Tower Topics ~ Summer 2001

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October Alumni Reunion
will feature organ recital,
special posthumous award

Two Alumni Awards for Distinguished Service and a special posthumous award will be presented and alumnus Edwin Day (C89-91) will present an organ recital at the annual Conception Seminary College Alumni Reunion Oct. 4-5.

Honoree William Rucker, who attended Conception between 1958 and 1961, is a licensed counselor who specializes in marriage and family therapy in the Omaha area and gives of his time to help with Catholic charity work.

Also receiving an award is Father Polycarp Son, CMC. Father Polycarp, a member of the Congregation of Mary Co-redemptrix, serves as the order’s director of seminarians. He will receive the award on behalf of his community, which marks the 25th year of educating its members at Conception.

A special posthumous award will be presented to Father Emil Kapaun (pictured at right), commemorating the 50th anniversary of his death. Father Kapaun, a Wichita priest who attended high school and college at Conception, died in a Communist prison camp while serving as a military chaplain in the Korean War. He saved the lives of numerous men in combat and later went to heroic ends to feed, protect and comfort his fellow prisoners. Father Kapaun succumbed to starvation and pneumonia following seven months in prison. He was 35. The U.S. government awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross and the Bronze Star, and the Vatican declared him a “Servant of God,” the first step toward sainthood. He is the first person to receive a posthumous Alumni Award for Distinguished Service.

(There will be feature articles on all three award winners in the fall issue of Tower Topics.)

Reunion registration will begin Oct. 4 at 10 a.m., followed at 3 p.m. by Day’s organ recital. Day, who serves as music director at Christ the King parish in Oklahoma City, is an accomplished musician who received his master’s degree in organ performance from the University of Oklahoma and has won numerous state and regional organ competitions.

He was a finalist in the National American Guild of Organists competition in 1982 and in the Music Teachers National Association competition in 1981. In 1988 he accompanied Tulsa’s Holy Family Cathedral Choir in the Vatican’s Basilica of St. Peter.

He will play selections from Felix Mendelssohn, J.S. Bach, Louis Vierne, and Paul Hindemith, as well as the spiritual “Go Down Moses,” by Fela Sowande.

For more information on the Alumni Reunion, please contact Father Peter Ullrich at (660)944-2875, or by e-mail at alumni@conception.edu.

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