Osher Map Associates Elect Directors, Honor Founders

Community and business leaders have been elected as members of the Osher Library Associates, a citizens’ organization formed in 1989 to support USM’s Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Information.

Elected to their first three-year terms were Theo H.B.M. Holtwijk of Portland, the director of planning and development for the town of Brunswick, and Edward A. Sziklas of Camden, a retired chief scientist for the Corporate Research Center of United Technologies Corporation.

Elected as returning members were civic leaders Sumner and Rosalyne Bernstein of Portland; Thomas Moser of Auburn, president of Thomas Moser Cabinetmakers; and Dr. Harold L. Osher of Portland.

Officers elected at the meeting held earlier this fall were President William Browder of Freeport, a lawyer with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Maine; Vice President Mary P. Nelson of Falmouth, director of development at Cedars Nursing Care Center; Secretary-Treasurer Alf Jordan of Yarmouth, a retired surgeon; and Recording Secretary David Hutchings of Gorham, a retired teacher and faculty research associate at Rutgers University.

The board also granted honorary life memberships to three individuals for outstanding contributions to the organization. The three honorees are Alf Jordan of Yarmouth, Harry R. Pringle of Portland and Marvin Sadik of Scarborough.

A graduate of Yale College and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Jordan trained in plastic surgery in Cleveland, his hometown. After practice in Iowa, he retired to Maine in 1985. Jordan is a founding member of the Associates and has served as its secretary-treasurer since its inception.

Pringle joined the Portland law firm of Drummond Woodsum and MacMahon in 1973 and now heads the firm’s Public Sector Group. He has represented private and public sector employers throughout Maine, and has handled school law cases before Maine courts. Pringle, a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, is the president of the Board of the Children’s Museum of Maine, and is founding director and president of the Osher Library Associates.

Sadik, a founding member of the Osher Library Associates, has served as director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the founding director of the University of Connecticut Museum of Art, and director of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. A graduate of Harvard, he holds an honorary doctorate from Bowdoin and was awarded a Knighthood of the Order of Dannebrog by the Kingdom of Denmark.

The Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education is located on the first floor of USM’s Glickman Family Library, Portland. It is the only separately established rare maps library in northern New England, and, according to Ronald E. Grim, head of the Reference and Bibliography Section at the Library of Congress in Washington, one of not more than a dozen historical cartographic collections in the country that are accessible to the public.

The cartographic collections were formed from the major gifts of Harold L. and Peggy L. Osher, and from the late Lawrence M.C. and Eleanor Houston Smith. Other gifts from several individual donors, notably Professor Peter H. Enggass and Tony Naden, have augmented the collections to the point where they feature 60,000 maps, as separate sheets or bound in books and atlases. The collections include a 1493 copy of a letter by Christopher Columbus, a 1475 hand-colored map of the Holy Land, a 1614 map of New England featuring the only known portrait of Captain John Smith, and a land survey by George Washington.

For more information, contact the Osher Map Library at 780-4850 http://usm.maine.edu/maps.