UMFK to give awards in conjunction with annual commencement

FORT KENT – Awards and ceremonies are on tap at the University of Maine at Fort Kent in the next two weeks.

The big day will be Saturday, May 11, when the 120th commencement ceremonies will be held for 240 graduates at 1 p.m. in the UMFK SportsCenter.

Gov. Angus King will deliver the commencement message.

Before commencement, the nursing division will have a pinning ceremony for 10 UMFK graduates at 6 p.m. Tuesday, May 7, in the Nadeau Hall Conference Room at UMFK. Nadine Lamoreau, a nurse educator at The Aroostook Medical Center at Presque Isle, will be the keynote speaker.

Michael and Diane Bresset of Van Buren will be presented the UMFK Family Award during commencement ceremonies, only the second time in UMFK’s 124-year history that the award has been presented.

They also will be attending the graduation of their daughters Jessica, 24, Rebekah, 23, and Melissa, 21, who will receive degrees in nursing and behavioral sciences.

The three Bressets will be the last three of 10 immediate family members who have received degrees from UMFK. The lineup started with Michael Bresset Sr., who acquired a bachelor’s degree in education in 1983.

Since then, nine others, including his wife, six children, a daughter-in-law and son-in-law have acquired degrees from UMFK. Eight have earned bachelor’s degrees, four in nursing and four in the social science field, since 1997.

Over the years, members of the Bresset family have taken more than 400 courses and logged hundreds of thousands of miles on their vehicles to get to school in Fort Kent from Van Buren, an hour away.

The entire family still lives in Van Buren, and they work at many sites in northern Aroostook County.

The only other family ever to receive the UMFK Family Award was the Hermel and Irene Martin family of St. Francis in 1990, when the 12th of their 13 children received a degree from UMFK.

A second award to be presented at the ceremony, the UMFK Service Award, will go to Marc Chasse, 64, a French cultural advocate and retired chiropractor. The award is presented to a recipient who has rendered service to the campus, the community, the St. John Valley, Aroostook County and the state of Maine.

Chasse started a chiropractic office in Fort Kent in 1962 and retired in 1998. Three of his sons and two brothers followed him into the profession.

Chasse remains a member of, and was president of the Maine Chiropractic Association, and served on the Maine Board of Chiropractic Examiners from 1972 to 1979. He also is a member of the International Chiropractic Association. In 1993, he was honored as Maine’s Chiropractor of the Year.

He is a member and past grand knight of the Knights of Columbus at Fort Kent, has been a member of the Fort Kent Lions Club since 1965, was a director of the Fort Kent Area Chamber of Commerce, a former member of the SAD 27 board of directors, a founding member and former president of the Fort Kent Golf Club and was named Fort Kent’s Citizen of the Year in 1993. He is a director and videographer for WFKT-TV, a local channel.

Chasse is the president and a member of Le Club Francais, a regional organization dedicated to preserving and promoting the French language. He was instrumental in revitalizing the Fort Kent Historical Society and was its president from 1986 to 1990. He became the first president of the Maine Acadian Heritage Council in 1997.

The family of Duane “Buzz” Fitzgerald, the former president of Bath Iron Works and a native of St. John Plantation, will accept a posthumously awarded honorary degree of humane letters in his name. The award had been approved by the University of Maine System board of trustees before Fitzgerald’s death.

Along with heading the Maine shipbuilding company from 1988 to 1991, Fitzgerald was founding chairman of the American Shipbuilding Association. He also was the first chairman of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court’s advisory committee on professional responsibility, on the advisory board of the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College, a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, and was first chairman of the Maine Jobs Council.