Inside Michael Toth's ('79) Global Quest to Reveal Secrets of Historic
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FEEDING SOULS (AND HIMSELF) IN NOLA / ESPRIT DE PEACE CORPS / HELLO, ROOMMATE! MAGAZINE WAKEFALL 2011 FOREST Inside Michael Toth’s (’79) global quest to reveal secrets of historic treasures THE MAGAZINE OF WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY 2 OPERATION ARCHIMEDES By Mark Schrope (’93) Propelled by curiosity and technology, FEATURES Michael Toth (’79) is relentless in his quest to expose hidden history. 10 32 ROOMMATES THE MAN WHO ATE NEW ORLEANS By Maria Henson (’82) By Kerry M. King (’85) One said ‘Hello, Roommate,’ and the To understand New Orleans, says Ray other said ‘Hello, Roommate,’ and it Cannata (’90), you must understand its food. has been that way ever since. Call him an expert. 14 36 CELEBRATING 50 YEARS: LATIN AMERICA? SI. PRO HUMANITATE AND By Kerry M. King (’85) THE PEACE CORPS From Nicaragua to Argentina, the By Cherin C. Poovey (P ’08) University extends its global footprint They volunteered to change lives, to countries due South. and in the process, found their own lives changed immeasurably. 72 22 CONSTANT & TRUE By Marcus Keely (’10) TEACHING IT FORWARD By Lisa Kline Mowry (’82) A sense of direction in the Age of Uncertainty. Undergraduate days at Wake Forest inspired a career in the classroom for eight alumni professors. DEPARTMENTS 38 | Around the Quad 42 | Highlights from The Homestead 45 | Philanthropy 48 | Class Notes FROM theh PRESIDENT This edition of Wake Forest FALL 2011 | VOLUME 59 | NUMBER 1 Magazine introduces readers to an array of professors from universities large and small ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT AND EDITOR-AT-LARGE Maria Henson (’82) who share common ground in their intellectual journeys. EDITOR Cherin C. Poovey (P ’08) They earned undergraduate SENIOR EDITOR degrees at Wake Forest, where Kerry M. King (’85) faculty-student mentoring has DEPUTY EDITOR been a long-honored tradition, Janet Williamson (P ’00, ’03) one that I seek to foster. A spark of their life’s work can be traced back to Wake CREATIVE DIRECTOR Forest and an inspirational faculty. Hayes Henderson DESIGNERS At Wake Forest we want faculty with a certain set of gifts — people who love the Julie Helsabeck Kris Hendershott life of the mind and are intellectually curious. For some people that alone is PHOTOGRAPHER their passion. We ask for more. We want someone who has a keen interest in Ken Bennett learning and who has a deep satisfaction when he or she can turn the light bulb STUDENT INTERN on for others and entice them toward a life of discovery. When I was an under- Hannah Kay Hunt (’12) graduate at Wheaton College in Illinois, I had a Greek classics teacher, the late PRINTING Gerald Hawthorne, who did that for me. Greek could be as dry as dust when we The Lane Press, Inc. were conjugating verbs, but Hawthorne’s outlook toward life — his genuine interest in students — was so compelling that he stood out as a model of what a professorial life could be. He took an interest in me. He would pose questions Wake Forest University Magazine (ISSN 0279-3946) is published three times a year in the Spring, Summer about what I was thinking, and he did the same with many others. He was and Fall by Wake Forest University, P.O. Box 7227, deeply curious, and his interests and his engagements ranged much broader Winston-Salem, NC 27109-7227. It is sent to alumni, than the mere content of his courses. He was simply terrific. donors and friends of the University. [email protected] The world needs great research institutions, where many professors are at the magazine.wfu.edu twitter.com/wfumagazine top of their field because they have devoted themselves intensely and almost facebook.com/wakeforestmagazine exclusively to the life of the mind. Such is the default position of the Academy. Many of those institutions’ scholars are passionate about students, but many of Send address changes or cancellation requests to: Wake Forest Magazine Alumni Records them are not. I do not think such an approach is Wake Forest’s central calling P.O. Box 7227 — not for our undergraduate college. It is both Wake Forest’s tradition and its Winston-Salem, NC 27109-7227 [email protected] future for professors, alongside their research, to regard teaching as a passion. 1.800.752.8567 Throughout the magazine you will see Wake Forest at is best. Michael Toth (’79) © 2011 exemplifies the vast possibilities open to a graduate steeped in the liberal arts. You will read about enduring friendships, including a tribute I wrote honoring my friend Porter Byrum (JD ’42), a private person who never toots his own horn. He recently gave Wake Forest its biggest gift from an individual, with the lion’s share meant for financial aid for students. I hope this issue of the magazine reminds you of college friendships that endure and cherished professors who lit the fire of discovery in you. Warm regards, On the cover: Michael Toth (’79) has embarked on a historic effort to uncover secrets in the Archimedes Palimpsest manuscript. Photo by Mark Schrope A cultural sleuth, Michael Toth (’79) travels the world to examine rare documents with sophisticated digital imaging to reveal original texts 2 WAKE FOREST MAGAZINE FEATURES OPERATION ARCHIMEDES Inside Michael Toth’s global quest to reveal secrets of historic treasures By Mark Schrope (’93) FALL 2011 3 The Bedouins spoke of them as “The Five.” They had come to the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt, to the remote St. Catherine’s Monastery, and they did stick out a bit. They had crossed the desert with a strange load of equipment described with some creativity to customs officials, they were American, and one of them stood 6’8” tall. The team was there on a technological aid mission of sorts, aiming to digitize the pages of ancient manuscripts for preservation, and to reveal secret texts hidden for centuries. They were hoping that the men outside the monastery, the ones from the Egyptian government speaking Arabic into walkie-talkies, weren’t going to interfere. This desert sojourn was the latest in a string of He went to work for the Foreign Broadcast Information adventures in history that began in 1999 when Michael Service, a non-secret branch of U.S. intelligence that Toth (’79), the tall one, offered his services to a once monitored publicly available news in regions museum group embarking on an unprecedented study. around the globe. Youngsters will have to imagine a They were about to analyze one of the oldest known world where you couldn’t get nearly every piece of news copies of works by famed scientist and mathematician available on the planet from a device that fit in your Archimedes, who lived in the third century B.C. pocket. You had to work for it, and that’s what Toth did. Photo courtesty of Michael Toth The service needed well-rounded people who could follow a wide range of topics, and Toth’s liberal arts studies at Wake Forest helped convince them he could do it. He would end up managing teams of translators and technicians in Central America, Southeast Asia and Southern Africa. “It was the best job in the world. We listened to the radio, watched television and read newspapers,” he says. “We just had to do it all at the same time.” Eventually, he shifted to working on satellites for NASA and the Department of Defense, even supporting a classified space shuttle mission in 1989, which meant a welcome chance to spend time in Florida, where he Toth in 2009 at Egypt’s Janub Sinai Mountains grew up. By 1999 he was the policy director for the surrounding St. Catherine’s Monastery National Reconnaissance Office, a secretive surveillance branch of the U.S. government. Taking part in such a project wasn’t an obvious extracurricular path for Toth, but it wasn’t a bad That year, 1999, also marked the beginning of the fit either. Arriving at Wake Forest in 1975, Toth historic effort to study a remarkable, if decidedly (pronounced like “oath”) began as a biology student, unattractive and moldy, handwritten book now but he shifted to history after realizing he didn’t want known as the Archimedes Palimpsest, or “Archie.” An to spend the money or time it would take to go on to anonymous donor known only as Mr. B had just picked graduate school and become a scientist. “I wanted to get it up at auction for $2 million, and he intended to pay out in the world,” he says. And that he did, quite literally. for an advanced analysis of the manuscript’s pages. 4 WAKE FOREST MAGAZINE FEATURES When Toth, who lives in Virginia, read about the project Archimedes’ works were foundational in mathematics, in The Washington Post, he contacted Will Noel, the physics and engineering. curator overseeing the project at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Toth suggested that he might be able to help In 1229 A.D., Archie ran into some troubles. Animal with Archie’s advanced imaging thanks to his experiences hides were in short supply, and a priest needed a new handling satellite imagery for the intelligence community prayer book. This seemed more important at the time and his connections among scientists and technicians than the Archimedes text, which he scraped away to who conduct such work. Noel and Mr. B liked the idea so scribe his new book. Pages thus recycled are known much that Toth became the project manager. collectively as a palimpsest. In its original form, produced centuries after Archimedes’ The entire history isn’t clear, but in 1899 Archie was death, Archie was a 10th century A.D., handwritten copy in Jerusalem, in the possession of the Greek Orthodox of seven of Archimedes’ most important works in the Church.