We learned this week of the passing of Dr. Robert Kohl. The above photo was taken at Honors Convocation in 1993, when he was named Distinguished Faculty Member. Here is his obituary.

He joined the DC faculty in the fall of 1987, retiring in 2007. He taught economics and statistics. Here he is in 2003, counseling an incoming freshman at summer orientation:

A couple of my memories of Bob: when he was teaching class, you could hear him speaking from quite a distance down the hallway. And several times, by request, to liven up a faculty meeting, he would regale us with a dramatic recital from memory of the poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

In the early 1990s, he was an advisor to the Theta Xi fraternity.

Here he is in 1996 in the Hive in Hubbard Hall:

On his retirement in 2007, he was awarded the status of Professor Emeritus. Here’s a photo of that from the 2007 Commencement, with President Wood:

Dr. Bob Kohl will be sorely missed; condolences to his husband Roger and family.

Barb Sedlock

DC Archivist

June is when the summer orientation sessions for incoming freshmen start. Here’s some photos from past orientations within the last 10 years or so. The above is Buzz the mascot with one of our upperclassmen orientation leaders in 2023.

Here’s history professor Steve Bare counseling an incoming freshman about his academics in the coming year, also from 2023.

These are incoming freshmen during orientation in 2016, posing by the Pilgrim Library entrance with a sign saying “I’m going to Defiance College!” It may have been a sign given to them at orientation to take home and put in their yards for the summer.

These are upperclassmen orientation leaders posing by the college sign facing Clinton Street during orientation in 2016.

Here are four incoming freshmen posing for the camera in 2015 by the campus clock.

These students are likely playing some kind of icebreaker game during 2014 orientation. Hubbard Hall in background.

And this is probably an incoming freshman having his photo taken for his ID card during orientation in 2014.

We welcome the incoming Class of 2030 to campus this summer, and hope you enjoy your experience.

Barb Sedlock

DC Archivist

Did you notice the bee in the photo above? It’s not a yellow jacket like DC’s mascot, but this was as close as I could get. The bee was visiting the spring crocuses in campus flower beds in 2010.

Commencement is this week, and that’s the time of year when the campus is at its prettiest, with spring flowers and flowering trees. I’m posting some of the photos we have on the spring theme from the archives.

Sticking with the early spring flower theme, here is a picture from 2011 showing the very early spring flowers such as daffodils which were planted by the Peace Pole between Serrick and Defiance Hall:

Here is an array of tulips planted next to Hubbard Hall in 2013, with Serrick in the background:

This one is also from 2013, showing flowering trees near the Pilgrim Library at Commencement time:

Tulips are one of my favorite flowers, so I can’t resist another photo of those, from 2016, with Serrick in background again:

And lastly, flowering trees taken in 2023, as prospective students are being shown around campus on Preview Day:

I hope you enjoyed this taste of spring on the DC campus.

Barb Sedlock

DC Archivist

We learned yesterday of the death of Kathy Punches, DC’s former Director of Public Relations and Marketing. This photo of her above is from 1999. I believe she started at DC in the early 1990s.

Below is a photo of her speaking at the dedication of the Little Turtle statue in March of 2001, in front of the Pilgrim Library:

In her position as PR officer, Kathy was able to interact with celebrities who came to campus. Here she is below with CBS Sunday Morning reporter Martha Teichner, who came to do a story for that TV program on The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, a memoir by Terry Ryan about her mother Evelyn. DC awarded a posthumous honorary degree to Evelyn at Commencement in 2001, and Teichner came to film the ceremony and to interview Ryan that same day:

Here is the Commencement program from that event, and here is an article in the alumni magazine.

And here she is with Colonel Richard Seibel, who commanded the troops who liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria in May 1945:

Seibel was a Defiance native, and DC awarded him an honorary degree at the 1998 Commencement ceremonies. Here is the page from the program with Seibel’s biography.

Kathy worked for the Crescent-News before coming to DC, and was a DC alumna, then earned a Master’s Degree from University of Toledo. Kathy’s brother Jerry Hayes was a business professor at DC during the 1980s and 90s.

Here is Kathy with some of her staff in 2014:

I appreciated her help in the year or two after she left DC (believe that would have been 2018-19) in identifying photos for the Archives. Kathy will be missed.

Barb Sedlock

DC Archivist

March being Women’s History Month, it seems fitting that I should do another post about the Schauffler College scanning project, last talked about in the June 2025 post of this blog.

In 2024/25, several Defiance College students participated in a multi-stage grant project with Professor Kate Davis in scanning and describing early Schauffler College, and loading them into the Schauffler section of our DC Memory site.

Schauffler was a women’s college in Cleveland, started by Rev. Henry Schauffler in 1886, originally called the Slavic Bible Readers’ School, later Schauffler Missionary Training School, and eventually Schauffler College of Religious and Social Work. After Schauffler moved from Cleveland to Oberlin in 1954 and then closed altogether in the early 1960s, Defiance College received its assets and its extensive archives.

After the students and Davis got hundreds of documents scanned and sent to Ohio History Connection to be loaded into the Defiance College/Schauffler subsection of Ohio Memory, those documents had to be checked, the metadata edited, and then loaded into the database. Because I retired from full-time to part time in summer of 2025, it took me awhile to accomplish the loading. But I can now say that all of the documents that the students scanned during that 2024/25 project are available in DC Memory.

Researchers looking for primary sources on women’s and religious history in Ohio may find many useful items in this collection. Here’s an example of a profile of one of Schauffler’s graduates. The full document can be viewed in DC Memory:

Researchers interested in Cleveland history, especially eastern European immigrants to the city, will find primary source documents on Bohemian and Slavic peoples, and Schauffler’s work with those populations. Schauffler started out concentrating on Bohemians but expanded to additional immigrants groups, such as Poles, Bulgarians, Italians, etc. Here are two examples below:

I said in the headline “complete (for now),” because there are many more Schauffler documents waiting to be scanned, such as boxes of glass lantern slides with images from Schauffler’s history. Some of them were scanned during this project, but many more await. So if you look for documents in the Schauffler section of DC Memory and don’t find something you want, we may have the print original in the archives, not yet scanned. Contact us about access.

Professor Katie Phillips and some of the students from the project put together an exhibit on Schauffler College in the DC Women’s Commission Art Gallery, which has been extended to stay in the gallery through April 2026.

Barb Sedlock

DC Archivist