This week’s Project 100+ memory comes from Lynn Creamer Borstelmann.  She was born in Madison, Wisconsin. She spent her first six months in Madison while her father, Professor Marvin Creamer, worked on his doctorate. After this, the family returned to Glassboro where she spent the rest of her youth. Lynn’s mother was mostly a homemaker, but she taught English and reading for three years at Glassboro Intermediate School when Lynn was in third, fourth, and fifth grades. Lynn believes that this was done mostly for financial reasons. During this time, Florence Bland worked for her parents. Her father knew her as she was on staff at the College, and she was very helpful during this period. She did some light housekeeping duties and baking in addition to after school childcare for Lynn and her brother, Kurt. Lynn attended public schools, beginning with the Campus School, then Glassboro Intermediate School, and finally Glassboro High School, graduating in 1975, one year early. Lynn enrolled at Duke University in the Fall of 1975. She started out in the nursing program, but she switched and earned a bachelor’s degree in public policy with a focus on health policy. She graduated in the Spring of 1980. Her first job was for the North Carolina Student Rural Health Coalition where she was a community organizer and an administrative coordinator. After two years, she left the position and entered the nursing program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, finishing in 1984 with a BSN. She then took a position on an oncology unit in a hospital in Durham. While in this position, she impressed one of her supervisors who recruited her to develop a hospice program in a rural county south of Durham. This program combined her interests in health policy, community organizing for health, and oncology and hospice nursing, and this type of work became the foundation of her career going forward. For the next four years, Lynn focused on hospice care in North Carolina. Deciding that she needed more training, especially in cancer, she pursued a master’s degree at the University of Washington. By this time, she was married to Tim (Thomas) Borstelmann, a graduate student at Duke University. Together, they moved to Seattle where Lynn finished in 1990, the same year that Tim finished his PhD in history. They soon moved to Ithaca where Tim had landed a position at Cornell University. Beginning in 1992, she took a variety of jobs in the Syracuse area in home health, oncology, and hospice, eventually becoming Director of Continuum of Care for the State University of New York Upstate Medical Center. In 2003, Lynn and Tim moved to Nebraska where Tim took an endowed professorship at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Lynn spent the next 20 years of her career at Nebraska Medicine, the clinical facility affiliated with the University of Nebraska Medical Center hospital in Omaha. She worked there in the cancer division for nine years as the Director of Oncology Services, but she became increasingly interested in health information technology and Informatics. She pursued a doctorate in nursing practice from the University of Minnesota, incorporating informatics coursework funded by the federal government, and earned her degree in 2016. For the last ten years of her administrative career, she worked in health IT and informatics as electronic medical records and other technology systems became more integrated into healthcare, retiring as Executive Director for Care Design & Innovation and System in 2023 at Nebraska Medicine. She continues teaching graduate students finance, economics, and informatics in the leadership and DNP programs for the UNMC College of Nursing as a part-time assistant professor. Lynn and Tim have two sons, John (a professional cyclist) and Dan (a software engineer who leads a start-up). 

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Some of my favorite memories of my father come from when he taught me to read. My mother and father realized that I was capable of reading at a very early age. So, at age three, my father began to teach me to read with flashcards. This time with my father remains precious in my memory. When I started Campus Elementary school, I was already such a good reader that they did not know what to do with me and brought in a reading specialist from the college to evaluate my abilities. They ended up adjusting my classes to compensate for my advanced reading skills.

I was five and a half years younger than my sister, Andi. So, my memories of my father and his role at the College are different and later than hers. The college was growing and so was the community. One of my early memories of my father’s life in the Social Studies Department involved the wedding of Janice Robb Biddle, the Department’s administrative assistant, who was close to my dad. I was impressed by the big wedding in a Catholic church in Glassboro, and looked up to Janice as a bride, especially her dress and the flowers she carried. It seemed very glamorous to an impressionable young girl. My family knew Janice not only through her role in the Department but through her mother, who taught swimming lessons to children in the Ridge neighborhood. Swimming lessons were very important to my mother. When she was a teenager and working at the hotels in Atlantic City as a waitress to earn money for college at Glassboro State, she had a scary experience. She was taken out into the ocean by a riptide and had to be rescued by boat. From then on, she was religious about swimming lessons. She took us swimming all the time and even took us to the indoor pool on the campus year-round. We loved that. I also had lessons in the lakes of Minneapolis when my dad did summer course work at the University of Minnesota in 1967 and at UCLA in 1968 when he was studying there. 

Another thing that was very important to my mother was music. Being so close to the College was important for this as well. All of us kids ended up learning to play instruments and Kurt and I sang as well. Andi’s clarinet teacher was Clarke Pfleeger who was on faculty. Kurt’s trumpet teacher was John Thysen, also a faculty member. I learned piano, but I took private lessons for this, not from a faculty member. However, Kurt and I always participated in a summer music camp at the College. All three of us Creamer children were very involved in music at church and all through high school and beyond. I later made my children take lessons as well.

Even though I did not choose to go to Glassboro State for my undergraduate degree, I was still influenced by the college in many ways. In addition to the swimming pool, another place on campus that I used often was Savitz Library. I went there all the time for book reports and research. Glassboro High School also allowed students like me to take classes at Glassboro State College. I took two logic classes with Al Shaw. I don’t think we had to pay for these classes. I can’t remember if this was true for all high school students or something special because my father was a faculty member. In any event, I was very empowered by this experience because I got A’s in both classes. Overall, I think that being a faculty kid living in Glassboro was empowering. I had the opportunity and privilege to interact with many other faculty children, especially through the Campus School. These relationships not only proved to be enduring friendships, but I believe that having such intelligent and capable children as friends and peers mattered to my future abilities and confidence. Their families were also committed to education. Living in Glassboro gave me exposure to many positive female role models. Not only were there female teachers and faculty members role models, there were also women who were otherwise employed in various roles on the campus. The wives of faculty members were also educated and lived lives of meaning and impact that were influential for me. One of these women that I remember looking up to was Doris Jensen, wife of Ivar Jensen. She was professional and stylish and had a significant role in the community, though I can’t exactly remember what. I felt similarly about Cleo Zimmerman, the wife of Don Zimmerman. These women lived in our neighborhood and their daughters were my neighborhood friends.  

I only went to my father’s office on campus on rare occasions, however, we enjoyed visiting when the opportunity arose. Most of the faculty that I knew well were those ones who visited our house, that we visited in their homes, or who lived in the neighborhood. Jerry Lint was one of these members of the Social Studies Department with which my parents socialized. Another one of the faculty that I remember well was biologist Musty Hussain. He was a frequent visitor to our home during one stretch of time. Ivar Jensen became very interested in my father’s sailing hobby, and he came over often, eventually joining my father on a no-instruments trip to Europe. Dick Zahn was also a pal of my dad’s and interested in sailing. His son, Dave, also went to Campus Elementary. Beverly and Wade Currier were two other friends of my parents. Wade was also in the Social Studies Department, and his daughter, Marilyn, was close in age to me and my brother. 

We had a really big family adventure that was related to Dad’s teaching at the college. In 1965 our family, along with the family of faculty member Robert Renlund, took a summer trip to Alaska. We drove across Canada on the ALCAN highway which was gravel at that time. We had a Fan travel trailer and Ford galaxy. We communicated with the Renlunds by CB radios in the car which was very cool for us kids. I was 7. Andra was 12, Kurt was 6. The Renlunds had 3 girls also at Campus School—Bridget (Andra’s class); Beth; and Robin (my class). I was imprinted with the snow capped mountains and prefer mountain terrain to this day (we are retiring to Colorado). I loved everything about the trip and it made a huge impact on my love of the outdoors. My dad took photos for his future classes in physical and economic geography and we children were featured in many photos for size comparisons. We went to some unusual locations for a vacation--such as a fish packing plant, a pulp mill, and an aluminum smelter—but we also saw wildlife, national parks, rivers, forests, and mountains. 

One of the things that I remember was that my father was involved with later was the launch of the King Scholars Program at Glassboro State College.   can’t remember the specifics, but I know he was very supportive. I remember that he took the King Scholars on a trip where they walked across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge and I joined the group for the experience. I can’t remember why we did this, but it was somehow connected to teaching geography.

In 1970, when I was 12 years of age, my father bought his first sailboat. For the previous two years, he had been moving in this direction. In fact, I think he taught extension courses in Ocean County in the summer to both raise money for his sailboat and also to spend time with his mother who lived in a small cottage in Avalon during the summer. After he bought this sailboat, he was gone every summer and generally less involved in campus affairs than he was at the beginning of his career when he was involved in so much! Until he retired in 1977, his role on campus slowly declined. When he got his first sailboat, he was still chair. He did this for a number of years, and he still continued teaching of course. In fact, for efficiency, he even hired my brother and I to grade the multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank sections of his exams.  Nevertheless, my memory is of sailing taking up more and more of his time, with some of that time coming out of what he had previously dedicated above and beyond at the College. While I think that his passion for sailing was the main pull factor for him, I think he was also ready for a new and different challenge beyond the confines of the college that he had been involved with since his undergraduate days. 

Before becoming a sailor, my father had owned a motorboat, and I loved the speed of flying through the water, so different than sailing. I was looking forward to water skiing and beach time when I was a teenager. However, his focus shifted to sailing. This was less exciting for me, and I also found out that I was more prone to getting seasick than I realized. In fact, this ended up having a very sad impact on my opportunity to sail with my dad to Bermuda when I graduated from high school. I was looking forward to going on a long trip with him just like my sister had and my brother would do later. On the second day of the trip, I was so sick that my father turned around, and I never got to go on an extended trip with him. Nonetheless, we sailed regularly on a small boat (Globestar II) in Bogue sound together in NC after he moved there in 2003. He also steered the motorboat and managed the motor when my husband taught me to ski as an adult and also when our sons learned as children. 

Unlike my older sister who left for college before my father became so focused on sailing, his obsession peaked during my high school years. This meant that he spent less time with his family and me. This caused some strain between us for a number of years. However, this strain never led to any kind of estrangement. One great memory that I have of the two of us took place in Baltimore, Ireland. My father was preparing for his later trip around the world by sailing across the Atlantic without instruments. I was in England for a Duke University summer program at Oxford’s New College. My mother sent me a telegram to Manchester, England (No cell phones!  No internet!) to tell me that, based on a sighting of my father’s boat in the Atlantic, he would arrive in Ireland in ten days. My mother was very good at predicting the arrivals and speed of my father’s sailing, so I took off to visit him. I took trains, ferries, and buses as far as I could, but it was a Sunday, and I could not get all the way to Baltimore. So, I hitchhiked the last 10 or 20 miles. When I arrived, I found his boat in the docks, but he was not on the boat. I thought for a minute, and I figured he was in a local pub regaling locals with tales of his travels even though he didn’t drink beer or any alcohol (could be why he lived to 104?).  Sure enough, I found him at the first pub I entered. I remember that the patrons were absolutely stunned that this young woman (I was 21) had somehow travelled all the way to Baltimore and arrived so close to the time of her father who had been sailing across the Atlantic. In any event, we had a warm reunion.

After my father passed, I helped with the process that led to the publication of Sailing by Starlight. My father had written a full manuscript, but it was too technical for mainstream presses. I found an author through a friend, and my siblings and I worked with Rod Scher and a publishing company so that my father’s dream of his story being in print could be realized.

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This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100+,” an ongoing collection of memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff that began as part of the celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University.  Due to interest in the project, the number of interviewees continues to grow.  Thanks to Laurie Lahey for helping proofread and edit the final versions.  Email carrigan@rowan.edu with questions or corrections.  You can find the Link to all of the Project 100 and Project 100+ entries on the Web:  https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_all/project_100+.html