Nashville and Vanderbilt benefitted when Malah Tidwell returned to her hometown nine years ago. An administrative assistant with the College of Arts and Science’s development and alumni relations office, she takes care of alumni, students and colleagues with a loving hand. “Malah is the heart and soul of the Arts and Science development team,” says Jonathan Petty, associate dean for development and alumni relations. “She always goes above and beyond in her work … no job is too big for her. She is a go-to and get-it-done-right person.”

Meggie Butzow, BA’06, who interned for four years under Tidwell’s guidance, fondly recalls their relationship. “She presented me with all kinds of projects that helped me learn about and understand the general purpose of development. She was never anything but supportive, kind and understanding through it all,” Butzow says. “She understood the constraints that school and classwork sometime put on me, and always made it clear that school was the priority. She really became a second mom to me.”

You’re a native Nashvillian?

I was born and raised in Nashville, and went to Antioch High School. We moved out there in ’56. My mother still lives in the same house. 

My husband, Leon, and I left on our honeymoon and moved to Worcester, Mass., outside of Boston. We stayed a year and a half and decided the weather was not for us. 

We moved back to Nashville, lived in Dickson for a while, and then moved to Montgomery, Ala., where we lived for about 14 years. We had always thought that we’d like to live further south. We knew some people in Montgomery, visited, and we thought we’d try it. And we loved it. Loved it. It was quite an adventure. I remember going through Hurricane Opal, which came up as far as Montgomery. The reason I came back to Nashville was because my husband passed away, my parents were aging, both my children were married, and I felt it was just time to come home. I’ve been back now nine years.

How long have you worked at Vanderbilt?

I have worked here a little over eight years. After my husband passed away, I moved back to Nashville and worked for J.C. Bradford. Then it was sold and I came to work at Vanderbilt in student accounts. I worked there for a year, and then was hired in development and alumni relations for the College of Arts and Science. 

What would most people be surprised to learn about you?

I once took belly dancing. That would surprise people. When my husband was alive, we had a sailboat that we called “Coupon Annie” because I was always clipping coupons; my brother-in-law wanted to know if that was how we bought it.

Other than that, I’m a pretty open book. I enjoy plays and reading. My sister and I like to go the movies and theater, and just out.

We saw The Country Wife at Vanderbilt and have tickets already for Always, Patsy Cline at the Ryman. I’ve seen it twice. We saw it in Nashville when it was here and then we went to Roanoke, Va., to visit my brother and it was playing there. We are big fans of Mandy Barnett. We saw her when she did it a few years ago and that’s when we just fell in love with her. She becomes Patsy. 

My sister, Wanda, and I do a little bit of traveling together. Last spring Wanda and I took our parents to Natchez, Miss., for a few days, and as we were driving on the Natchez Trace close to Tupelo, we went through a tornado. 

What else do you do in your spare time?

Most of my time is spent with my four grandchildren. My son, Barry, has three children and my daughter, Margaret, has one child. The oldest is 7 and the youngest is a year. They light up my life. The older three will come and stay with me over the weekend, and we enjoy going to the park and zoo. They’re the most special things in my life. They keep me going and keep me busy. 

Do you have a favorite alumni event?

The last two years, I’ve worked with the Reunion office in the hospitality tent. It’s always nice to see the people and help them in any way we can. It’s excitement. Old friends will see each other and stop right where they are and congregate, saying “Do you remember this? Have you seen so-and-so? Is so-and-so coming?” Things like that.

Do you find you become close to alumni?

Yes, I do. I talk to them often. I assist with the Board of Visitors that we have for Arts and Science. We have been having two meetings a year and it is always a joy to work with them. We’ll have dinner the night before and then meetings the next day. The people really seem to appreciate it and are excited to find out what’s going on at Vanderbilt.

How much interaction do you have with students?

I usually have work-study students in the office. It’s something they need as well as something we need, so it’s a nice combination. I’m on the third year with the one I have now. I like to get freshmen and keep them four years. I’ve been fortunate enough to have ones that have been very serious about their studies and about their futures.

We’ve heard you like to cook. Do you have a specialty?

I like comfort food. I have a soup they ask me to bring every time we have a potluck lunch at work—lemon chicken artichoke soup. Everyone seems to like that. At Christmas, I make Oreo balls, and they like those too.

His license plate proclaims “SAFTBOB.” That moniker conveys Bob Wheaton’s mission as Vanderbilt’s executive director of environmental health and safety, sustainability and environmental management. 

Is there a funny smell in Benson Hall? Wheaton and his staff of 34 want to know about it. Need a particular chemical for a physics experiment? Wheaton’s department has already catalogued and created a tracking system for 26,000 lab chemicals. What if the psychology department wants to up its commitment to going green? They’ve got it covered. Suppose a natural disaster happened during a football game? No worries—Wheaton’s team has helped create a safety plan. 

The native New Englander shrugs at the myriad, multiple moving parts of his domain and insists that focusing on the institution-wide picture while simultaneously dogging the details is just how it’s done. Safety Bob is on the job.

Where did Safety Bob get his start?

I was always interested in science. I had a professor in environmental toxicology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Every week he’d read to us the job ads and salaries in the field of industrial hygiene. I thought they sounded pretty good. After graduating I worked at Digital Equipment Corp. as an environmental chemist and then as an industrial hygienist.

After leaving Digital, I was assistant director of environmental health and safety at Harvard for six years before coming to Vanderbilt. That was 10 years ago, and Vanderbilt is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. 

Is there an initiative that you’re particularly proud of?

One of the things we do is help with clean-up in labs that are closing. These are important programs we’ve developed to assist researchers in moving, closing or relocating laboratories. In fact, we just helped move eight researchers from chemistry into new facilities at the Vanderbilt Institute for Chemical Biology in Medical Research Building IV.

Have you come across any surprises during those kinds of moves?

When Nobel Prize-winning professor Stanley Cohen was retiring, we found a plastic vial labeled “KCV.” We asked him about it and he said, “Oh, that’s king cobra venom.”

Once, early on a Sunday morning, we were removing some hazardous materials from the old Medical Center North dock. We roped off the area with yellow caution tape and had experts in to handle it properly and safely. We even had VUPD police officers there to help protect public safety. Then some guy walked up and tried to duck under the tape like nothing was going on. I guess he was going into his office to work. It’s always something.

After 10 years in Nashville, do you miss Boston?

Sure, I miss family and friends, but Vanderbilt’s a special place. It has a collegial atmosphere, and the people here really do want to do the right thing. I also miss going to Red Sox and Patriot games. So I go to Titans games instead.

So after the Super Bowl is over, what then?

I’m a golfer with a 13 handicap. My wife, Kathy, and I live on the 19th hole of a 27-hole course. We play every Saturday and Sunday and sometimes during the week. My friends say if there’s a golf infomercial [about a piece of equipment], I own it. That stuff helps my game. Sometimes.

And if you’re not on the golf course …?

I like photography and have a Nikon D300. I love that camera. It’s got the latest and greatest technology built in. I like to shoot environmental stuff—you know, whales breaching and celestial and weather events. My picture of a lightning strike is in the Vanderbilt calendar this year. I’m still waiting on a good tornado [shot]. During the last tornado I was in the closet with Kathy. I figured it wouldn’t look good for Vanderbilt if its safety director got killed while photographing a tornado.

Besides photography and golf, what else do you do?

I enjoy cooking and TiVo cooking shows such as Tyler’s Ultimate, Everyday Italian, America’s Test Kitchen and Down Home with the Neeleys.

My best dishes are pizza from scratch, spaghetti and meatballs, anything on the grill and smoking ribs. I do have to confess, though, that my secret food vice is rocky road ice cream.

Do you have a favorite book?

I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when I was in college. I really envied the imagination and writing style of Ken Kesey in being able to develop the characters and the storyline to not only entertain, but also to use symbolism to describe society in the 1950s.

Is there someone famous you wish you could meet?

My grandfather was a vaudeville magician. You’d have never heard of him, but he’d met Harry Houdini and I wish I could meet Houdini, too. Houdini could do miraculous things like escape from chains inside a safe in 40 feet of water. He could do things no one else could do. I’d ask him how he did it and why. It’s a safety thing, ya know?

“Norma Antillon is the glue that holds us together,” says Ted Fischer, professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies (CLAIS). “She is our public face, the person who shepherds students through the program. She knows where our alums are and what they’re doing, and through her, gives them a tight connection to the center. When alums call, they always ask about Norma.”

Antillon’s ebullient personality and willing spirit are her trademarks. The native of Guatemala doesn’t mention it, but she’s been known to help visiting scholars by personally paying their apartment deposits until their funding comes through. She has a large collection of letters, photos and cards from former students, who keep in touch with her long after they have graduated. The grandmother of 10 is the kind of woman who takes a homeless woman to lunch on a weekly basis. For Antillon, strangers are just people she has not yet transformed into friends. Her official title is administrative assistant, but it should be premier go-to person for the center.

How did you come to work at Vanderbilt? At CLAIS?

This is my second time at Vanderbilt. I came in 1958 with my husband who was pursuing a Ph.D. in biochemistry. After he received his degree, we went back to Guatemala. Later, after I was divorced, I sent my daughter to Nashville…I could get a visa to work and I came back. I heard about an opening in CLAIS and I’ve been here for 22 years.

What do you enjoy about your job?

I am privileged to work with faculty who are experienced in Latin America, speak Spanish, and several of them, Portuguese. Not only are they great academics, they are special, excellent people. The students are diverse, interesting, and they will be teaching and influencing young people to study and to care
for others. I have a lot of contact with the students and it keeps me young.

Spanish is your first language. How did you learn to speak English?

My father was the Guatemalan ambassador to Washington, D.C., so I went to the American School in Guatemala.

What do you like to do?

I love to travel. My first international travel was when I was only 17. I received a scholarship to a college in Briarcliff Manor, New York. That changed my life forever. Since then, I have traveled within the U.S. quite a bit and have been to Venezuela, Peru, Central America, Paris and Israel. I go to Guatemala every summer to see my son and his three children, and also my aunts who are in their 90s.

What do you like best about Nashville?

The region’s change of seasons, particularly fall, is one of my favorite things. Guatemala is called “the land of eternal spring.” We don’t have fall or the kinds of trees that flower and leaf out in the spring. I love to walk at Radnor Lake. The Vanderbilt campus is so beautiful, it’s like working in a park. Every day when I walk from the parking lot, I rejoice in the beauty of the campus. And I talk to the campus groundskeepers. They’re very nice people.

How do you spend your free time?

I love to go shopping at the Farmers’ Market. It’s an informal United Nations. And I visit my five grandsons in Franklin. They have a ping-pong table and my grandsons were surprised that I know how to play. But the youngest—he’s four-and-a-half—has been begging me to play soccer with him.

I’m always busy with my church. It’s very international—we have members from 12 Latin American countries. I’m a consejero (part counselor/part teacher). I help people who want to be baptized. I also teach a Sunday school class for older members and visit new members.

What’s the biggest difference between life here and in Guatemala?

In Guatemala, families live in the same city. Children go to college in the city where their families live, and they don’t leave their parents’ homes until they marry. That’s the kind of thing that holds families together, but you can’t do that in the U.S. because of the distances.

Are you still a citizen of Guatemala?

I couldn’t vote in Guatemala because I didn’t live there and I couldn’t vote in the U.S. because I wasn’t a citizen, so I became a U.S. citizen in 1996.

Do you like to read?

Yes. I love libraries. Also, what the Ph.D.s write about is incredible, but if you haven’t read the Bible, you’re really missing something. For many years, I read anything that came into my hands, but I never got anything out of it. Now I only read spiritual material. The last book I read was 90 Minutes in Heaven: A True Story of Death and Life by Don Piper.

Do you have a secret vice?

I’ve been watching The Young and the Restless soap opera for 10 years. We watch it at lunch in the copy room. I go home to Guatemala for three weeks every summer, and when I come back, I haven’t missed a thing on the show.

Do you plan to retire anytime soon?

Everyone keeps asking me when I’m going to retire. I keep asking God the same question. In the end, I think it’ll be technology that gets me out of here. Even my grandsons do things on the computer I don’t understand. At Christmas, my son gave me a combination telephone/answering machine. It had 60 pages of instructions. I told him to take it back. When I’m home, I just want a phone I can use by picking it up and saying “Hello?”

Photo by John Russell.