Bucking tradition

After work, Mary Ann Winkle drives to her Tweety Bird-lined home, slaps together a ham sandwich and drives back to campus to turn in a paper and spar in a class debate. She loves her classmates, who describe her as "your typical good student in class." \nWinkle is 61. \n"She acts like she's 20," Michael Hunsaker, a senior, said. Hunsaker works with Winkle and had a geography class with her. "She takes too many notes, in my opinion, but that's good in the long run."\nWinkle reads a lot, too. She is taking six credits this semester to go along with her job at Franklin Hall where she works 40 hours a week with the work study programs and payroll. She has seven books for her history class about American Indians and is currently reading, "The Last of the Mohicans." \nWinkle said she does not watch very much television, just the news. "I have a lot of energy," she said. "I like to stay busy." \nHer notes and diligence were rewarded last spring when she was named one of 15 Chancellor's Scholars, the only representative from the Continuing Studies Department to be honored. She credits her father for her work effort.\n"My dad was actually the hardest worker I've ever known," she said. "He was also probably the most honest."\nJoseph Silnes built race cars in Norway for the Indianapolis 500. A picture of Norway still hangs over Winkle's head in her home library where she studies. The shelves are lined with the Serenity Prayer, biographies of presidents, Power Puff Girls figurines and the Bible. Other trinkets add character to her favorite spot in the house -- pottery her children painted that she glued back together after it broke, stuffed moose and fish and copies of the martial arts book and video written by her oldest son Jason. \n"I just love to have books around me -- it's such a comfort to me," she said. She volunteered in her children's school library for 12 years. \n"She's been very supportive of my brother and I in everything we've done," her son, Jason, said. During the summer, the family would crowd into their one-bedroom cottage on Lake Lemon and water-ski. \nWhen her children were about 10, Winkle decided to compete in a water-skiing tournament against her friend -- and the IU water-skiing team. She practiced on the water each night until the police ordered her to get off. \nHer friend beat her at the competition, but both ladies finished ahead of the entire IU team. As she walked back, she heard another girl say, "Those two old ladies beat us." \n"I'm not a naturally athletic person, I don't think, but I can ski," Winkle said.\n"I think next to me, that's her next love," husband Bill Winkle said. \nWhen her children got older, she decided to go to college. She had always stressed the importance of education to her children.\n"One day I thought, 'Oh my gosh, they're going to be ahead of me pretty soon.' I just wanted to get that degree," she said.\nWinkle earned her associate degree in General Studies and graduated with her oldest son, Jason, in 1997. She also received an Associate Degree in Accounting at Ivy Tech and worked part-time as an accountant. Her love of learning and reading has kept her taking classes, and she hopes to be a librarian someday.\nAfter her children graduated from Indiana University, she and her husband moved to the cottage where they used to ski during the summer. The couple expanded the house to about five times its original size and the whole family helped build the deck and pour eighty tons of rocks around the boat dock in September. \n"This place is kind of a do it yourself project," Mary Ann said. Her family is used to working together, and Winkle has relied on that support a great deal the past few years. \nJason remembers getting a call from his mother one February morning in 1996. She had breast cancer. It had spread to her lymph nodes and was in stage three of four stages. \n"She told me that she wanted me to know but she didn't want me to worry because she was going to beat it," Jason said. "'I need your love and your support to do it,' she told me. \n"I think I about broke down, but I remember knowing that if anyone could beat it, it would be her."\nWinkle called a friend she knew who taught a class about cancer. Her friend warned her it could scare her to death, but she took it anyway. \nHer exercise and sense of humor did not lag, either. She said her doctor told her husband that "I usually have to tell people to be more active when they're going through chemotherapy, and I have to tell your wife to slow down." She also had a tattoo of Tweety Bird put on her chest after her mastectomy. \nWinkle said her family was key to her survival, also. "We just all started doing more together," she said. "It was like they were all trying to protect me."\nFive years later, the cancer is in complete remission. She finished her prescription of tamoxifin in May and is in a clinical trial for another cancer drug that is being tested for its effectiveness in preventing the recurrence of cancer in post-menopause women. \nShe plans to graduate in August and eventually be a librarian. Her gray hair might reveal her six decades of work and battle with cancer, but splotches of blonde still shine and her roots are still dark. \n"She's young at heart," Bill said. "And she just doesn't want to get old"