Fitness center to honor alumna Husson facility will be named for Clara Swan

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BANGOR – Adjusting her glasses, Clara Swan bent down to examine more closely the curious-looking contraption before her.

“Hmmm … what do you do on this, I wonder?” she said.

Swan may not be familiar with the latest weight-training equipment in Husson College’s new recreation center. But that doesn’t diminish in the least her excitement that the building is to be named for her Sunday, her 90th birthday.

“This is tremendous. I am really honored,” Swan said earlier this week during a tour of the soon-to-be-opened facility.

Vice president of Husson until she retired in 1973, Swan also served as business education teacher, academic dean and dean of women, as well as girls basketball coach.

Attached to the Newman Gymnasium, the $1 million Clara Swan Center is divided into two areas named for the project’s major donors, Richard Trott of Brewer, who graduated from Husson in 1965, and Hilda Hutchins McCollum of Bangor. Both serve on the school’s board of trustees.

The 4,000-square-foot Richard and Alice Trott Fitness Center features cardiovascular, aerobic and weightlifting equipment.

Across the hall is The Kenduskeag Institute, which contains a clinical and research facility. McCollum named the institute after the stream that flows by her home, Husson President William Beardsley said.

Although she has been taking snapshots of the construction progress since groundbreaking last fall, Swan said this was her first chance to tour the inside of the building. She beamed as she looked around the huge, mirror-lined exercise room filled with treadmills, Stairmasters and other apparatus.

“This means that kids don’t have to go downtown to pay to use equipment like this,” she said.

With Swan, it’s always the kids.

That’s why naming the center after her seemed entirely natural, said Julie Green, director of public affairs.

“She had a tremendous impact on 30 years of alumni. She knew everybody and she was famous for going that extra mile,” Green said.

If she heard through the grapevine that a student was considering dropping out, Swan would encourage him or her to stay, even loan money for tuition, Green said. No matter their problem, students knew the teacher, adviser and mentor was there for them.

“Go to Clara and she’ll clarify it,” Swan said kids would chant.

“I loved them all,” she said. “If a kid’s in trouble, it seems to me you’ve got to help them out.”

With her trim, upright figure, close-cropped gray hair and blue eyes bright behind gold-rimmed glasses, Swan looks nowhere near her age. Born in Princeton in 1912, Swan was valedictorian at Brewer High School in 1930 and at Husson College, then known as the Maine School of Commerce, in 1933.

In 1939, after teaching business classes at Mexico High School and Foxcroft Academy, she returned to Husson where she worked for 34 years.

Swan, whose duties at Husson included teaching physical education two mornings a week at the YMCA in downtown Bangor, said calisthenics, balance beam exercises, tumbling, basketball and softball comprised most of the activities.

“There was nothing like this,” she said, looking around the room in wonderment. “We never heard of this.”

Swan still is promoting physical fitness. Twice a week she leads exercise classes at the Ross Home in Bangor. “You’ve got to keep these older people moving,” she says, according to Richard Trott whose idea it was to name the center after Swan.

Swan has been inducted into the Bangor Daily News Sports Hall of Fame, the Husson College Sports Hall of Fame and Maine Sports Legends Hall of Honors. She received the Maine High School Coaching Association Award in 1992 and was named outstanding business education teacher in the state by the University of Maine.

Down the road, it is hoped that the fitness room will be open to the public, Green said.

Also rejoicing in the new building on Tuesday was physical therapy professor Ben Sidaway, who proudly showed off the Kenduskeag Institute’s human performance lab.

The facility contains state-of-the-art equipment so health and physical education students and faculty can study the effects of rehabilitation techniques, measure movement and cardiovascular function, and analyze athletic skills.

One piece of equipment can be used to help people with neurological damage, such as a stroke or a spinal cord injury, to relearn to walk.

The patient is supported in an upright position by a harness and then is lowered onto a treadmill. Recent research has shown that sensations of the moving treadmill can help the nervous system relearn the coordination necessary for walking, Sidaway said.

Future plans will allow for movement and cardiopulmonary assessment of patients in local hospitals and clinics, Sidaway said.

“There’s nothing like this in northern New England,” he said. Currently, area patients must travel to Boston or Connecticut for such advanced assessment techniques.

The ribbon cutting ceremony for the Clara Swan Center will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday, April 28.