg shared in the same Nobel Prize in 1958, and the same for Joseph Erlanger and Herbert Gasser in 1944, bringing the UW’s number of distinct awards down to 18.

The UW has nearly added other future Nobel winners to its faculty. Milton Friedman, who helped establish the Chicago school of economics and won a 1976 Nobel Prize, briefly taught at the UW as a visiting scholar in the early 1940s. He withdrew his name for consideration as a tenured professor and left the economics department amid internal disputes. Richard Feynman was set to join the physics department in 1942, but the university discreetly granted him leave so that he could work on the government’s Manhattan Project. He won a Nobel Prize in 1965 for his theory of quantum electrodynamics. And George Smith, who worked at the UW as a postdoc in the 1970s, won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a technique in studying protein interactions.

The following list includes only UW faculty and alumni who were individually named for the prize. Professors Jonathan Patz and John Magnuson served as lead authors for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.
—P. S.

In 1996, the UW Law Library had just opened its gleaming glass reading room overlooking Bascom Hill. The hill was the heart of my tour that crisp fall day. At the bottom, my guides gestured toward College Library, noting that it had been named one of the country’s best places to find a date. At the top, I learned about “traying,” the tradition of sledding down campus slopes on fiberglass cafeteria trays.

My group wanted to know how much hill climbing was expected of first-year students. A few years later, when I led tours for UW–Madison’s Student Orientation, Advising, and Registration (SOAR), this was still a hot topic. I fielded questions while scaling the mountain backward in my favorite Chuck Taylors and a Bucky-printed bucket hat. Campus tours have changed a lot in 20-plus years, with new facilities to explore, fresh facts to share, and increased accessibility for guests with disabilities. There’s even a Zoom session where six campus tour guides share their experiences and answer questions about life on campus. For in-person tours, two guides from UW Campus and Visitor Relations lead each group of 15 to 20 guests, covering a third of the campus on foot in 75 minutes. They take turns presenting, then get new partners for the next tour. This makes each tour unique, keeps the guides on their toes, and energizes the tour group.

Though backward-walking guides and the Bascom Hill endurance test are long gone, campus tours are more memorable than ever. I don’t recall much about the students in charge of my inaugural UW tour, but today’s tour-goers get to know their guides almost as well as the campus. The guides’ personal experiences — and personalities — can be a real factor for visitors when choosing a college.

Reading Your Guests

Abby Medhin x’26 wouldn’t be a Badger if not for her tour of UW–Madison. The Milwaukee native was set on attending an out-of-state college but agreed to a tour when her dad urged her to check out the campus.

“The two guys who led it were so enthusiastic about UW–Madison and did a great job explaining student life. I started picturing myself here, which I hadn’t done before,” she says. The experience inspired Medhin to become a campus tour guide last January. So did her goal of getting comfortable talking to acquaintances. As a future nurse, Medhin knows the value of building rapport with patients, but sometimes anxiety derails her efforts to connect. “Social anxiety has been a factor in my life for a long time. Being a tour guide gives me lots of practice talking to new people, which really helps,” she says.

The experience also helps Medhin navigate the performance anxiety that used to make public speaking unbearable. Rehearsing her tour script has an advantageous side effect: she feels more at ease giving class presentations.

“My friends tell me I’m good at it now, which I can hardly believe,” she says.

I see a little of my 20-year-old self in Medhin, remembering how I used the tours to work on my own stage fright. Her warmth and excitement shine through when she divulges her favorite study spots and the best movies she’s seen at Union South’s Marquee Cinema. Campus and Visitor Relations employs 75 tour guides each semester, and they memorize a 10-page script outline filled with facts about university history, academics, and resources. They don’t recite it verbatim, however. They enhance it with personal experiences from the classroom and beyond. Guides often share what they’ve learned by studying abroad or participating in student organizations. Many discuss acclimating to campus or working with academic advisers. The challenge is choosing the right stories for your audience.

When representatives from a Thai university joined one of Medhin’s tours, for example, she asked them about the ways their institution resembled and differed from the UW. Then she used this information to customize their experience. Medhin highlighted organizations that might help Thai students feel at home and spent extra time explaining things that might be unfamiliar, including the way classes are structured and the role of academic advising.

“Reading your guests — learning who they are and what they need — is a huge part of the job,” she explains.

Fascinating Factoids

Sometimes an energy boost is what’s needed most. I took a morning tour last spring to learn about the latest approach to showcasing campus (see sidebar), and a few people in the group yawned as they introduced themselves. The leaders — seasoned guide Emily Mihalovich x’26 and knowledgeable newcomer Lucas Liske x’27 — noticed this and took action. Soon their witty quips and fascinating factoids had us laughing and asking questions.

Mihalovich, a finance and accounting major from the Phoenix area, used colorful descriptions to entertain and educate. While discussing housing and safety, she called the residence halls on the west side of campus “the cheapest lakeshore property you’ll ever have.” Ears perked up when Liske, a communications and psychology major from Medford, Wisconsin, mentioned that he plays sax in the UW Marching Band. Soon he was tackling their questions about Badger football games. My group passed by a Chemistry Building classroom, strolled up North Charter Street, and walked through Grainger Hall. A dozen other groups followed the same route at the same time, but we didn’t crash into each other. Every group got its own spot at each destination. It was a complicated dance, but the guides choreographed it perfectly.

“It can be tricky to find places to stand so guests can see everything, especially in the summer, when we have more tours going at once,” Medhin says. “You have to imagine things from their perspective and remember that they may not have seen the campus before.” Knowing shady spots to rest and where to hang out during thunderstorms is also essential, since most of the tour is outdoors. Plus, it’s wise to check in with the group in case someone needs a breather or a bathroom break. Liske made sure everybody was comfortable as we approached Library Mall.

Sometimes a more complicated challenge arises. According to Macy Olson x’26, who supervises fellow student guides, training is a valuable tool for navigating these situations.

“If a guest asks about something not so positive — maybe college tuition getting more expensive — it’s important for guides to give honest answers,” she says, adding that a little diplomacy can go a long way. This echoes the advice Zola Dincin Schneider ’46 shares in the popular Campus Visits and College Interviews: A Complete Guide for College-Bound Students and Their Families, which insists that the best type of campus tour guide “speaks from the heart, is candid, and answers questions without hiding the true facts.”

Unlike my UW campus tour in 1996, this one didn’t mention Library Mall’s history of student demonstrations. Though I missed that discussion, I appreciated the new ways the guides addressed student engagement, weaving it into descriptions of campus organizations and volunteer opportunities.

During their training, the guides give mock tours peppered with various disruptions, from loud noises to strangers trying to join the group.

“We learn to be very aware of our surroundings and adapt quickly,” Medhin says. “We want everyone on the tour to be safe, comfortable, and focused on what the campus has to offer.”

“Loved the Tour So Much”

Leading tours is a chance to turn visitors’ vague ideas about the UW into vivid impressions. Sometimes a tour helps them embrace a possibility they hadn’t considered, as in Medhin’s case. Other times, it provides a sense of belonging that they haven’t found elsewhere. Olson witnessed this phenomenon while leading a tour for a middle-school group.

“One of the students asked me about LGBTQ resources,” she recalls. “After I shared what he needed, he said, ‘This is so helpful and makes me feel better about going here.’ That made me feel really good, and I’m so glad he felt comfortable asking me for this information.” Olson, a social work and legal studies major from Freeport, Illinois, is considering careers in advocacy, counseling, and human services. Creating an atmosphere where people can explore difficult questions is key in all these fields, and supervising other guides has helped her hone the skill.

“Being a new guide can be intimidating, so we try to help everyone feel truly welcome and make them want to come to work each day,” she says. “We’ve also built a strong feedback culture, one where it’s normal to ask questions and where we’re constantly thinking about how to improve.” Like Medhin, many students apply to be guides because they want to strengthen a skill set or rise to a challenge.

Liske hopes to become a more polished presenter. The tour-guide experience is quite different from his previous job at a small-town cheese-packaging factory.

“I spent last summer moving 40-pound blocks of cheese, so I decided to spend this summer talking with people,” he says.

Meanwhile, Medhin is realizing just how impactful she can be. She recalls a woman sprinting toward her during a recent tour stop — a mom from a tour she’d given the previous winter.

“She told me her son loved the tour so much that he couldn’t talk about any other university afterward. It turned out that he was attending SOAR that day,” Medhin recalls. “I felt so proud that I was part of the reason he chose UW–Madison.”

Today, most of the horses that do work are the equine equivalent of professional athletes: racing and showing. But a select few pursue more modest careers in public service.

Two of those horses are Rettke and Vetter. They and the human officers who ride them, Jolene Eck and Ryan Conybear, make up the UW Police Department’s Mounted Unit.

You’ve probably seen them standing guard at Badger football games or keeping the peace on busy weekend nights downtown. But the Mounted Unit plays another, less visible role on the UW force — one that cars would be hard-pressed to replace.

“It’s a way for us to make a connection with our students and our community,” Conybear says.

Champing at the Bit

Before cars, police horses were the fastest way for officers to get around. A 1929 Milwaukee newspaper boasted that the city would purchase four horses from the U.S. Army for the city’s police force. But in the 1940s, the Milwaukee police motorized, and the horses were phased out.

By the fourth quarter of the 20th century, interest in mounted police rebounded, as departments recognized the animals’ prowess in public relations. The City of Madison’s Mounted Patrol Unit got its start in 1986, and the UW Police Department (UWPD) Mounted Unit began in 1989.

Early on, as with many latter-day mounted patrols, the UW’s officers rode their personal horses, so the unit’s size (and existence) fluctuated. In 2015, the unit’s last horse, Vegas, was diagnosed with an incurable muscle disease. In 2017, Vegas was put down after serving 12 years with his owner, Assistant Chief Kari Sasso.

The unit was essentially dormant until 2020, when UWPD leadership made a push to revive it. A call went out to the officers to gauge interest in mounting up. Eck and Conybear were the first to put their names in for the job. Rettke and Vetter were purchased by the university and officially joined the force in 2022. In honor of the 50th anniversary of Title IX, the horses were named after two legendary UW female athletes: Jessie Vetter ’09 (hockey) and Dana Rettke ’21 (volleyball).

Back in the Saddle

When they started with the Mounted Unit, Eck and Conybear worked four to five regular patrols per week, responding to calls for service as any other officers would. Except instead of showing up in a squad car, they showed up on horseback.

“We found some limitations,” says Eck. “There are certain calls for service that we can’t necessarily get to as fast as you could in a vehicle — off-campus buildings or the far west side.”

In those days, the unit even performed routine traffic stops. The horses wore a breast collar fitted with lights, and the officers had lights on their vests and saddlebags that could flash red and blue like the lights on a police car. In lieu of sirens, the officers used whistles to get drivers to pull over.

“Not every time we attempted a stop did a car stop,” Eck admits.

The mounted officers typically develop very close bonds with their equine partners.

Today, most of the Mounted Unit’s duties involve interacting with the community. In large crowds, like those on game days or late nights on State Street, the horses’ height gives the officers extra visibility. And the animals can move through congested areas more nimbly than a car.

Then there’s the intimidation element. Rettke stands five feet eleven inches at the shoulder and weighs almost 2,000 pounds; Vetter, the runt, is 5 feet seven inches and 1,750 pounds. In many cases, Eck says, the sheer size of the animals can deter would-be troublemakers.

“If people on State Street or Library Mall get into a fight, just bringing the horses to that area can make them want to leave,” Eck says.

But the primary effect of the horses’ presence is positive. When they’re not doing crowd control, they’re usually out on “community rides” — easy-going patrols through neighborhoods or visits to specific spots on campus. People are encouraged to pet the horses and get to know the officers.

“A lot of smiles and excitement” are typical reactions, Eck says. The community rides take the unit through neighborhoods such as Eagle Heights and to stops like the dean of students’ office. The officers make a special point to visit residence halls, Eck says, “so that when the students see us, they’re not like, ‘Oh my goodness, police are here.’ ”

Even in more chaotic environments, such as a Friday night on State Street, the horses can completely change the energy. Conybear remembers something an apprehensive stranger said to him on one such night: “ ‘I don’t really like police, but can I ask you a question about your horse?’ That’s the kind of stuff that sticks in your mind,” he says.

Horse Sense

What makes a good police horse?

The Mounted Unit doesn’t know much about Vetter’s and Rettke’s lives before they joined the force. They’re originally from Canada but came to the UWPD through Mounted Patrol International, a Texas-based mounted police training and consulting company.

There’s no statutory retirement age for police horses — the animals typically live for 25 to 30 years. The City of Madison’s Mounted Patrol Unit has a 23-year-old police horse, Bubba, who, according to Conybear, shows no signs of slowing down. Vetter is 13 and Rettke is eight.

Both are draft horses, bred for agricultural work. Rettke is a Percheron, with a dark brown coat and a mane and tail to match. Vetter is a Clydesdale-Percheron cross with a dappled coat and flaxen mane that’s neatly braided during hot summer months. The horses were selected for their strength, size, and temperament — calm, cool, and collected. But what really sets them apart is their training.

The Mounted Unit’s work requires a level of social awareness that both horses and humans have honed over the last three years. To strengthen the bond between horse and rider, the officers were partnered with specific horses: Eck, a more experienced equestrian, with the younger Rettke; Conybear with the more mature Vetter. In addition to learning standard care and riding techniques, the officers had to train the horses to be comfortable around crowds and loud noises — and, most importantly, to be comfortable around them.

“We have a pretty close relationship,” Conybear says of Vetter. “She’s a very opinionated lady. She’ll tell me when something bugs her, whether it’s how she tips her ears or her breath work and things like that.”

Eck says working with Rettke has taught her as much about herself as it has about horses. “We can’t both be energetic and fast-paced,” Eck says. “She’s taught me that sometimes I have to just keep calm throughout my whole body, because she can sense that when I’m riding.” Eck says both horses are “definitely food motivated.” During our interview, when the officers weren’t paying close attention, Rettke and Vetter availed themselves of the freshly cut grass across from the UW police station on Monroe Street.

The two-horse team may take a little more upkeep than a 400-horsepower squad car. The Mounted Unit spends eight hours a week training at Dawson Pointe Stables in Oregon. Add to that the time it takes to get the horses ready for work — brushing them, cleaning them, loading them into the trailer, and driving them to wherever the day’s event is, all of which the officers do themselves. And, of course, there’s the poop. (The officers always pick up after their partners.)

But at the end of the day, the advantage is clear. No one wants to pet a police car.

Video by Jason Weiss

That precious bit of movie history is safeguarded by UW–Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR). Koepp x’85 entrusted it to the center along with many of his other early drafts and final scripts, including Mission: Impossible (1996) and War of the Worlds (2005), which he cowrote with Steven Spielberg.

One of the top archives of its kind in the world, WCFTR has for 66 years been preserving — and sharing — resources from the film, theater, and broadcasting industries. Although it’s located on the UW–Madison campus, some 2,000 miles from Hollywood, the center’s rich collection draws scholars, researchers, and movie buffs from around the globe.

And a rapidly growing digital presence means that many of the jewels in this fascinating collection can be accessed from anywhere, for free, 24/7. Through the center’s Media History Digital Library, online visitors can view millions of pages of historical books and magazines focused on film, broadcasting, and recorded sound, gaining insight into American culture.

“We are doing more than ever before to bring our collections to the world,” says director Eric Hoyt, the Kahl Family Professor of Communication Arts.

Among the center’s treasures are the original Jurassic Park screenplay, the pilot script for Bewitched, and a casting call for what would become the American TV hit The Office, which includes a description of the character Michael Scott (Steve Carell): “a train wreck of bad leadership characteristics.” Althea Dotzour

The center “is a treasure trove of insight, images, and ideas about film and theater,” says the filmmaker and film scholar Karen Pearlman, who came from Australia to tap the archival riches for her book about the 20th-century American dancer and filmmaker Shirley Clarke. Pearlman and Richard James Allen, who together direct the Physical TV Company, went on to donate their papers and films to WCFTR as well.

How did a heartland university become a premier destination for entertainment history? Top-notch faculty helps. And, crucially, UW–Madison saw the value of preserving film materials long before other major institutions.

“New Ways for Understanding Ourselves”

The collection was made possible in 1960 by a collaboration between UW–Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society. In 1969, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research acquired the hugely significant United Artists collection, containing nearly five decades of records from the film production and distribution company founded by movie legends Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith.

Today, the center is part of UW–Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. It contains an astonishingly wide range of holdings, including the collections of Broadway greats such as Hal Holbrook, Moss Hart, and George S. Kaufman; plus film and television collections from pioneering late-night TV host Faye Emerson, Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, MGM studio head Dore Schary, and blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. “It houses one of the best and most useful collections of material for film studies anywhere in the nation,” says Thomas Doherty, a film scholar and professor of American Studies at Brandeis University. Doherty turned to the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research as he did research on blacklisted screenwriters in the 1940s for his book Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist.

“Wisconsin was one of the first universities to realize that the records of the studios and filmmakers were worthy of preservation and cataloging, at a time when snooty universities turned up their noses at collections from Hollywood,” he says.

WCFTR’s archives are rivaled only by those at the University of California–Los Angeles, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the Library of Congress. Working hands-on with the actual artifacts can be a thrill, says Mary Huelsbeck, the center’s assistant director. “I love any chance I get to work with our movie posters,” she says. “I’m amazed not only at the artwork but all the movies I’ve never heard of.”

Film archivist Amanda Smith says that one of her favorite corners of the center’s collection is “our growing number of press junket interviews.”

“We have one collection from news broadcaster John Stofflet ’83 during his time as an entertainment reporter in Seattle and another from Milwaukee-based entertainment reporter Gino Salomone. The footage consists of three- to five-minute interviews with basically every celebrity who was producing work from 1990 to today.” Particularly fun, Smith notes, are the few seconds before and after the official interview, when reporter and star are just casually chatting.

The center’s materials are often used in the classroom. UW–Madison communication arts professor Jeff Smith MA’89, PhD’95, for example, borrows a 16mm print of the nearly forgotten Warner Bros. movie Nora Prentiss for his film noir class. For his course American Film Industry in the Era of the Studio System, Hoyt has students select and analyze a paper artifact — newspapers, scripts, memos — from U.S. cinema history prior to 1940.

“Research in the humanities is vitally important,” says Hoyt. “This work confirms what we think of as our history, and sometimes it challenges it. It cares for a shared past and gives us new ways for understanding ourselves.”

“Our Shared Knowledge of America and the World”

The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research has been one of the most successful humanities units on campus in terms of receiving federal grants. From 2023 to 2025, it won three separate grants totaling $550,000.

One of the center’s largest efforts has been Project Ballyhoo, a five-year initiative to digitize and share motion picture pressbooks, which contained promotional materials. The open-access database allows users to view the material and to see how these early marketing tools made their way into newspapers and trade magazines.

Historic Hollywood pressbooks are being digitized as part of the WCFTR’s Project Ballyhoo, recently described by the National Endowment for the Humanities as “among our nation’s most significant humanities projects.” WCFTR

The innovative technologies and data analytics methods created by the WCFTR team for Project Ballyhoo are also designed to serve as a model for future researchers. To speed up its work, the center has leveraged the high-level computing power of the Center for High Throughput Computing, UW–Madison’s core research computing center.

In January 2025, Project Ballyhoo was awarded a prestigious, roughly $150,000 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). However, less than three months later, the government terminated that federal grant, plus an even larger one to digitize the work of video artist Wendy Clarke. The American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Modern Language Association responded with a lawsuit asking that the NEH funding be restored.

Last July, a federal judge issued a preliminary ruling that was supportive of many of the plaintiffs’ claims. Project Ballyhoo was one of the NEH awardees referenced in the decision as “among our nation’s most significant humanities projects” that holds the potential to contribute something great to “our shared knowledge of America and the world.” Nevertheless, the ruling did not order the NEH to immediately restore the grants.

Due to the loss of federal funds, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research is putting a greater emphasis on growing its base of donor support.

“The funding landscape will change,” says Hoyt. “Our commitment to access, preservation, and history never will.”

Below are just a few of the love stories you shared. WAA will post a new batch of stories in 2026. To submit your own story of how you met, go to uwalumni.com/news/badger-sweetheart-submission. Kelly Widule ’14 and Matt Widule ’15 met at an ugly-sweater party and reunited through a Facebook shout-out when Matt wrote, “You were the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.” David Bryant ’02 and Jennifer Rens ’02 met in Witte in 1998 when she walked into his room and introduced herself. It all started our freshman year when we were both in the same Chemistry 103 class. You could say Rachel and I had chemistry. Our first date was going to see Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, and we still love that series today. We had the best times with band, and almost all our best friendships to this day were made in the band. So the obvious choice was to propose to Rachel in the biggest way possible, during the Fifth Quarter of our final home game in 2015 against Northwestern. I had let band director Mike Leckrone know my plan and had him make sure to play “Hey! Baby” as the first song of the Fifth Quarter. As soon as the song started, I grabbed Rachel by the hand and sprinted out to the center of the W at midfield and started singing “Hey! Baby” to her while a good portion of the band surrounded us to sing and play along. After the first chorus was finished, I popped the question in front of 80,000-plus Badger fans, band members, and our family and friends in the stands.

— Karl Schmirler ’16 and Rachel Schmirler ’16

I was a nursing student, and Paul was in landscape architecture. We were introduced by mutual friends on a blind date. From then onward, we dated exclusively, enjoying every UW event and the beautiful campus and falling in love. We were married in 1975 and will celebrate 50 years by taking an alumni trip in November. Two of our three children graduated from UW–Madison, and the grandchildren want to be Badgers as well.

—Barbara Bergum ’73 and Paul Bergum ’73 Joaquin and I met through PEOPLE [the Precollege Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence] when we were in high school, but we began a relationship our freshman year at UW–Madison. We would spend a lot of time walking down the Lakeshore Path to Picnic Point and looking at the koi fish at Allen Centennial Garden until we both graduated in 2019. We are now coming up on our 10-year anniversary. We are also engaged and planning to marry at Allen Centennial Garden next year.

— Alma Sida Ontiveros ’19, JD’21 and Joaquin Lara ’19

We met in Introduction to Occupational Therapy, though neither of us became OTs. We were instructed to introduce each other to the class on the first day and discovered we had many similarities. We hung out occasionally the rest of the semester. We started dating about a year and a half later after prompting from mutual friends and have been together ever since. We have lots of great Madison memories from the library to the Library [bar] to football games, including a Rose Bowl. We still make the trip back to Camp Randall a few times a year.

— Jordan Seitz ’13 and Nathan Seitz ’13, DPT’16 I met Alex during my sophomore year and his junior year. We were both enrolled in a modern literature class in the Mosse Humanities Building. We sat near each other every Tuesday and Thursday and had minimal conversation. One day, the professor offered an extra-credit movie, and I asked him to watch it with me. Our first date after the movie was late-night ice-skating at the Shell. After dating for six years, we got married in May 2025. Since graduating, we have bought Badger season football tickets and love going back to cheer on our team in the place we fell in love.

— Sophie Sjo ’21 and Alex Pillard ’20 To view all the responses, visit uwalumni.com/news/badger-love-stories.

Thanks to Andrea Stegman of the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association for collecting these stories.

Published in the Winter 2025 issue.

Hygge (pronounced HOOG-uh, with the y sounding like the oo in “good”) is a Danish concept that implies warmth, simplicity, and comfort. In the 21st century, as digital media have become more invasive, hygge has grown increasingly popular in America. Andersen, an associate professor in the UW’s 150-year-old Scandinavian studies department, is an expert on Danish culture — he grew up in Denmark and studied at the University of Copenhagen. He’s been on the UW faculty since 2017, and hygge has become something of a cottage industry for him, though he’d like you to know that its appeal stretches beyond cottages — in fact, beyond all the stereotypical hearth-and-home trappings of tradition that style magazines and websites promote.

Andersen frequently speaks about hygge to alumni audiences, as well as at Badger Talks programs and Wisconsin Public Radio’s University of the Air. “I’m probably asked to do five or six of these talks a year,” he says, “and then often on the media, [with] radio and TV interviews asking me to give the 30-second version of hygge.”

Hygge is popular in wintertime because of its associations with comfort and family — with warm sweaters and crackling fires. But this is an oversimplification.

“You hear that the concept is untranslatable,” he says. “But it’s essentially the art of creating coziness, familiarity, friendliness.” It’s an experience that people can create anywhere, anytime. If you want to incorporate a little hygge into your life, here are Andersen’s tips, in his own words.

Hygge Is Social

My definition of hygge is “pleasant togetherness.” Pleasant is about atmosphere. Togetherness is about being social. In the pleasant column would be things like candlelight. It would be things like indirect lighting in your house. It would be, maybe, a fireplace, relaxed clothing. On the social side it would be intimacy with friends and family.

Hygge Is Intentional

In Denmark, what is very important is the word itself. And the word hygge exists as a verb, “to hygge”; a noun; and an adjective, hyggelig. Part of doing hygge is using the word. The word kind of becomes a speech act. You’re sitting in an environment with friends, and then you say, “This is hygge.”

In our home, we have a tradition called eftermiddagsmad, an afternoon snack. And literally, it is hygge. At one point in the afternoon, we sit down together. We have a cookie, or we might have pumpkin pie. My wife and I have coffee. It might last anywhere from two to 10 minutes, but we sit down. We take a breather. We spend time together.

Hygge Is Egalitarian

Hygge is also used as a way of social control to create egalitarianism. If someone has a lot of money and builds a house that’s too big, the worst thing you can say is that it is not hygge.

Hygge Can Be Anytime

One misunderstanding is that you can only be hygge in the wintertime. Hygge is an important component in the winter months, but hygge is something that you do all year round. It’s also on a long summer evening, where it’s light until midnight and you are sitting outside and cozying up. It doesn’t have to be indoors.

Hygge Evolves

Most people think of hygge as a constant concept, but if you look at it historically, it changes with the times. If you had gone to Denmark a decade ago and said, “Let’s do hygge with the electric candles,” people would have laughed at you. But there has actually been a shift in Denmark. People buy fewer real candles and more electric candles. Half a generation ago, the typical Danish house would have been mid- century architecture. Now it’s clean, sharp corners, everything white or black — not at all soft. I think this shows the flexibility of hygge. Most people think it can’t be changed, but each generation uses it in a new way.

John Allen, the associate publisher of On Wisconsin, is still trying to make his mouth pronounce hygge.

The border-battle football rivalry between the University of Wisconsin Badgers and University of Minnesota Gophers was already one of the oldest in the country, dating to 1890.

Other sports — notably men’s and women’s hockey — would eventually contribute their own chapters to the storied Badger-Gopher matchups, but in 1962, football was king. What happened in Camp Randall Stadium on that November day still resonates, more than six decades later.

“The most significant game of all in a highly significant rivalry,” says Joel Maturi, a Minnesota native who was an assistant athletic director at UW–Madison and, later, athletic director at Minnesota.

Bill Brophy, another native Minnesotan who served as sports editor of the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, was a young boy in 1962. But he remembers.

“My dad took the train to Madison for the game,” Brophy says. “He was still mad a month later. He told me the story. He said Minnesota got screwed.”

The game had large implications — the winner would go to the Rose Bowl.

The Gophers led, 9–7, when the Badgers tried to mount a late fourth-quarter drive starting at their own 20-yard line. Three completions from Ron Vander Kelen ’64 to his star receiver, Pat Richter ’64, JD’71 (later UW athletic director), brought the ball to the Minnesota 43-yard line. Two and a half minutes to play.

The next play lives in infamy for Gopher fans. Vander Kelen was rushed and hit by Minnesota’s star defensive tackle, Bobby Bell. His wobbly pass was intercepted, and joyous Gopher fans began dreaming about Pasadena in January.

Except a 15-yard penalty was called on Bell for roughing the passer. And soon another 15 yards was tacked on for “unsportsmanlike remarks from the sidelines,” as Sports Illustrated put it.

Suddenly the Badgers were at the Minnesota 13-yard line. “We still had to take it in,” Richter recalls, 63 years later. “I’ve seen a lot of crazy calls in my life, but you have to play it as it is and execute.”

They scored three plays later, winning 14–9. Minnesota players and fans were outraged.

“I touched the ball,” Bell told Sports Illustrated. “It was a legitimate rush.”

Crazy calls, the introduction of a slab of bacon, then an axe, and a heated personality clash between two charismatic hockey coaches — the rivalry between Badgers and Gophers athletics has produced legends and lore for the ages.

“Badgers May Abolish Football”

Incredibly, the football series, which began in 1890 and will continue this year in Minneapolis on November 29, is currently dead even. Each team has won 63 games, and there have been eight ties.

In 2010, when the Big Ten Conference added Nebraska and went to two divisions in football, Minnesota and Wisconsin were split up. Though teams would be allowed a crossover game, some discussions of scheduling did not include a Gophers vs. Badgers matchup.

“I think both [then UW athletic director] Barry Alvarez and I said that a game had to happen,” recalls Maturi, who then led Gopher athletics. “I made the comment at a meeting, ‘If we don’t play each other, I’m going to get fired.’ ”

The game happened, and indeed, only once in the 135-year history of the rivalry did the Badgers and Gophers not meet on the football field.

What caused them not to play in 1906 was the culmination of a decade-plus rash of serious injuries that led some to question whether college football should continue.

News accounts from those early games tell the story. Reporting on the first Badgers-Gophers meeting, in November 1890 — won 63–0 by Minnesota — the Green Bay Weekly Gazette noted: “The usual number of accidents occurred during the game — Leary of the Minnesota team having his nose broken; of the UW men, Davidson sprained his ankle; Sumner was quite seriously injured by colliding with one of his opponents, and Kerr, the captain of the team, was seriously injured about the head in a collision. He protested that he was not seriously hurt and continued playing but finally fell unconscious and was carried off the field.”

By 1906, university faculty and administrators discussed doing away with the sport. A March 1906 Wisconsin State Journal headline read: “Badgers May Abolish Football.”

There was a mass student protest on campus. Football survived, but the Badgers-Gophers game was suspended, as a Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist explained in 1973: “The reason they didn’t play in 1906: college football with its mass formations had become too brutal. President Teddy Roosevelt ordered the colleges to suspend their most intense rivalries. … Roosevelt directed the rules committee to create a more open game. Thus the forward pass was introduced.”

An Axe and a Slab of Bacon

By 1930, the history and intensity of the Badgers-Gophers rivalry led a Minneapolis dentist named B. Fouch — a 1914 Minnesota alumnus — to create an unusual trophy.

Carved from black walnut, “it is two feet long and one foot wide,” the Star Tribune reported, “has a raised football in the center, the word ‘Bacon’ at each end, and the initial ‘M,’ reversible to a ‘W’ when the slab is hung the other way.”

UW Athletics

It became known as the “slab of bacon,” with the winner of the Badgers-Gophers football game gaining possession until the next meeting. It changed hands across a dozen years, and then, in 1943, the slab of bacon disappeared after a Gopher victory in Minnesota.

A Star Tribune article the Monday following the game said a Badgers manager had tried to present it in the Gophers’ locker room, only to be told “all trophies are frozen for the duration” of World War II.

The slab of bacon wasn’t seen again in public for 50 years, when it was unearthed in Madison in 1994 by a UW athletics intern cleaning a storage room. Oddly, it hadn’t been completely ignored. Somebody had written on it the scores of the Badgers-Gophers games from 1943 to 1970 in thick black marker, according to a 2023 New York Times series on college sports mysteries.

By the time the missing slab was discovered, the rivalry had another trophy: the Paul Bunyan Axe, donated by the Badgers’ National W Club. It was presented for the first time in Minneapolis in January 1949, at halftime of the Badgers-Gophers basketball game. Gopher football legend Francis “Pug” Lund accepted it, Minnesota having won the 1948 game 16–0.

Today’s tradition of the winning team feigning to chop down the goalposts with the axe did not happen immediately. Richter, who played in the early 1960s, said he and his teammates never swung the axe.

Minnesota sports historian Ryan Barland looked into the origin of the chopping and couldn’t pinpoint it precisely, noting that “the practice was started in the 1980s (at the earliest).”

The chopping is a big deal now. Andy Crooks ’08 was a high school All-State player in Wausau in the early 2000s prior to coming to the UW, where he first played linebacker, then tight end. Crooks always wanted to be a Badger, but his high school girlfriend’s parents were Gophers who serenaded him with the Minnesota fight song.

“That ‘Ski-U-Mah’ stuff,” Crooks says.

He wasn’t having it. Crooks arrived in Madison fully versed in the rivalry.

“There is not a better feeling,” he says, “than taking that axe and chopping those posts down. There’s nothing more disheartening than when a team runs across the field and takes [the axe] from you.”

The original Paul Bunyan’s Axe is now in possession of the College Football Hall of Fame, the W Club having replaced it in 2000.

An Upset and an Abdication

In a memorable 1961 game in Minneapolis, with a Rose Bowl bid on the line for Minnesota, the Badgers upset the Gophers, 23–21. Richter caught two touchdown passes, and Minnesota fans were furious.

The loss left the Ohio State Buckeyes with a better record than the Gophers. Remarkably, however, the Ohio State faculty voted 28–25 to reject the Rose Bowl bid.

A faculty member told Sports Illustrated: “We’re upset that the image of Ohio State is that the school is merely an appendage to the football team.”

There was a near riot in Columbus. Some 2,000 students “burned members of the faculty in effigy,” the magazine reported, “snake-danced down the main street, and surrounded the capitol building.” The bid went instead to Minnesota, and the Gophers won the 1962 Rose Bowl, 21–3, over UCLA.

From Ecstasy to Shambles

Even the fiercest rivalries have ebbs and flows, and for a time — a decade starting in 2004 — the football Badgers dominated the Gophers.

One game seems to particularly haunt Gopher fans. In 2005, in Minneapolis, the Gophers had the ball and a 34–31 lead with less than a minute to go. Forced to punt near their own end zone, the unthinkable happened. The Badgers blocked the punt and recovered the ball for a touchdown, securing a 38–34 Badgers win.

“It was a home game,” says Minnesota’s Barland, who was a Gopher student at the time. “We were beating our rivals. To go from that ecstasy to shambles was a foundational part of my college experience.”

Five years after the blocked punt, in October 2010, UW head football coach Bret Bielema drew the ire of Gopher fans when he had the Badgers go for a two-point conversion after taking a 41–16 lead with under seven minutes to play in Madison.

Was Wisconsin running up the score?

“A very poor decision,” Gophers coach Tim Brewster said afterward. “It was wrong.”

“We Bring Out the Best in Each Other”

The Badgers-Gophers rivalry has also been heated in both men’s and women’s hockey.

The NCAA sanctioned women’s hockey in 2000, and since then the Badgers have won eight national championships and the Gophers six.

Writing about the rivalry in 2019, the Star Tribune called it “fierce.” The occasion was the 2019 national championship game between the Badgers and Gophers. The Badgers won, 2–0, behind a 27-save performance by goaltender Kristen Campbell ’20.

Gophers coach Brad Frost said, “We bring out the best in each other.”

The all-time series in women’s hockey is nearly as close as that of football. When the Badgers and Gophers met last, in March 2025, in the semifinals of the Frozen Four, each team had 57 wins, and there had been 16 ties.

The Badgers won, 6–2, securing a one-win advantage in the border-battle series and going on to win their NCAA-record eighth national championship.

“They Hit You to Hate You”

The Badgers-Gophers rivalry in men’s ice hockey dates to 1922 (a two-game sweep by the Gophers), but from 1936 to 1964 they didn’t play, as Badger athletics discontinued hockey until November 1963.

The apex of the rivalry arrived in the following decade and centered on two larger-than-life head coaches.

Bob Johnson and Herb Brooks had much in common: both had played hockey for the Gophers, and both would coach the men’s hockey Olympic team. They were energetic, quotable, and terrific coaches. There was one more thing.

“History tells us they’re probably two of the greatest American coaches ever,” says sportswriter Brophy, who knew and covered them both. “But they truly didn’t like each other.” In the 1970s, Johnson coached the Badgers and Brooks the Gophers.

“I was struck with the level of dislike between the two programs,” Brophy says.

Mike Eaves ’78 was a star player for the Badgers team that won the 1977 NCAA championship. Eaves later coached the Badgers, and in 2002 he spoke to Capital Times sports columnist Joe Hart about the intensity of the Badgers-Gophers hockey rivalry.

Eaves described entering the Minneapolis arena as a player, taking the ice and thinking, “Holy moly, this is hate. … The tenacity on the ice was incredible. When they hit you, they hit you to hate you. It was special.”

In November 1977, eight months after the Badgers won the national title, the Gophers were coming to Madison for a two-game weekend series at the Dane County Coliseum. During the week, at a luncheon in Minneapolis, Brooks made a comment about the Badger hockey fans.

“They get about 8,000 people in there,” Brooks said, “and half of them are drunk.”

Word drifted back to Madison. Some enterprising Badger fans concocted a photo of Brooks sucking on a beer can and distributed copies to fans seated near the Gophers coach.

“There were hundreds of them being held up behind the bench,” Brophy says. “It got to Herb. After the game, in the area where Herb was doing his press conference, some kid from the band asked Herb to sign the photo. Herb grabbed the guy and threw him up against the wall. Then he cooled off. But it was like, ‘Wow!’ It was real. He really didn’t care for Wisconsin and Wisconsin didn’t care for him.”

Ironically, within a few years, Bob Johnson’s son, Mark ’94 — who now coaches the powerhouse Badgers women’s hockey team — would star on the 1980 Olympic “miracle” team that won the gold medal. Their coach? Herb Brooks.

Doug Moe ’79 is a longtime Wisconsin journalist and author.

Published in the Fall 2025 issue.

What about the Badgers-Gophers rivalry in men’s and women’s basketball?

Watch video highlights of the teams’ 2025 matchups below!

Choudhury wanted to be an entrepreneur. He didn’t just want to be his own boss, but rather to launch the sort of company that would attract venture capitalists (VCs), one that would be a Very Big Deal.

“Starting a company, you need something that is very groundbreaking, very revolutionary,” he says. “VCs will tell you, don’t make anything that’s marginally better than what you have available today. A VC-backed company would have to have exponential growth. You need to 10X their investment.”

Choudhury thought he was in the right field for that: electrical and computer engineering. As a grad student, he worked in the lab of Professor Leon Shohet, along with Daniel Benjamin ’16, MS’17, PhD’21 and Josh Blatz MS’18, PhD’21. They were using plasma to make microchips better, faster, and more powerful. Computer chips are a promising line of work — they’re vital to the booming AI industry. And Choudhury was willing to be patient.

“I didn’t think entrepreneurship would happen right away,” he says. “I thought I’d go to work for IBM or Intel — I had a job offer from Intel. I’d work there a few years and then eventually start my own company.” He figured Silicon Valley was where he would find his Very Big Idea and venture capital backers.

But in 2016, opportunity walked into the lab in the person of Michael Sussman, a professor of biochemistry. Sussman and his chief scientist, Ben Minkoff, were interested in plasma but not in making computer chips. They wanted to use it to study the structure of proteins. Proteins are one of the keys to disease. Viruses, bacteria, cancerous cells — all have characteristic proteins.

The Shohet lab found a way to help Sussman — a process called Plasma-Induced Modification of Biomolecules, or PLIMB. It was a revolutionary idea, one worth taking to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) to have it patented. It was the kind of big idea Choudhury was looking for, and he and Benjamin — along with Shohet, Sussman, Minkoff, and Blatz — decided to launch a start-up company around PLIMB: Immuto Scientific.

Immuto appealed to WARF as much as, if not more than, patenting PLIMB itself. In recent years, WARF has been increasing its role as a venture capital investor for UW-connected start-ups. Immuto seemed like an ideal candidate for investment.

A Better Mousetrap

Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. Ralph Waldo Emerson is supposed to have said that, or something like it, but you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s WARF’s motto. The foundation’s purpose is to promote inventions. And its history is tied up in rodent removal.

Actually, WARF’s motto is “partnering with University of Wisconsin research to solve the world’s problems,” which is more apt if less evocative.

The foundation began its life 100 years ago, in 1925, at the urging of Harry Steenbock, who wanted the university to control and benefit from the process he invented for enriching foods with vitamin D. WARF patented that process, and many other ideas. WARF’s licenses bring in revenue through royalties, and WARF then returns funding to the university.

Last academic year, WARF’s support for UW–Madison totaled $159.8 million. One of its most successful patent licenses is for warfarin — not a better mousetrap, maybe, but a better rat poison. Warfarin was developed in the 1930s by biochemistry professor Karl Paul Link 1922, MS1923, PhD1925. Later, the chemical at the heart of warfarin was found to be a useful blood thinner to prevent strokes.

Erik Iverson, who has served as WARF’s CEO since 2016, refers to warfarin as one of the university’s “diamonds in the rough.” (See sidebar, below.) It’s one of the inventions that has provided an outsize return to WARF and to the UW.

Since Iverson came to Madison, he’s been looking for ways to create more — and more profitable — diamonds.

Erik Iverson has led WARF since 2016. During his tenure, he has focused on finding “diamonds in the rough,” inventions with potential for high profit.

“When I arrived at WARF, we had our IP [intellectual property — essentially, patent and licensing], which is our bread and butter, the soul of this organization,” Iverson says. “But I was brought on to identify [ways of] both strengthening the licensing pipeline but also broadening out the sources of revenue.”

By broadening the sources of revenue, Iverson means chiefly helping WARF grow into a venture capital investor that puts its money in — and earns significant returns from — UW–based start-ups. Under his leadership, WARF added several new divisions, including WARF Therapeutics, which does drug discovery; WARF Accelerator, which identifies potential start-ups and helps them build the skills and teams that will make them attractive to investors; and WARF Ventures, an in-house VC fund. His hope is to find not only new warfarins but also the companies that will produce and sell those warfarins.

“Warfarin, our namesake, is the most prescribed drug in history as a blood thinner,” says Iverson. “Every successful tech transfer office in the country has a drug in its portfolio. WARF is no different.”

Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. But build a better drug, and the world will remunerate.

This is one reason why PLIMB and Immuto appealed to WARF. The process has a clear application in drug development. Previously, biochemists could find the structure of proteins only by crystallizing them and then looking at them under an electron microscope. The process is slow and expensive, and it takes proteins out of their natural state, which means the outcome is prone to failure.

“Crystallography takes over a year sometimes to get a single structure. It costs over $100,000,” says Choudhury. “It’s been a big bottleneck in the pharmaceutical industry.”

PLIMB could accurately discover the structure of proteins in their native environment.

WARF saw the possibilities in PLIMB and Immuto right away — it was just the kind of company that WARF’s venture-capital group wanted to back.

De-Risking

To make the UW a player in the world of high-tech entrepreneurship takes more than invention. It takes money. Madison may not have the kind of investor money that New York or San Francisco or Boston can command, but with WARF, it offers a clear method for promoting technology transfer — business-speak for turning ideas into inventions and inventions into products. This is what attracted Iverson to Wisconsin. And it’s what brought Greg Keenan here, too. Keenan, who heads WARF Accelerator, brought experience from Boston and Silicon Valley, where he had worked in technology start-ups. When he talks about what Accelerator does, the term he comes back to again and again is de-risk.

“We do technology de-risking and market de-risking,” he says. “And what’s exciting now, we’re starting to de-risk teams.”

Risk, of course, is central to venture capitalism — venture is just a synonym for risky. The popular image of venture capitalists is that they embrace high risk for the hope of large rewards. But in general, businesspeople — even VCs — don’t actually like risks nearly so much as they want rewards.

“It’s getting harder and harder to license technologies, because companies are becoming more risk-averse,” Keenan says. “They want to see more proof that these technologies work and can solve the problems they were trying to address.”

Accelerator tries to remove the most obvious kinds of risks.

Each month, WARF holds a roughly three-hour meeting to discuss the new technologies that UW researchers have developed. The university generates between 350 and 400 of these innovations each year, “about one a day,” says Keenan, “and our licensing team and our Accelerator team look at every one. It’s an awesome meeting, an energizing meeting, and a lot of fun.”

Sometimes, as with Immuto, members of the research team want to take their invention to market. Keenan estimates that WARF will seek a patent for about half of the ideas that come in, and for between five and 10 a year, it backs a proposed start-up. Keenan’s Accelerator group keeps a “holding pen” of around 40 ideas that it’s evaluating — de-risking to see if they’re worth backing with venture capital.

What does de-risking entail? The first thing WARF wants to see is “commercialization potential” — does this idea or invention have a market?

“Most of the time, [what we see is] not even a product yet. It’s still just an early-stage technology, maybe an idea, maybe just a kind of lab bench experiment. Translating that into a business or a product is a much, much more challenging activity,” says Keenan. “Ideally, we’re starting with a problem and bringing a solution to that problem. But a lot of times, we have what we call technology searching for a problem. Those are the hardest to sell.”

If the idea does solve a real-world problem, the next question is whether that solution is unique. If existing technologies solve the same problem, then even a new and practical invention can fail in the marketplace.

The next step in de-risking is to prove that the idea or invention works. “Frequently, what we’re funding are prototypes, a field trial, a marketing study,” Keenan says. “We want to meet a milestone that is meaningful to business and industry.”

If a potential start-up can meet those requirements, Accelerator tries to de-risk the team — to ensure that the potential start-up has the necessary talents to be successful.

“Our biggest question is who’s going to run this idea,” says Mike Partsch, who heads WARF Ventures. “The overwhelming majority of the time, the inventor of the technology is a professor on campus. They are a world-renowned scientist, very knowledgeable in their field, but they don’t know anything about running a company. So we need to recruit management talent from outside.” Once a start-up satisfies Keenan’s Accelerator team, Partsch’s Ventures team will decide whether to invest WARF money. That investment would likely begin with between $250,000 and $500,000 of seed capital and might rise to as much as $10 million over several rounds of fundraising.

But the funding is an investment and not a gift. Most start-ups fail, and as WARF is taking a risk, it expects a sizable reward. Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. But mousetraps currently sell two for $1.23 at Walmart, and that doesn’t give much room for profit. Venture capitalists want to see much higher potential.

“When we make a million-dollar investment, as a venture capitalist, we want to see a five- to 10-times return in seven to 10 years,” says Partsch. “We expect that investment to realistically be able to make multiples. If we saw an opportunity, and the entrepreneur said, ‘Oh, if you invest in us and we’re wildly successful, you could get a 25, 30 percent return,’ we’d be like, ‘No, not interested.’ ”

Immuto Scientific was one of the first companies to go through WARF Accelerator after Keenan arrived in 2017. “Our funding went in to help the cofounders build the first devices,” he says. Its idea appealed immediately to pharmaceutical companies, and Choudhury struck the WARF team as a strong CEO. WARF saw how quickly Immuto could turn technology into profit.

“The market is undeveloped for this technology, but it’s going to displace the X-ray crystallography market,” Partsch says. “It’s faster; it’s cheaper. It can grow the [drug] market, because companies will now use [Immuto] for every single drug candidate instead of just the 10 percent or so that they think have potential.”

The line from lab to profit seems clear for Immuto. But that’s not the primary direction in which Choudhury wants his company to go.

Successful Exit

Choudhury wants to solve big problems, and the thing about the plan that makes so much sense to Partsch and Keenan — the problems it shows such promise at solving — is that they’re limited. Speeding up drug development is a small problem.

“We knew right away that there was a service business here,” Choudhury says. “And we could make some money on services. But then we thought, how do we make this into a high-growth business? We’ve got to make drugs of our own with this platform.”

For three years, from 2018 until 2021, Choudhury and Benjamin and the Immuto team developed their ideas with WARF Accelerator. Then WARF Ventures put significant money into the company, and for the next two and a half years, Immuto built up its customer base among pharmaceutical firms.

For the team at WARF, Immuto is heading toward what venture capitalists call a “successful exit,” either a stock offering that invites broad public investment or the sale of the company to a bigger, established firm. Either will make all of the early investors rich.

But this isn’t the kind of success Choudhury is hoping for, or at least not the only kind.

While the company was growing, Immuto was looking for an opportunity to solve a big problem — like curing cancer.

Cancer seemed like a prime area for PLIMB investigation because of its nature. Cancers are, essentially, protein problems.

“What happens in cancer is that a protein gets mutated in some way or it gets overexpressed,” says Choudhury. “Drug developers identify these proteins, and then they make drugs against them. But the same overexpressed protein exists in healthy tissues.”

Drug developers often run into problems creating cancer treatments in the lab, because they’re only dealing with a protein drug target in a test tube. If the drug candidate destroys the protein and kills the tumor in a lab setting, it looks like a success. But put it in a live patient, and suddenly it’s causing collateral damage. Now healthy tissues are suffering. Or worse, patients can die of the cure.

PLIMB enables researchers to find a drug that leaves the healthy protein alone. “We can design drugs to the structure of the protein that are only specific to the tumor,” Choudhury says. “When we test that same drug on the healthy tissues, it doesn’t bind to that protein in the healthy tissues.”

Immuto’s opportunity arrived in the form of acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, a cancer that affects bone marrow. The only current treatment for AML is a drug called Mylotarg, which was discovered in 1991, granted accelerated FDA approval in 2000, and removed from the market in 2010, because it caused potentially fatal liver disease. It was approved again in 2017, but carrying a warning that it was associated with “hepatotoxicity, including severe or fatal hepatic veno-occlusive disease.”

Immuto is developing a new treatment for AML, one that is currently being tested in mice. Choudhury believes it might make it to market in the next few years.

For Choudhury, this is the point of entrepreneurship: not making 10X money or building companies, but creating technologies and then using them to help people. It doesn’t greatly matter if that’s through sale to a Big Pharma firm or continuing to go it alone. The goal is to produce cures.

“This is our North Star,” he says. “What can we do to eradicate disease? How quickly can we get a therapeutic to a patient? Because patients are running against time here.”

Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. But cure a cancer, and you solve a Very Big Problem.

I graduated during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and remember the added layer of stress that came with searching for my first job. Friends left and right were pivoting to remote roles, moving across the country, finding new ways to use the lessons they learned in the classroom. As a journalism major, I knew there was a job out there for me somewhere, but questions weighed on me as I began my search: Would I find something fulfilling? Where would it take me next?

My path was typical for a young reporter. Eager to make my mark, I started off as an intern at one of Wisconsin’s largest newspapers and then transitioned into a full-time reporting gig at a smaller paper in central Wisconsin. I cried when I didn’t get a job I’d been hoping for at a bigger publication. I learned, as many grads do, that it’s necessary to “work your way up.”

Despite my initial concerns, my first job was formative. It was also nerve-wracking and intimidating. I had to fight off imposter syndrome at every turn while learning new skills and getting to know new colleagues. Everyone offered advice: Be yourself. Build your network. Find a mentor. Be patient. Take risks. Solve problems on your own. Ask for help.

At the time, it all seemed impossible. But eventually the advice paid off, and my journalism career kicked into gear.

The job market for recent grads is ever-changing. As always, some fields are booming and others lagging. But Badgers can find success anywhere. The following stories highlight UW alumni who found themselves on unexpected paths, overcame early struggles, or discovered a passion they had never anticipated — all traced back to that pivotal first job.

“What If I Just Went All In on This?”

Katie Roberson ’19 knows the sting of postgrad rejection all too well.

“I applied to so many jobs in advertising and communications,” she recalls. “I got some interviews, but nothing panned out. It was disheartening.”

After graduating with a degree in communication arts and a certificate in digital studies, she juggled multiple jobs at Target and a Madison event-planning company, on top of an endless stream of applications. But one thing remained constant: photography.

After a disheartening entry into the job market, Katie Roberson took a risk and started a photography business.

“I had been taking pictures since freshman year of college — mostly for fun and for a little extra money,” Roberson says. “One day, I realized I was spending more time editing photos than applying for jobs. And I thought, ‘What if I just went all in on this?’ ”

The idea was both thrilling and terrifying. A creative passion wasn’t the same as a stable career, and she wrestled with doubts about whether she could turn it into something sustainable. But after months of contemplation, she decided to take the leap. In 2020, she officially launched Katie Ann Photography LLC.

Then the world shut down with COVID-19.

“All of my bookings got canceled overnight,” she says. “It felt like the worst possible time to start a business.”

But rather than give up, Roberson pivoted. She leaned into learning, honing her craft, refining her marketing strategy, and connecting with potential clients online. She offered discounted sessions to build her portfolio and experimented with different types of photography.

Slowly, word spread.

“I remember the moment things started to shift,” Roberson says. “I opened bookings for summer senior photo sessions in late spring and suddenly had dozens of inquiries, and for the first time, I thought, ‘This might actually work.’ ”

Five years later, Roberson has built a thriving business, specializing in high school seniors, college graduates, and family portraits. What started as a side hustle has become a full-time career — one she never imagined but wouldn’t trade for anything.

“Taking that leap and believing in myself was the best decision I ever made,” she says.

Roberson says a first job doesn’t necessarily have to be traditional. “If you have a skill or passion that you love, don’t be afraid to explore making it your career. The risk might just pay off.”

“Say Yes to Conversations”

Adaptability is a hallmark of being a Badger.

For Aaron Her ’24, there was no clear roadmap for breaking into the business world. With a degree in consumer behavior, he landed an internship at the department store chain Kohl’s, working in marketing and analytics at the corporate headquarters.

Having grown up in Milwaukee in a low-income household, Her didn’t have industry connections or a clear-cut path to success.

A decision to step out of his comfort zone and arrange a networking meeting changed Aaron Her’s life.

“I’ve seen how valuable networking is. While many of my peers landed great internships or mentors through family connections, coming from a family of immigrants meant not having that,” he says. “I’ve had to work harder to get an opportunity and to prove myself.”

But Her’s willingness to step outside his comfort zone opened unexpected doors. While he was still figuring out his career path at Kohl’s, a conversation at a networking event changed everything. He met an executive from Dell Technologies who introduced a new perspective on sales.

“I always thought sales was just cold-calling people and pushing them to buy stuff,” Her says. “But the way he described it, as problem-solving, as relationship-building, made me see it in a totally different light.”

Her reached out to the executive on LinkedIn and asked if he’d be open to grabbing coffee.

“That conversation ended up changing my life,” he says.

Her began researching sales roles at Dell and applying to sales training programs. His efforts paid off with a position as an inside sales account executive at Dell in Austin, Texas.

“I remember getting the job offer and feeling this mix of excitement and fear,” he recalls. “I had never done sales before. But I reminded myself that the skills I had — communication, adaptability, persistence — would carry me through.”

Now Her is responsible for generating more than $8 million in revenue and managing a diverse portfolio of clients. He’s thriving in a field he never initially considered.

“I had to create my own opportunities,” he says. “Even when the path isn’t clear, believing in yourself and seeking out connections can lead to incredible possibilities.”

His advice to new grads?

“Say yes to conversations. You never know which one will change your life.”

“Life’s What You Make It”

Tamia Fowlkes ’22 always thought her path would take her far from home. After earning her journalism and political science degrees from UW–Madison and completing a master’s in journalism at Columbia University, the Milwaukee native was set on chasing big stories outside of Wisconsin. But when an opportunity came up in Milwaukee at the same newspaper where she had interned as an undergraduate, it felt like the perfect choice.

Fowlkes is a public investigator at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, covering labor, politics, and culture — exactly the kind of journalism she dreamed of doing growing up.

Tamia Fowlkes followed her gut and landed her ideal journalism job.

“When I was offered the job, I had a call with my mom, and she said, ‘I remember when you said in your eighth-grade graduation speech that you wanted to report on your community and make a positive impact,’ ” Fowlkes recalls.

Fowlkes has written about national political conventions and interviewed the pop star Chappell Roan, but she’s most passionate about helping everyday readers — those who reach out to her with tips, concerns, and questions.

Like many fields, journalism can be tough to break into, but Fowlkes advises new graduates to pursue their passions and not wait for permission.

“I think back to that Hannah Montana song: ‘Life’s what you make it, so let’s make it rock,’ ” she says with a laugh. “My college career and the time after has been defined by following my gut and knowing exactly what I want to get out of something, and then trying my best to actively pursue it. Even if it doesn’t always work out, at least I tried.

“People can certainly tell you no,” Fowlkes adds, “but the best thing you can do is just put yourself out there and keep trying.”

“You Don’t Have to Have It All Figured Out”

Sometimes, UW grads strike gold from the get-go. That was the case for Caitlin Mensing ’14, who graduated with degrees in community and nonprofit leadership and sociology. Initially drawn to public health and education, she explored opportunities with AmeriCorps and other nonprofits, uncertain where she’d land. Then a friend introduced her to Project Success, a Minneapolis-based youth development nonprofit.

An email introduction led to a Skype call, which led to an interview. By the Tuesday after her college graduation, she was stepping into her first full-time role as an administrative manager at Project Success.

“I remember feeling this mix of excitement and nervousness,” Mensing says. “I was grateful to have a job lined up, but I didn’t know yet if I would grow into it.”

Eleven years later, Mensing is the director of administration for the entire organization.

“I didn’t expect to go into administration,” she says. “I thought I’d be working more directly with programming. But taking on an operational role gave me insight into how nonprofits function at every level. I learned how funding works, how to support a board, and how to manage an organization’s day-to-day needs.”

Caitlin Mensing embraced the learning curve that came with her job.

Mensing discovered parallels with her late mother, who had spent more than two decades in education administration.

“I remember looking around one day and realizing how similar my role was to what my mom did,” she says. “It was an unexpected full-circle moment, and it made me feel like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.”

Mensing attributes much of her professional growth to being open-minded and embracing the learning curve that came with the job.

“You don’t have to have it all figured out,” she advises new grads. “Find an organization whose mission you believe in and a role where you can gain a variety of skills. Your first job doesn’t have to be your dream job, but it can set the foundation for whatever comes next.”

“On the Cutting Edge of Innovation”

After earning a doctorate in chemistry, Tyler Ogorek PhD’24 didn’t head to a research lab or pharmaceutical company like many of his peers. Instead, he made an unexpected pivot into business strategy.

Now, he’s a consultant at Bain & Company in Chicago, where he works with clients across industries to tackle complex challenges. To Ogorek, his path is a reminder that career boundaries are often more flexible than they seem.

Tyler Ogorek benefited from an unexpected career pivot.

“Not many PhDs know that consulting is a field that’s open to them,” he says. “It’s an extremely rewarding career path that should be top-of-mind for PhDs looking to enter the workforce in an area not strictly aligned with their educational background.”

The leap into consulting wasn’t random. It was strategic, informed by careful preparation. The role constantly pushes him to think critically and creatively.

The real draw for Ogorek is the intellectual thrill. “I work with clients across all strategy topics,” he says. “You get a chance to solve the toughest problems businesses face, in topics on the cutting edge of innovation.”

Whether you’re working in a chemistry lab or a corporate boardroom, Ogorek is proof that the most rewarding career pivots are often the ones that blend curiosity with courage.

Allison Garfield ’20 is a freelance journalist based in Chicago.

Published in the Fall 2025 issue.

Wenc covers the paper’s evolution from a way to make money by students who had no idea what they were doing to a phenomenon that influenced today’s style of news parody. The Onion’s approach to making up the news is now ingrained in the nation’s psyche, to the point where people react to headlines that strain credulity by saying, “It sounds like an Onion story.”

Wenc engagingly captures the staff’s freewheeling chutzpah, which she attributes partly to ’90s slacker culture. When an advertiser asked to speak with the publisher, they had to look up what a publisher does, make up a name for their mythical administrator, and have someone posing as the publisher call back. Wenc also highlights the absurdly random nature of the staff’s early decisions, from the name of the publication to its very concept. But, seemingly by accident, the paper succeeded from the beginning.

As Wenc says, “A bunch of 20-something Generation X nobodies out in flyover country had invented something that would become one of the most culturally influential American publications of all time.”

This excerpt deals with the very early days of the Onion.

[In 1988, Tim] Keck decided to start his own newspaper. “I didn’t really have a good idea of what that was; I just knew I wanted to start a newspaper. I was going to quit school and do this newspaper. And then I met this guy in a history of science class, part of the Integrated Liberal Studies program at Madison. His name was Chris Johnson x’91.

“He’s one of those people that just has a weird light and energy around them. Completely fearless,” Keck says. “Can make a trip to the grocery store weird and uncomfortable and electric. He had this crazy childhood in Brazil and Poland and Sweden, and then he went to high school in Lodi, Wisconsin.

“When I met Chris,” Tim says, “I was like, ‘That’s the guy. I can’t do this on my own. I need somebody like Chris to do it with me.’ I talked to him about the idea, and he immediately jumped in.” Amy Reyer ’89 (Amy Bowles at the time, who would sell ads and write for the Onion in its first year) says, “Tim has a healthy dark streak that draws him to the most complicated, brilliant people. He’s genuinely curious about what makes someone tick. The weirder, the better.”

But then, out of the blue, not long after they’d started brainstorming, Johnson said he was going to drop out of school and move back to Brazil with his dad to work on a business venture. Tomorrow. He packed up his stuff and vanished.

Keck was shocked and bereft at the abrupt loss of his friend and purported business partner. At the same time, he was impressed by the boldness of it all. The disregard for convention. The hugeness of the move. He kept on working on the newspaper idea, but found he didn’t have the confidence to do it by himself. So he decided to go to Brazil on a cheap courier flight and convince Johnson to come back. He returned victorious and very hungover 10 days later. Johnson had said he would return in six months.

Keck had taken a room in my apartment around this time, and I remember him telling me about the newspaper idea when he got back from Brazil. He said they wanted me to be the art director, whatever that was. (Though I did do some drawings now and then, I actually became the copy editor.) I hadn’t met Johnson yet, but I was excited enough that I wrote about it in my diary: March 3, 1988.

Johnson finally got back to town, and then it was time to rock. “We didn’t have editorial ideas or anything complicated like that,” Keck says. “We just wanted to start a newspaper.” Keck’s mom loaned them $3,000, and they rented a [rundown] three-bedroom apartment on East Johnson Street, a few blocks from both State Street and the capitol, to be the office — and their home. The living room was the production and editorial area, and Andy Dhuey ’89 was brought in to live in the third bedroom and help pay the rent. Keck’s mom would also be their adviser.

The first problem was what to call it. The only requirement was that it couldn’t be serious. Maybe The Rag? How about The Paper? Then one day they were visiting Johnson’s uncle Nels, who lived in Madison. “We ate onion sandwiches a lot,” Keck says. “Why, I don’t know, but we did, and Johnson’s uncle said, ‘Why don’t you call it the Onion?’ ” Keck adds, “I’m sorry I don’t have an interesting story about why we called it the Onion; that’s it. We made a lot of snap decisions in those days.”

Reyer’s roommate, Pete Haise ’90, tells me, “And then I think somebody drew a pretty good onion, and that was the clincher.”

The Onion’s first issue, featuring Keck’s arm as the “Mendota Monster.”

There would also be coupons on the bottom of the front page, he said. “They were all thrilled with me because of the coupon concept. Everybody loves coupons.”

Sturm agreed to let the new paper publish Down and Out Dawg. Keck also found another cartoonist he wanted to publish: Scott Dikkers x’87, the creator of Jim’s Journal. As Keck put it, “The Daily Cardinal paid them $5 a comic strip. I paid them $10.”

“So now we had some advertisers,” Keck said. “We had a name. We rented a Mac. This is in 1988, so it was a [primitive] little Mac, the ones where you had to put the floppy disk in and out and change it 80 times just to run a program. But we didn’t have any idea about the content in the publication.”

They had no editorial mission. No cause they wanted to promote. No message they wanted to send. They did love Spy magazine. Doing something in that spirit would be cool. But, otherwise, no topic fascinated them enough to make an entire newspaper about it.

As far as I know, only one other person from my high school class besides me graduated from UW–Madison, a guy named Todd Brown ’93. He was good-looking, funny, and charismatic, with parents from the Twin Cities. One day I went to visit him in his dorm during our freshman year, and he had a new friend there, a guy he’d met at the Ark Improv, a little independent theater a few blocks from State Street where he’d been taking classes and performing: Matt Cook ’89. Matt and I hit it off right away. He was from Chicago, he was really funny, and he was wearing a Joy Division T-shirt. We started hanging out all the time. That summer at a party at my first apartment, a tiny, sweltering attic two-bedroom on Conklin Place I shared with our friend Rachel [Johnson x’89], I introduced Keck to Matt Cook. Several of us were hanging out on the street — really an alleyway — waiting for Matt to show up.

“The first time I saw Matt Cook,” Keck said, “he was roller-skating with a refrigerator box on top of him down the street and then intentionally running into [stuff]. Like ‘Oh no! Oh no!’ and then ‘It’s okay, I’m okay!’ Like doing tons of pratfalls.” The box was so big it covered Matt completely, making it look like it was zooming around all by itself. He careened around bashing into things, and we all just about died laughing. Keck said, “Matt is really funny, and he’s self-hating, and creative, and not afraid to make a fool of himself. He kind of likes it. And that’s the ingredients of a great comedian.”

Keck says, “If there was a person who created the Onion’s voice, it would be Matt Cook.”

As the Onion evolved, stories became more political.

Brian Stack MA’88, who later became a writer and performer with Second City, Conan O’Brien, and Stephen Colbert, started his performance career at the Ark Improv in Madison. He told me that Matt Cook was in the first show he ever saw there. Cook joined other interesting performers from that era, like Joan ’84 and Bill Cusack. And also, “Chris Farley, the late great Chris Farley,” was there, too, “with his bandana and his Marquette rugby jacket.” Cook says, “I was Chris Farley’s first director. I taught him everything he knew about comedy except for cocaine and hookers and booze, because he learned that stuff by himself.”

Stack praises Cook and his creative style. “Matt was one of the most original thinkers I’ve ever met. He would do very, very fun experimental things with the Ark that were very conceptual and weird in wonderful ways.”

One day, Keck and Johnson asked Cook to meet with them. “It was this baby-businessman thing,” Cook said. The calendar had been pretty successful, Keck and Johnson said. Now they wanted to do a newspaper. Cook asked them what kind of newspaper, and they said that’s why they’d invited him to the meeting. “So sitting there at that time, at that very meeting, I said, ‘How about we just make it all up? Have all made-up stories, but play it like it’s a real newspaper?’ ” Keck remembered that the Cardinal did an April Fools’ Day parody every year that was always really popular. “Well, I’m just gonna … do that,” he thought. The Onion would not be a real newspaper. It would be a comedic parody of one.

Keck and Johnson finally had their concept. They went to Reyer and Haise’s place and said, “Okay, we’re gonna unveil this thing. You’re sworn to secrecy.” (Their other roommate was Deidre Buckingham ’89, who became the photographer for the Onion in the first year. Buckingham, a skilled photographer and darkroom developer, told me that she had always wanted to be a photojournalist, but had flunked the skills test to get into UW’s journalism school because she couldn’t spell. The Onion became her outlet instead.)

Reyer says, “I didn’t even know them well enough to guess what it was. I was so sure it was gonna be lame.” They unveiled the concept and explained: “We’re gonna make up fake news. And people are going to believe it.”

They said it was going to be called the Onion, and Reyer said, “Please tell me that it isn’t like the onion has these deep layers of meaning. Is it just random?”

Johnson and Keck said, “It’s totally random. People will think it means something, but it doesn’t.”

“That was the beginning of it,” Reyer says. “And it actually was a big deal. It never felt like that at the time, though.” They asked Reyer if she wanted to help out, and she immediately said yes; she had a huge crush on Keck. She began selling ads, brainstorming, and eventually doing a little writing. Buckingham signed on, too.

Amy Reyer was born in New York City. When her family moved to Washington, DC, she attended the school Sidwell Friends. “It was a private school with some really smart kids,” she says. “And I did not feel like one of them.” For college, she wanted something completely different. “I thought, ‘I want to go to a Big Ten school. And I want to be anonymous.’ ”

Anonymity was important. Amy has a very famous older sister, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a Second City and Saturday Night Live alum who had been working in film and would soon be cast in a lead role on Seinfeld. Amy’s younger sister is actress Lauren Bowles. Amy, the middle child, said she was a theater kid too. “But it’s not what I wanted to do. I was good at it, but it’s not what I wanted to do.” She was also tired of being in a small place — her Sidwell class was only about a hundred people — as well as “sort of being labeled as a dumb blonde” there. “That sucked,” she says. “It really sucked. And UW–Madison, when I visited, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is so great. It’s, like, 85 percent blonde. Nobody will notice me. I’m just gonna be a regular person here.’ ”

Keck and Johnson asked Haise if he would sell ads. He said no. Though he used to do ad sales for the Cardinal, he was done with that. He had gotten fired from the Cardinal for skipping too many meetings. And he had other jobs now, including renting apartments and bartending. Whatever worked to keep him cruising. But after being asked “five times,” he finally caved, and within a few weeks he was the advertising manager.

Haise saw it as “rallying around a cause,” saying, “I never thought there could have been a better job.”

Haise was from Wauwatosa, a suburb of Milwaukee, a place for which he had great affection. His parents had divorced when he was young, and it may not have been a great time for him. Luckily, Haise was a very outgoing and social guy, and he had his hometown to give him a foundation even if his parents were not together. At the time, I saw him as this sort of surfer-dude Deadhead. According to Reyer, he was “baked all the time.”

The first issue of the Onion came out in the fall of 1988, with the front-page story “Mendota Monster Mauls Madison,” written by Matt Cook under the pseudonym Gunnar Downes (they wanted the most macho-sounding name possible), about a mythical lake monster named Bozho. The purposely blurry photo by Deidre Buckingham showed the head of the “monster” breaching the water. It was actually Tim Keck’s arm with a stocking over it; Photoshop had not been invented yet. (I remember seeing him at the office afterward and asking why he was all wet.) The rest of the issue was a pretty anarchic mix of stuff. Most of it was written in the week or two before the first issue came out. In addition to copyediting, I wrote occasionally that year too; in the first issue I have a little story of the sort that would later be called “flash fiction.” We also published a story by a creative writing friend of mine.

The issue included excerpts from the campus police blotter — gossipy content that people would want to read, but that you didn’t have to pay for. Lorin Miller ’90 and Sandra Schlies ’90 wrote soap-opera summaries, which turned out to be one of the main reasons people picked up the paper. To create some buzz before the first issue hit the streets, Keck and Johnson printed out stickers with the Onion’s name and the motto they’d invented, “Witty, Irreverent, and a Little Nasty,” and stuck them up around town.

Keck said, “And it was just a pile of crap. When I saw it, I was like, ‘This is really, really bad.’ But strangely, it was successful. Like, right off the bat.”

A student at Madison at the time, future Onion writer Joe Garden x’92, said, “I remember being kind of impressed by it because back in those days, you had the regular alternative weekly, you had the socialist weekly, you had the feminist weekly. You had a second socialist weekly. The music weekly. You had all these free papers everywhere. And the Onion, even as raw and primitive as it was with the ‘Mendota Monster’ issue, it stood out from the rest of them.”

In only 10 months, Keck and Johnson had made the Onion out of nothing into a highly popular campus presence.

Excerpted from Funny Because It’s True: How the Onion Created Modern American News Satire by Christine Wenc. Copyright © 2025. Available from Running Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.