Executive director of the Granville Area Chamber of Commerce Maggie Barno, Zach Goldman, Erica Duffy and Denison president Dale Knobel

The 2011 Louis Kussmaul Friendship Award, presented by the Granville Area Chamber of Commerce to Denison University students “who have contributed most to the friendly relations between Granville and the college,” has been awarded to two Denison seniors, Erica Duffy and Zachary Goldman. The students were presented their awards at the Kussmaul Award Luncheon held on Wednesday, April 20, at Denison. President Dale Knobel and Maggie Barno, executive director of the Granville Area Chamber of Commerce, presented the award certificates and checks for $150 to the students.

Duffy, an educational studies and psychology double major from Fombell, Pa., was nominated by Julie Fudge-Smith, owner of A Positive Connection, a dog training service in Granville. Duffy worked as a dog walker and barn hand for Fudge-Smith and also volunteered with the Licking County Humane Society. Fudge-Smith commented, “Erica’s love of animals and careful attention to the details of their care has endeared her to me and to all my clients whose animals she has cared for. I couldn’t ask for a more sincere and caring individual.”

Goldman, a mathematics major from Cincinnati, was nominated by Susie Kalinoski, associate director for Service Learning at Denison, and by Jill Esh and Jill DeTrude Dunham, local math teachers and Mathcounts coaches at Granville Middle School. For the last four years, Goldman has volunteered with Mathcounts, a club that encourages middle school youth to increase their math skills. “Zach brought a dimension to the program that enriched the experience for over a hundred students in the four years that he has been working with the program,” Esh said about Goldman. “He showed the students that the love of mathematics is ‘cool.’ He was able to give them insights into mathematics that they wouldn’t have had if it weren’t for him.”

Louis Kussmaul, brother of former printer and owner of the Granville Times, W. H. Kussmaul, was a well-loved character in Granville during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Kussmaul was intensely interested in both Granville and Denison and the relationship between them. His good friend Harry Amos, editor of the Cambridge (Ohio) Daily Jeffersonian, honored “Lou” in 1947 by funding the annual award. The Louis Kussmaul Friendship Award stands as a testimony to the friendship of the two men and to the importance of friendly relations between a college and its hometown.