Memory unlocked
When Jennifer Flanagan ’86 and husband Tom ’85 were on campus to move their son into his dorm for his freshman year, she had a secret second mission — to find a piece of art that, for all the research she had done in previous weeks, seemed to be lost for good.
Luckily, a random walk on campus that weekend solved the mystery.
A little backstory first: Flanagan started her college career at the University of California Santa Cruz, but a semester exchange to Durham in 1984 changed her life’s path: “Suffice to say I fell in love with UNH, never returned to California and never looked back either!” she says. She graduated with a degree in fine art and went on to enjoy a satisfying and successful career as a painter. “I have always credited my love of painting — and my success as an artist — to the years I spent at UNH under the tutelage of the legendary art professor John Hatch.”
Flash forward a bit to 2022, and Jennifer and Tom were planning their visit back to UNH so that son Huck ’26 could move onto campus and start practice as a member of the football team. Jennifer began thinking back to her time with Professor Hatch and about a mural she’d helped him paint as his assistant. She reached out to the art museum, but there was no record of the beloved mural, and “as so many years had passed, I couldn’t provide many other details that might help to track it down — a roadside fruit stand, some cars, a warm summer day were among the only visual details I could recall,” says Jennifer.
Who knew if the mural existed somewhere or had been painted over some time in the last 40 years, lost forever, she wondered. A melancholy thought, but the excitement of Huck starting as a freshman — even wearing his dad’s No. 81 on his football jersey — soon took hold.
Then, during that move-in trip, serendipity seemed to step in.
During a break in the day, Huck had a meeting with a football coach at the Field House, so Jennifer and Tom took a stroll over to the greenhouses. Once there, something caught Jennifer’s eye through the window.
“Just then a student leaving the greenhouse held the door open for us, and we walked inside. And there it was — the mysterious, uncatalogued mural I had helped paint, with John Hatch’s signature,” she says. It was just as she had remembered, bright with summer sunlight, blanketing a greenhouse wall.
“It still makes me happy to trace the colors and shapes back to such a carefree, vibrant time in life — a time that I’m delightfully able to feel all over again as my son sets off on his own journey that is beginning on the UNH campus.”