Today's Featured Biography
Alison Baker
Alison "Ali" Baker
After I graduated high school, I started at Penn State for the Summer term. Joanne Wixon and Joyce Warren both did the same. It was during the first weekend we were there that both of them met the men with whom they were to spend the rest of their lives. I didn’t.
I studied History and Political Science and graduated in three years. In my third year I met Dutch Boltz and we were married in December 1967. Dutch was a graduate student at Penn State, studying Biophysics. I became the wife who worked her husband through.
I held a series of clerical jobs and finally got one at Penn State that carried tuition benefits. I enrolled in the Master’s program in Public Administration and graduated in 1972. This credential qualified me for an analyst’s position in the University’s budget office, and so my career in higher education administration began.
My marriage broke up shortly after I graduated. Now, no longer being place-bound with a husband, I decided to find a better job somewhere else. I was hired at the University of New Hampshire as assistant vice-provost for budget, where I worked for two years. The university president resigned the day I started (not my fault), but there was a good deal of reorganization that followed that didn’t make me happy, so I again started looking for another job. I had only two criteria: I must be close to an ocean and my salary couldn’t be less than at New Hampshire. The University of Oregon met these criteria.
I had never been to Oregon. I did not know a soul there. It struck me as enormously funny that the University’s mascot was a duck. But I landed on my feet, moving within two years from a budget-analyst’s position in the system office to being the associate dean of fiscal affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences. I really loved this job, and stayed at it for eight years.
While there, one of the deans for whom I worked encouraged me to get a doctorate, and I decided that instead of a research-oriented degree, I would go to law school. UO had a tuition program for employees, so my law degree cost me $84 plus books.
I graduated from law school in 1985, and immediately after that, the University president asked me to become his chief of staff. I loved this job, too.
All this time I dated casually, a few times seriously, but it never was right to marry again until Roger Chickering and I started to take one another seriously. Roger was on the faculty in the History department at UO and we had known each other for years before we started dating. We were married in 1988.
Roger, too, had been married before, but he had two sons, Roger and Max, so I became a stepmother. Young Roger was in college when I started seeing his father, and Max was a junior in high school living with his mother, so I didn’t need to rear either of them. They both are very handsome, smart, and successful people. Now, each is married to a wonderful woman and each has two great kids. Step-grand mom; it is a wonderful role.
My husband, Roger, specializes in German History and travels to Europe regularly. I’ve been able to go with him many times, and I’ve even learned to speak a little German. We lived in Freiburg for the academic year 1991 -1992 and that was a wonderful experience. When we got back, Roger was offered a position on the faculty at Georgetown University that gave him the opportunity to work with graduate students and to be closer to the “action” in European history. So we left Oregon and moved to Washington, DC.
It took me a year to find a job, but I was finally appointed to the staff of Georgetown’s fund-raising unit. I stayed there for two years, until I was offered a job in finance at American University. Then, after two more years, the job of my dreams came to me. I became vice president for finance and administration at Northern Virginia Community College (AKA NOVA). NOVA is a big deal. It had five campuses (six when I left) and over 60,000 students. Running it was a major but satisfying challenge. I stayed eleven years.
My parents celebrated their 50th anniversary in 1990 by taking their three children and their spouses on a Caribbean cruise. We all loved it, and all of us became frequent cruisers after that. Roger and I like both ocean and river cruises, and we’ve seen much of the Europe and the Americas by ship or boat. Asia is still on the list.
In 2008, Roger had a number of great opportunities, which when put together, allowed us to live in Europe again for 18 months. We spent five months in Florence, Italy, and then moved to Berlin for a year, spending lots of time traveling in between. Again, that was simply wonderful, but to do it, I had to retire early. No brainer.
My mother died at 84 in 2001. My father died in 2008, while I was in Italy. He was 93.
Roger and I always knew we wanted to retire in Oregon. Both Roger’s sons live on the west coast and we have many friends from our time at the University. We bought a lot, directly on the ocean, back in 2000, and started the building process in 2007. Don’t talk to me about architects, but the house was completed in January 2011, and we’ve lived in South Beach, Oregon, ever since.
We have a dog, Lola, who takes us on long walks every day. I work in the garden and we travel quite a lot, especially this year. This is the 100th anniversary of World War I, a topic about which Roger knows a great deal. He is in demand on the lecture circuit, and I tag along much of the time.
Now, I am working hard to make our 50th reunion a reality and a real blast!
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