Carleton Connections

23 May 2024

Something came full circle for Paul Epton ’74 as he returned to campus in 2022 to begin planning his 50th Reunion. Just off the Bald Spot were the remnants of the Music and Drama Center—recently demolished after the performing arts had moved to a new home—a building that had officially opened during his first year at Carleton, and one he spent many hours in, nurturing a newfound passion.

Paul Epton '74

Life following Carleton has been filled with full-circle moments like these, Paul says. The advice of his high school guidance counselor led him from Chicago to Northfield, and by the time he graduated from Carleton, he had a feeling he’d eventually make Minnesota his home. Sure enough, after graduate school in Houston and 14 years in Detroit, serendipity brought him to Minneapolis, where he’s now lived for 32 years.  

Paul was a physics and mathematics double major with time to spare, he says—after being completely focused on academics in high school, he now wanted to experiment. And, foreshadowing a later career, he found the theater.

“At another school with a robust theater department, I never would have considered getting involved,” he said, “because everyone would have been a theater major.” But at Carleton, exploring different interests was encouraged. Throughout his time at Carleton, Paul designed lights for 14 student-led shows (plus one infamous crack at running sound), and worked on many more.  

After graduation, Paul earned a PhD in electrical engineering from Rice University and then took a job at General Motors, working with a then-emerging technology to use lasers instead of high-temperature furnaces to process computer chips during manufacturing. Paul was familiar with lasers from grad school, and he was well-versed in measuring temperatures in places where thermometers wouldn’t work, since his physics comps at Carleton had been on temperature measurement. “How do we know what temperature iron melts? How do we measure the temperature of a mosquito?” he recalls. “The objective of the physics department was that by the time you gave your comps, you would be the department expert.”

But two and a half years into working for General Motors, Paul says he realized he liked knowing about science and engineering much more than he liked doing it. In a bold and unconventional move, he left GM and eventually returned to the passion he’d discovered at Carleton: theater.

Paul has freelanced for 32 years designing and running lighting for numerous theaters in Minnesota (prior to that, he worked full-time for a theater company in Detroit for 11 years). His career has been filled with more serendipitous connections, such as the time he worked on the musical The 1940s Radio Hour and relied on his electronics background to manipulate the speed of a clock on stage, a prominent and important prop for the show. “I was able to use my physics and apply it in a very direct way,” he said. “That pleases me to no end.”

“There have been times when I’ve had a challenge with how to do something, and I was able to draw on my experiences to say, here’s a problem … it’s not like anything I’ve done before, but I can bring all parts of my background together and solve the problem.”

Part of that, he says, is simply the way his brain works. But it’s also partly because he had an education that opened him up to the ways things could interconnect, like physics and theater. It’s partly because he had supportive instructors who understood that not everybody worked the same way, and instructors who encouraged collaboration.

“That is certainly a part of why I support Carleton,” Paul said. “How it’s affected my life, how I approach things, what interests me.”

Paul began supporting Carleton’s Alumni Annual Fund the year after he graduated, and as his 25th Reunion approached, he joined the Joseph Lee Heywood Society. Now, as he celebrates his 50th Reunion, he’s increased his planned giving and earmarked portions to support the Bill Titus Fund for Student Research, the Class of 1974 Center, and the College’s Toni Awards. (Another full-circle moment—Paul took ballet as a Carleton student from Professor Toni Sostek, whom the prize honors, and they maintained a friendship for the rest of her life. After she passed away, her husband told Paul how much Toni had appreciated his unconventional career path.)

“The Toni Award is not necessarily for somebody who has a particularly noteworthy accomplishment in the arts; it’s for somebody who displays an enthusiasm in the arts,” Paul said. “It’s important for me to support people who will perhaps never be arts majors, as I wasn’t, and yet the arts are extremely important to them.”

“Carleton meant so much to me and set my life in a direction it wouldn’t have otherwise taken,” he said. “I attach a great deal of importance to Carleton, and that’s why I’ve made a significant legacy provision for Carleton. This is one more way I can give back.”

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