Boston College Magazine, Summer 2023

BOSTON COLLEGE SUMMER 2023

MAGAZI NE

s o u s s p o rt m a f e ’r y e Th ers now. b roa d cast u t o n W Z B C . ed o They start 5 in Chow ’9 v r a M w o H gle’s go-to o o G e m a c be whiz. marketing

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l a i t n e d i f n o c rtray o p o et ly lik l a scot? e a r m t i e s t ’ ri he What s favo s behind t ts. ’ e n o every nts take u the secre ll de BC stu d reveal a . an suit . .

Contents // Summer 2023

FEATURES

20

24

30

How the Right Learned to Take Comedy Seriously

Baldwin Confidential

Meet Google’s Messenger

He’s everybody’s favorite mascot. And nobody spills his secrets, see? ... until now.

As the tech behemoth’s vice president of global marketing, Marvin Chow ’95 helps shape the stories told by one of the world’s most important companies.

Conservatives are suddenly all in on being funny. BC Communication Department Chair Matt Sienkiewicz explains why.

By John Wolfson Illustration by Ryan Olbrysh

By Lisa Weidenfeld and Elizabeth Clemente Illustrations by Mark Fredrickson



By Lisa Weidenfeld Photographs by Aaron Wojack

38 The Change Agent The pandemic was a long and grueling reminder of the feelings of distress and voicelessness that nurses can sometimes experience.

Now Aimee Milliken, who joined Boston College last year, is helping the Connell School train nurses to confront these challenges.

By Bill Donahue Photographs by Lee Pellegrini

CV2

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12

18

LINDEN LANE 4

The Calling Game They’re some of the most recognizable names in sports media today. They started out talking BC athletics on WZBC.

7

A Taste of Spiritual Fulfillment This BC Jesuit’s recipe-infused memoir is seasoned with a love for cooking.

8

Campus Digest

10 Edgar Allan Poe or

Jane Austen?

Two Boston College English professors duke it out in a page-turning rumble.

12 The Miracle Mile

CLASS NOTES 14 Moral of the Story The Morality Lab will spend the next two years researching how to influence people to be more ethical consumers.

44 Alumni News and Notes 45 Class Notes 70 Advancing Boston College

15 When Good Brands Go Bad Carroll School Assistant Professor Larisa Kovalenko on avoiding marketing disasters.

16 Preserving a Way of Life

72 What I’ve Learned John Finney

73 Parting Shot

In his new novel Salvage, the Boston College professor and noted public intellectual Richard Kearney reminds us of our sacred connection to nature.

18 Kantika BC English Professor Elizabeth Graver writes a stirring family history.

Steven Jackson ’24 became the first BC runner to break the four-minute mark, raising hopes for men’s track.

Illustration by Mark Fredrickson

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Conversation

The CEO

Editor’s Note: Our Winter 2023 profile of CVS Health CEO Karen Lynch ’84 connected with many Eagles on the business-oriented social media platform LinkedIn. Here are just a few of the comments that were posted to the site.

Karen Lynch’s personal story of struggle and how she vulnerably transformed her heartbreak into excellence in leadership is an example of power with a purpose, the reason so many of us are proud to be Boston College graduates. Thank you, Karen, for leading us into a better future by example.

Nedra Fabito

“

A great example of how vulnerability and empathy are equally important to effective leadership as vision, execution, and results.

(Yet another reason I’m both proud and grateful to be an Eagle.)”

Tim Minahan 2

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I read her story in my Winter 2023 issue. It was an inspiration to hear about her childhood struggles and subsequent rise to prominence in the health care industry. As a 1978 BSN graduate in Nursing, I know health care is the most important field in our lives. It is great for her to be leading the field and as a BC grad it made me immensely proud!

Marianne Hird I read with interest “The CEO,” the wonderful success story of Karen Lynch, and noted that she credited the influence of a high school teacher, Mr. Baltren. That teacher was Peter Baltren ’71.

Peter was a biggerthan-life character who could be found at every BC home basketball game, wearing a WWI Army helmet and varsity jacket, exhorting the crowd as an unofficial cheerleader. Later he joined the rugby club, and like everything he did, brought unbridled enthusiasm to it.

He left us much too early, but it is heartening to know that he was such a positive influence to others after him.

Gerald Rotella ’71 Clifton, NJ

The Case of the Looted Bust

I very much appreciated the article about Leila Amineddoleh LAW ’06 providing legal assistance with tracking down the history of the Roman bust [Winter 2023]. But it was horrible to find out that Harrison Ford as an archaeologist was a “looter” in Raiders of the Lost Ark. John Michalczyk Director, Boston College Film Studies Program

Under Construction

Editor’s Note: The following are tweets about our Winter 2023 profile of Earl Grant, the new head coach of the BC men’s basketball program.

Congratulations to Coach Grant. Earl brings energy, enthusiasm, and class to the program.

Barry Gallup [a former BC football star, coach, and administrator]

photos: Scott McIntyre (Lynch); Sub Turri (Baltren); San Antonio Museum of Art (Roman bust); Billie Wiess (Grant)

Good luck to Earl Grant! It’s a great opportunity to build the program back to a highly competitive team.

Bobby O’Brien

Rebuilding after Tragedy

Editor’s Note: Several readers commented on our Winter 2023 profile of Marathon bombing survivors Patrick Downes ’05 and Jessica Kensky.

As an Eagle finishing my last semester during the Spring of 2013, I felt unsafe for the very first time after this bombing. But the strength of protection and security during the search for the perpetrators of this evil given to us by law enforcement increased our trust in them.

As we mark the tenth anniversary, we pray for the victims and their families who were affected in any way. We pray for an end to violence in this country and in the world.

Sr. Mary Aloysius Onwuegbuchulam, MED/CAES ’13, via LinkedIn A very touching love story! Proud of you for “giving back” in the form of a sustainable BC scholarship and for making a book about your service dog!.

Monique Wolford ’86, via Facebook

2023 BCM issue and almost instantaneously felt her wrapping me in a hug via three of your pieces.

1. “Dead Dad Club”: self-explanatory; now a reluctant member. I immediately added Katie Moulton’s audiobook to my To Consume list. Moulton mentioned mixtapes and the importance of music. I loved to make mixes for BC friends and blast RENT throughout Shaw, 90, Fenwick, and Ignacio.

She mentioned Tom Petty. My mom owned a gardening business and thus Petty’s song “Wildflowers” holds a special spot in my heart and made it onto many of those BC mixes. I wear a cosmos flower necklace in her memory.

2. “BC Announces Launch of Companions Program”: I’ve been dreaming of a program like this for years. And many of my “what if...” visions are rooted in what my mom valued most in life. Community!

Learning! Reflecting! Discussion! Mutual enrichment! Being open to the twists of the journey that is life! I’m driven to help adults live thoughtfully designed lives that fit their definition of success.

3. “The Freedom of Missing Out: Letting Go of Fear and Saying Yes”: another immediate addition to my To Consume list, from Michael Rossman. I’ve seen the aweinspiring power of yes—I’ll try; why not; just jump—but also of setting unapologetic boundaries. Sometimes living a life of yes means saying no. These are mentalities I owe to my mom, who unhesitatingly championed every idea and action of mine and helped me value myself when I didn’t feel worthy of visibility; a priceless gift from a parent to a child.

Thank you for the smiles in a hard time and for the hugs from beyond, Saya Hillman, BC ’00 Chatham, Massachusetts

Boston College Magazine welcomes

The federal judge that presided over the Boston bombing trial—-and did us all proud—was Hon. George A. O’Toole, class of 1969 and Graduate of Harvard law School. His brother, Dr. James O’Toole, is a history professor at BC. Mary Ellen Fitzpatrick ’73

Praise for Magazine in Time of Grief

My mom recently passed away. Soon after her death, I was flipping through the Winter photo: Kelly Davidson

letters from readers.

Letters may be edited for length and clarity. Please include your full name and address.

EMAIL: bcm@bc.edu MAIL: BCM, 140 Commonwealth

Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 Connect with @BostonCollege

BOSTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE

VOLUME 83

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NUMBER 2

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SUMMER 2023

EDITOR

John Wolfson ART DIRECTOR

Keith Ake DEPUTY EDITOR

Lisa Weidenfeld STAFF WRITER

Elizabeth Clemente DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Lee Pellegrini SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Caitlin Cunningham

Please send address changes to: Development Information Services Cadigan Alumni Center 140 Commonwealth Ave. Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 (617) 552–3440, Fax: (617) 552–0077 bc.edu/bcm/address Please send editorial correspondence to: Boston College Magazine 140 Commonwealth Ave. Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 (617) 552–4820, Fax: (617) 552–2441 bcm@bc.edu Boston College Magazine is published three times a year by Boston College, with editorial offices at the Office of University Communications.

ISSN 0885–2049 Standard postage paid at Boston, MA, and additional mailing offices.

Postmaster: Send address corrections to: Boston College Magazine Development Information Services Cadigan Alumni Center 140 Commonwealth Ave. Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 Please direct Class Notes queries to: Class Notes editor Cadigan Alumni Center 140 Commonwealth Ave. Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 email: classnotes@bc.edu phone: (617) 552–4700 Copyright © 2023 Trustees of Boston College.

All publications rights reserved.

Printed in USA by Royle Printing.

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Linden Lane

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The Calling Game

They’re some of the most recognizable names in sports media today. They started out talking BC athletics on WZBC.

BY ARCHER PARQUETTE ’18

When Bob Wischusen ’93 arrived at Boston College in 1989, he knew exactly what he wanted to do. “I was laser focused,” he said.

“I was going to be a sports broadcaster.”

Just two years earlier, the first all-sports radio station in the country, WFAN, had launched in New York, and Wischusen was obsessed. He imagined himself as one of the hosts, and even collected cassette recordings of the station’s best debates. On his second day at BC, he went to WZBC, the student radio station, and asked if anyone was covering athletics. The station, which was better known for alternative music than talk, had only one sports talk show, Sports Tonight. It aired every Monday evening, he was told, and if Wischusen was interested, he could join.

He signed up immediately.

Wischusen encouraged Christian Megliola ’93, one of his two randomly assigned roommates, to join him at the station. Over the semester, they met other sports fanatics who wanted to contribute to Sports Tonight. One was a fellow freshman, Joe Tessitore ’93, who was studying marketing at the Carroll School of Management.

Tessitore’s football career had been derailed in high school by a broken leg, and he relished the opportunity to be close to the game again. Another member of the show was Jon Sciambi ’92, a sophomore transfer from William & Mary who’d come to BC to play baseball. The group thrived in the freewheeling talk radio format, debating and analyzing the latest in BC athletics and taking listener calls. “There was this real good chemistry between us,” Sciambi said. “We had the same interests, the same passions. On-air, off-air, we were always making each other laugh. Just thinking about it now is making me smile.”

More than thirty years later, Tessitore, Sciambi, and Wischusen have become three of the most successful voices in national sports broadcasting, and Megliola has become the senior vice president of communications for the Boston Celtics. Among their many other accomplishments, Tessitore

from left: Joe Tessitore ’93, Jon Sciambi ’92, Bob Wischusen ’93, and Christian Megliola ’93.

illustration: Jonathan Carlson

spent two seasons as the play-by-play commentator for Monday Night Football, Sciambi will call this year’s World Series for ESPN Radio, Wischusen is the radio voice of the New York Jets, and Megliola has excelled in one of the most demanding jobs in sports communications, overseeing the entire public relations wing of an NBA team with a notably rabid fan base. They’ve each attained a coveted position in intensely competitive fields, but back when they were getting their start on WZBC, they were just kids who loved sports and arguing in equal measure.

“

Everyone was really talented at a young age,” Tessitore recalled. “It was eye-opening. I remember thinking, Man, these guys are just excellent.”

“Those were hysterical years,” Tessitore recalled. “Everyone was really talented at a young age. Bob was ridiculously good at hockey play-by-play. Christian was ridiculously knowledgeable about basketball. And Sciambi could do everything. It was eyeopening. I remember thinking, Man, these guys are just excellent.”

Sports Tonight started to develop what Megliola called an “intimate but enthusiastic following” around BC. “We had regular callers,” he said. “We were learning on the fly, but we took the journalism seriously—no one was having a couple of beers and then getting on air. I think it’s unusual for college kids to have that kind of discipline.”

Wischusen attributed the quality of their show to a certain competitiveness between the friends. They were always trying to oneup each other, whether they were on air or just hanging out at the Mods. “If you didn’t know your stuff, if you didn’t bring that knowledge, you were going to get exposed and made fun of,” Wischusen said. “It was like a master’s degree in sports.”

None of which is to imply that they didn’t know how to have fun. On one occasion, Wischusen, Tessitore, and Sciambi followed the football team to West Virginia to cover a game. “We flew from Boston to Pittsburgh to Morgantown, which was ridiculous because it’s like a seventy-minute drive from Pittsburgh to Morgantown,” Wischusen said.

“But none of us knew that. We booked this plane from Pittsburgh that looked like a flying milk carton.” BC won the game, and afterward the three ended up at the hotel bar on a Saturday night. And, as is known to happen with college guys, they stayed out so late that they missed the next morning’s flight home.

Still, for the most part, the guys were all getting increasingly serious about their careers. As graduation neared, a switch flipped for Tessitore. He no longer saw himself in a business or marketing career after college—he wanted to keep talking sports. So did Sciambi, who’d been cut from the baseball team, and Megliola and Wischusen were equally intent on careers in sports journalism.

At first, things didn’t look too promising.

Megliola moved back in with his parents after graduation and got a job making five dollars an hour at Newbury Comics. Wischusen tried fruitlessly to find a job at two radio stations where he’d interned during college.

Sciambi wound up covering local news at a tiny radio station in Bradford, Pennsylvania, population nine thousand. And Tessitore was going back and forth between Boston and Dallas, where he’d found a freelance TV opportunity he hoped would turn into something full-time.

Then in June 1993, Wischusen’s former internship supervisor told him about a producer job at WQAM sports radio in Miami.

“I went from having no idea this job even continued on next page »

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Linden Lane

« continued from previous page

existed to packing up a car and moving to Miami about a week later,” Wischusen said. He had his foot in the door—but just barely. He was making $7.10 an hour. “This was 1993, not 1953—that’s how little they were paying me,” he said. But it was a real job at a real sports station. Roughly a month into his time there, the program director approached him.

“He walked into the control room and said, ‘Do you know anybody dumb enough to come down here and do what you’re doing for no money, too?’ And I was like, ‘I got just the guy.’”

Wischusen told them about Sciambi.

WQAM offered him a position, and he moved down to Miami, where he crashed on Wischusen’s couch. The two college buddies had essentially the same producing job, just different shifts, Wischusen during the day and Sciambi at night. They both remember the best part of those years the same—the free food. “At every sports game, they fed the media,” Wischusen said. “We were a couple of twenty-one, twenty-two-year-olds making seven bucks an hour, who could go to any

professional or college sport whenever we wanted and could eat for free. We must have saved thousands in groceries.”

“That was kind of heaven,” said Sciambi, who earned a new and lasting nickname at WQAM—“Boog,” due to his resemblance to MLB great Boog Powell.

While his friends were chowing down in Miami, Megliola—the son of Lenny Megliola, a popular sports columnist for the MetroWest Daily News—managed to escape Newbury Comics and start his career by “just showing up” at NECN, the twenty-four-hour Boston cable news station that had launched a year earlier. He wasn’t making any money, but he managed to parlay the experience into a part-time producing gig at the station, which led him to several full-time jobs afterward, eventually landing at Boston’s FOX25 as the head sports producer.

At that same time, Tessitore had turned his hustling into a real job as a broadcaster for an NBC affiliate in Dallas. Within a few years, he became the main sports anchor at WFSB in Connecticut.

To Think They Started out Arguing Sports on WZBC Bob Wischusen ’93

Joe Tessitore ’93

ESPN broadcaster and radio voice of the New York Jets

ESPN broadcaster

Wischusen got his

announcer, Tessitore

start working at a

6

After joining ESPN in 2002 as a boxing has become one of the

radio station in Miami. He then worked as

network’s most versatile commentators, call-

a reporter at New York’s legendary WFAN

ing everything from horse racing to college

sports radio station before eventually set-

football and basketball. He spent two years

tling in at ESPN, where he calls hockey,

as the play-by-play voice of Monday Night

football, and basketball. He also announces

Football and also calls the action on the ABC

NY Jets games for radio station WEPN.

reality golf show Holey Moley.

Jon Sciambi ’92

Christian Megliola ’93

ESPN Radio broadcaster and radio voice of the Chicago Cubs

Boston Celtics SVP of Communications

Sciambi followed his

a Boston television

Megliola started as

buddy to the radio

sports producer, then

station in Miami, which led to a series of

left to work in public relations. He forged a

play-by-play jobs with Major League Base-

relationship with the Boston Celtics when

ball teams, including the Marlins, Braves,

his firm took on the NBA team as a client.

and Cubs. At ESPN Radio, he calls Sunday

In 2015 the Celtics hired him as senior vice

Night Baseball and will announce this year’s

president of communications, and today he

World Series.

oversees the team’s PR efforts.

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“After those first few years out of school, it started to become clear to me that we really had a special group of guys,” Megliola said.

“We all found work in sports journalism, and it isn’t easy to do that. I started to think, Man, it’s going to be interesting to see where we all go.”

Indeed, the crew—a “pretty good draft class,” as Wischusen put it—took off after its somewhat slow start. Wischusen left Miami in 1995, finding work at none other than WFAN, the station that had launched his love for sports talk. In 2005, he joined ESPN, calling hockey and college football and basketball.

Sciambi, meanwhile, stuck it out in Miami, landing a prime spot in 1997 calling Marlins baseball games for WQAM. That led, among many other jobs, to doing playby-play for the Atlanta Braves and, most recently, the Chicago Cubs. This year, you’ll hear him calling the World Series on ESPN Radio, where he also announces Sunday Night Baseball.

Megliola left sports journalism in 1999 for a career in public relations at Regan Communications, one of Boston’s most influential PR shops. When Regan took on the Celtics as a client, the team’s top brass noticed Megliola’s impressive work, eventually hiring him in 2015 as senior vice president of communications.

While his friends were climbing the ranks around the country, Tessitore joined ESPN in 2002, delivering blow-by-blow boxing commentary. Over the next twenty years, he became one of the network’s most versatile commentators, announcing horse racing, college football, and from 2018 to 2020, Monday Night Football. (His son, John Tessitore, also attended BC, and was a punter for the football team. In 2020, during the ESPN broadcast of a BC–Clemson game, Tessitore’s call of his son’s killer trick play drawing the Tigers offsides proved a heartwarming moment that quickly went viral.)

On top of his work for ESPN, Tessitore now plays the straight man to comedian Rob Riggle on Holey Moley, a reality golf competition ABC series.

“It’s been really cool to see everyone succeed,” Tessitore said. “I don’t know that we all would have become who we became if it wasn’t for us being together at WZBC. Everyone was so sharp, so knowledgeable— such precocious talents that it set the bar so high. We all raised each other’s game.” n Archer Parquette ’18 is the managing editor at Milwaukee Magazine.

Salade de la Pastèque au Citron Vert Watermelon salad with English cucumber, avocado, feta, and a limemint dressing Makes 4 to 6 servings

ingredients For the salad

This BC Jesuit’s recipe-infused memoir is seasoned with a love for cooking.

• 4 cups cubed, seedless watermelon • 1 large unpeeled English cucumber, cubed • 2 ripe avocados • 8 to 10 mint leaves, roughly shredded • 1 cup French feta cheese

BY ELIZABETH CLEMENTE

For the dressing

A Taste of Spiritual Fulfillment The year was 1966, and Walter Smith, SJ, had not yet been ordained a priest when he made a pivotal life decision. A scholastic Jesuit studying and teaching in Paris, he walked into the famed culinary school Le Cordon Bleu one day and asked the director, Madame Elisabeth Brassart, if he could audit an introductory course. Brassart, who had been running the school for forty years and formerly taught Julia Child, agreed—under two conditions. The first was that Smith would have to purchase a set of Sabatier knives. The second, he recalled recently, was that “if you hold the group back in any way, you’re out.”

The course sparked Smith’s love for French cuisine, and his discovery of that love is one of hundreds of colorful anecdotes featured in Faith, Food, and Friendship: Reflections and Recipes from a Jesuit’s Abundant Life. Half cookbook and half memoir, the book takes readers through Smith’s life via the lens of food. He opens with tales of growing up in Boston, and later relays anecdotes of his wide-ranging career, which included years spent as a psychology professor, a clinical specialist in palliative care, and the chief executive officer for a New York City nonprofit. Smith now teaches at Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry, photo: Caitlin Cunningham

and holds several degrees from BC, including his bachelor’s and two master’s degrees.

Each chapter includes recipes that he encountered during specific times in his life.

The types of cuisine featured in the book’s 175 recipes represent Smith’s shifting environment and worldview through the years, beginning with an updated version of his mother’s oven-baked macaroni and cheese, and later reflecting global fare like dal chawal, an Indian lentil dish that Mother Teresa once recommended to him.

Smith began working on the book in 2017, when he spent five months aboard a cruise ship as its chaplain, celebrating Masses with the passengers and crew as the boat circumnavigated South America.

He began by writing reflections of his life, which sparked memories of dishes he had learned to make along the way. Cooking, he explained, has helped him build community in both his personal and professional life, whether through hosting dinner parties for friends or serving residents at the nonprofit he ran. “Cooking, in that regard, was a ministry,” he said. “It’s labor in prep, in presentation, and cleanup. But I never grew tired of it, because it had a purpose.”

Enjoy this recipe taken from Faith, Food, and Friendship.

• grated zest and juice of 2 limes • 2 finely minced shallots • 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard • 1 teaspoon granulated sugar (optional) • ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil • ¼ cup dry white wine • salt and pepper

method 1. Prepare the avocado by cutting it in half and, with a large spoon, removing the flesh from the outer skin. Cut into wide strips and then into cubes, and toss the pieces with lime juice to prevent discoloration.

2. Place the chilled watermelon

cubes, cucumber, avocado, and mint in a large bowl.

3. In a small bowl, whisk together the Dijon mustard, salt, pepper, and olive oil to form an emulsion. Add white wine, shallots, sugar (optional), and lime zest, and blend into the emulsion.

Add lime juice and whisk until fully incorporated.

4. Drizzle the dressing over the

melon, cucumber, and avocado mixture and toss to coat.

5. Sprinkle with crumbled feta cheese and serve.

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Linden Lane // Campus Digest

STUDENT CLUB SPOTLIGHT

BC Moon Club Established: Fall 2021 Current members: Approximately 80 What: The entire BC community is invited to celebrate the beauty of the full moon each month by gathering on the Gasson Quad at midnight on the full moon. The night ends festively, with a Moon Club trophy awarded to the most enthusiastic member and a group howl.

—Kayla Roy

“People come and go as they please, talking with others and just bonding over the weird fact that they are all at Gasson Quad at midnight under the full moon.” —Club Cofounder Parker Keller ’23 BIG NUMBERS

Noted Journalists on Preserving Democracy Has the widespread closure of news outlets over the past decade contributed to the rise of an anti-democratic political movement in this country? That question was the focus of “Journalism and Democracy,” a three-day panel organized in March by the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy.

Speakers included the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, the reporter and columnist Ron Suskind, the Pulitzer winner Maria Hinojosa, and the award-winning journalist and civil rights activist Charlayne Hunter-Gault. They discussed the role of journalism at a time when the industry is fighting for its financial survival, even as the nation struggles to maintain democratic norms, and explored the challenges of journalists reaching a distracted audience that has become skeptical of traditional news sources.

In his keynote address, Bouie emphasized the importance of finding new ways to fund local news organizations because they often remain a source of trusted information for communities that have developed an aversion to national news outlets. But, he said, more will be required to reach audiences in our current era of political polarization. The strategies, he said, must involve “an everyday experience with deliberation, with compromise, with coming together to find collective solutions to collective problems.”

Whatever the public’s skepticism, Suskind said, the media must do its job of informing the public. The stakes are simply too high not to. “We are the only profession named in the Bill of Rights for a reason,” Suskind said. “Without us, it doesn’t work.”

—Lisa Weidenfeld 8

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$765,000

Gift to Saint Columbkille—a BC laboratory school—from the estate of Mildred O’Brien Tudor, a member of Saint Columbkille’s first graduating class. It’s the largest single gift the school has ever received.

In Memoriam: Thomas D. Stegman, SJ The Boston College community lost a beloved figure in April, when Thomas D. Stegman, SJ, the former dean of the School of Theology and Ministry, passed away at age sixty, four years after being diagnosed with glioblastoma. A Nebraska native and former star baseball player, Stegman was a widely respected New Testament scholar. He had stepped down from his role as STM dean in 2022, but remained active in the BC community, giving a talk for the Agape Latte series about how his faith had helped him cope with his illness. The university honored him with a service at St. Ignatius College on April 20, which drew more than one thousand visitors. illustration: Nadia Radic

photos: Shutterstock (moon); Caitlin Cunningham (Stegman)

Campus News Boston College has been ranked tenth among universities worldwide in Theology, Divinity & Religious Studies by the prestigious 2023 QS World University Rankings. The rankings, which were released in March, are determined based on a variety of factors, including academic and employer reputation and global research impact. BC was the highestranked Jesuit university in the world.

BC’s most recently accepted freshman class is the most academically accomplished and diverse in University history. According to the Office of Undergraduate Admission, 94 percent of admitted students in the Class of 2027 rank in the top 10 percent of their graduating high school class, and 44 percent identify as AHANA.

Thomas O’Reilly, the former president of Pine Manor College, has received a Fulbright Specialist Award to spend six weeks at Bifröst University in Iceland. He’ll assist the university with its efforts to graduate first-generation college students. “It’s a lot like what we were doing at Pine Manor College,” said O’Reilly, “in terms of finding new ways and better ways to graduate underrepresented and first-generation student populations.”

Pine Manor College integrated with BC in 2020. A major focus in Iceland will be building an online program that will give students from across that country greater access to the university’s courses, O’Reilly said. He’s one of more than four hundred US citizens who will share knowledge this year with institutions abroad through the Fulbright Specialist Program.

The Liturgy Arts Group of Boston College performed at Carnegie Hall, a first for the group, in February. The performance was part of the legendary venue’s “Voices in the Hall” series. The chorus, directed by Meyer Chambers, BC’s campus minister for liturgical arts, sang in a program titled “The Story of God: A Journey of Faith, Hope and Unity.” photos: Courtesy of Thomas O’Reilly and Sean McShane

Sean McShane ’19 is Wicked Smart The BC alum recently won more than $82,000 on Jeopardy!

Sean McShane ’19 did Boston College proud last year, winning three games of the legendary trivia show Jeopardy! “It runs in my family,” McShane said. “I had a cousin who was on the show. We have that type of mind where we hear a fact and we never forget it.” McShane, who works for a Boston nonprofit, joked that he wouldn’t have needed to go on the show in the first place if he had a dollar for every time someone asked him how he knew a piece of trivia. So, how do you win at Jeopardy! three times? To find out, we asked McShane to explain how he came up with the correct “questions” to three fairly obscure “answers.”

Question: Who Is Woodrow Wilson ONLY THREE PRESIDENTS HAVE MARRIED WHILE IN OFFICE—JOHN TYLER WAS THE FIRST, AND HE WAS THE LAST

McShane had a month to prepare before his appearance, so he focused on subjects he knew the show likes, such as geography, state capitals, Shakespeare—and US presidents. “I spent one day getting broad strokes on the presidents, like what order they were in,” McShane said. He also noted whenever a president had more than one first lady, which prepared him for the Wilson question.

Question: What Is “R” MANY BRITS PUT AN “INTRUSIVE” ONE BETWEEN WORDS THAT END WITH A VOWEL SOUND AND WORDS THAT START WITH ONE

One way to prep for the show? Simply rely on your BC education. “I learned that fact because we talked about it in the general linguistics class that I took my senior year,” McShane explained. The class was a favorite, and while the professor didn’t call the R “intrusive” at the time, McShane remembered that others did. The Brits aren’t the only ones who use the R—Bostonians famously do as well.

Question: What Is “Nearer, My God, to Thee” THE RECOVERED VIOLIN HERE WAS BANDLEADER WALLACE HARTLEY’S; HIS TROUPE PERFORMED THIS FITTING 1841 HYMN AS THE TITANIC SANK

McShane knew this one simply because he’s a Titanic buff. “I became just fascinated with it,” he said. “I read multiple books as an eight-yearold kid.” Chief among them was one that offered answers to nine hundred questions about the famous sinking. “I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ going down on the Titanic,” he said. —Lisa Weidenfeld s u m m e r 20 23 v bc m

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Linden Lane

A LITERARY BRAWL FOR THE AGES!

SMACKDOWN THE MASTER OF THE MACABRE

EDGAR ALLAN

THE TEAROOM TORNADO

JANE

POE AUSTEN VS

WHO’S THE MORE INTERESTING WRITER? 10

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photos: Classic Image/Alamy (Poe); Pictorial Press/Alamy (Austen); Shutterstock (gloves)

Edgar Allan Poe or Jane Austen?

Two Boston College English professors duke it out in a page-turning rumble.

Jane Austen and Edgar Allan Poe may not have much in common biographically, stylistically, or in their chosen subject matter, but what they do share is a rare ability to stay relevant in pop culture. Two centuries after their deaths, both authors continue to inspire adaptations, imitations, and reprintings, all devoured by their devoted fans. But who’s more interesting to a modern-day audience? Each year, two professors in Boston College’s English department conduct a spirited debate on that very question. Where do they come down on the subject?

We asked Paul Lewis, a Poe scholar, and Rebekah Mitsein, an Austen expert, for the CliffsNotes of their annual academic throwdown.

— Lisa Weidenfeld Paul Lewis: During her short career, Jane Austen wrote six luminous, insightful, nuanced, and politely amusing novels. During his short career, Edgar Allan Poe worked across genres, including short story, poetry, drama, literary theory, hoax, book review, and, yes, a novel. Driven by financial need, Poe navigated a hectic career in magazine writing and editing to make ends meet alongside his creative pursuits. His fertile imagination and obsession with mystery shaped popular culture by taking us inside the minds of Gothic villains, inventing the modern detective story, and promoting the idea of art for art’s sake. If you’ve ever enjoyed a popular work not for the lessons it teaches (think Austen) but for the sheer, thrilling pleasure it brings, then you owe a debt to Edgar Allan Poe, who, early in his career, insisted that “he who pleases, is of more importance to his fellow men than he who instructs.”

Rebekah Mitsein: At core, perhaps all of Austen’s novels are about the same things: the dangers of superficial reading and the folly of falling for first impressions. Austen was a master of irony, and the irony of the fact that we think we know Jane Austen is that anyone who reads her books with a careful eye finds that they maddeningly refuse to be known. We can only know her novels as we can know a person: The more time we spend with them, the better we get at recognizing their patterns. And yet, they keep little pieces of themselves hidden, defy expectations, are riddled with ambiguities, stay silent when we want them to speak, say one thing and mean another, and (like all worthy friends, lovers, or even rivals) grow more interesting with each encounter.

Paul Lewis: No less astute a student of British literature than Winston Churchill agreed with my sense that Austen brilliantly covered a mostly closed-off world in which privileged

characters navigate predictable challenges.

Alive during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, Austen kept to the parlors and tearooms, where young women needed to avoid marrying an idiot, narcissist, snob, or (heaven forfend!) a poor, working man. Poe, on the contrary, was himself a poor, working man, a man of the crowd, familiar with the dark side of urban life in the dynamic cities of the young United States.

Rebekah Mitsein: Austen’s books take readers far outside of the drawing room. There are no plots without Lord Mansfield’s Antigua plantation, the battles in which Captain Wentworth fought and which left his comrades in arms disabled and traumatized, the boarding house in Bath where Mrs. Smith lives crippled and alone, and the slums of London where Colonel Brandon’s first love died and where Willoughby consigned her pregnant daughter to destitution. Her worlds are only small and tidy on that never-to-betrusted first impression.

Paul Lewis: Writers are only as interesting as the questions they ask us to consider. In Austen, they’re usually about which man to marry: Mr. Darcy or the Rev. Mr. Collins?

Mr. Willoughby or Colonel Brandon? The kinds of questions Poe asks take us far outside this limited sphere. For instance: “Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigour? The boundaries which divide Life from Death, are at best shadowy and vague.

Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?”

Rebekah Mitsein: Austen’s fiction is not about who to marry but about the stakes of marriage. Romance is a side plot in a larger investigation into how we live in community with one another. Her love stories—not just between men and women but also between

family members and friends—are satisfying because they suggest that we can create ports in the storm of human selfishness for ourselves and each other.

Paul Lewis: Reading fiction is a form of intellectual and emotional tourism. We set aside time to visit the world according to writers we find interesting, whether it’s Richard Powers or Toni Morrison, Jane Austen or Edgar Allan Poe. And, of course, we all love visiting Austen’s world, would be delighted to spend a weekend at Pemberley, among the teacups and chatter (okay, brilliant conversation), not thinking about what that level of wealth requires from the masses of people who struggle to meet the most basic human needs: food, clothing, and shelter. In the two centuries since Austen and Poe wrote, the perverse, selfish, and, yes, horrific impulses that Poe described have seen technology augment and globalize the brutal carnage our species has inflicted on itself, other life forms, and the planet. The truth that writers of Gothic fiction, most notably Poe, were trying to tell is that understanding the fate of humanity in our time requires us to see the world beyond Pemberley, to peer deeply into the darkness.

Rebekah Mitsein: In some ways, Austen and Poe are more alike than different. They died at roughly the same age. In the face of financial precarity, they both tried to make a living by their pens. Both felt and saw the foibles of the social and cultural systems on which life depends. Poe isolated and dramatized the parts of ourselves and our worlds we’d rather not confront, and he did so in a way that makes it impossible to look away or pretend that they don’t exist. But hyperbolic and supernatural metaphors for social ills are ignorable in their own way—we have the luxury of dismissing those stories as improbable.

Austen’s work deals in the undramatic horrors of the everyday. When her characters succeed, they achieve not infinite ease or bliss—just tolerable comfort. So why is it that some find Austen’s endings so unrealistically tidy? Isn’t it interesting to consider that, though it takes courage to look in the face and believe in the things that unsettle us, somehow it takes even more courage to look in the face and believe in the possibility of our own happiness? n s u m m e r 20 23 v bc m

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Linden Lane // Sports

Miracle Mile

Steven Jackson ’24 became the first BC runner to break the four-minute mark, raising hopes for men’s track.

BY SIMONE MIGLIORI

Halfway through the race, he knew he was going to do it. “Stay on your feet,” Steven Jackson ’24 told himself. “Get to the line, and you’ll have this.” And minutes later, he did. It was January 27, 2023, and in the second heat of the John Thomas Terrier Classic race, Jackson had just crossed the finish line in 3 minutes 57 seconds, making him the first Eagle in history to record a subfour-minute mile.

“Right when I crossed the line, I was in shock,” Jackson said. “It was an electric moment. A moment I’ll never forget.” And one that took years of hard work.

Jackson credited his grandfather, an all-around athlete named Ralph Dellorfano, with being a major influence. For his part, Dellorfano praised his grandson’s “tremendous” work ethic—even if it wasn’t always clear he was a born athlete. He laughed recalling the time he took a six-year-old Jackson out to the backyard to hit golf balls into a lacrosse net. “After five minutes we came back in, and I said to his mother, ‘I hope this kid is smart, because he has absolutely no athletic ability.’” By the time Jackson reached his junior year of high school, however, he was able to record a 4:20 mile.

Jackson’s barrier-breaking run placed him at the competitive peak of his sport, and it could be a boost for the entire men’s team, which has historically had a difficult time attracting top athletes because, unlike the women’s program, it doesn’t offer athletic scholarships.

John Kane, a former longtime BC sports

administrator, explained that a sub-four mile “is something that really doesn’t happen in a nonscholarship program. It’s really a big deal.”

And it’s exactly the kind of thing that BC Track & Field Coach Pete Watson has been waiting for. Watson, who came to the Heights last August to oversee both the men’s and women’s programs, has set a goal of attracting top men’s talent that usually gravitates to scholarship programs. Before Jackson’s run, Watson said, it had been a long time since there were “marks on the board” that could make a serious case for men’s athletes to choose BC over other ACC options. But Jackson’s subfour is just the edge the men’s program needed to recruit more talented athletes to BC. As Kane pointed out, even people who don’t follow the sport know that a four-minute mile is the gold standard. “It’s the best gift I could have gotten this year,” Watson said.

Jackson said his focus right now is on competing for BC next year as a senior, though he did acknowledge his feat has added fuel to his dreams of being a pro runner. “I’ll see where I am at the end of my NCAA career, and how much faster I can go,” Jackson said. “Running is a tough sport, but it’s definitely just a whole part of my identity.” n

EXTRA POINTS

New Internship Program for BC Football Players Many Boston College students pursue internships to further their professional ambitions, but it can be hard for football players to fit this kind of experience into their practice 12

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schedule. Now a new internship program is making professional experiences available to football players by scheduling them during the two weeks off that the team gets during the summer. The HighBrook Scholars program, created by Boston College Trustee David O’Connor ’86, is made up of two parts: a one-week in-person professional experience, and a remote capstone project. “We saw an

opportunity to tap into what I think is the biggest untapped resource at Boston College,” O’Connor said, “which is the talent that exists among the athletes that don’t have time to participate in traditional internship programs.”

The in-person portion of the internship takes place at the Florida offices of HighBrook Investors, the real estate investment firm, cofounded by

O’Connor, that gives the internship its name. The program launched with a class of three athletes last summer.

O’Connor said he hopes the program will attract students from underrepresented backgrounds to the real estate industry. “We’re hopeful we’ll inspire other employers to come up with programs of their own to tap into this opportunity,” he said.

photos: Chris Remick/Athletic Communications (Jackson); Chris Soldt (Cheney); Courtesy of Alexander Storm Howe

“Not only do you have an opportunity to make a difference, but you have an obligation to make a difference…the country and our structure of government doesn’t sustain itself. And it requires people who are committed to be engaged and involved.”

—Former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, at the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics’ Clough Colloquium.

QUICK Q&A

Alexander Storm Howe ’10

Investor and consultant focused on East Africa’s economic future.

What makes East Africa an interesting place for investors right now?

The region is the fastest-growing in Africa. Everywhere you look, there are opportunities to provide goods and services that tangibly improve people’s lives, from sustainable agriculture and e-commerce networks to the resources we need to build batteries and electric vehicles.

Where does your firm, Africa Insight Advisors, come in?

I founded AIA to help companies understand the nuances of doing business on the ground here. I’m the only non-African employee. Since 2015, we’ve partnered on more than one hundred projects in eleven countries. We’ve also raised over $38 million for East African businesses.

What are your plans for the future?

I believe with all my heart that Africa is going to become an important player on the global scene, and I hope our company can be a springboard for the next generation of East African entrepreneurs.

—John Shakespear illustration: Joel Kimmel (Sasso)

Justice League In January, James Sasso ’12 completed his year-long tenure as a Senior Investigative Counsel on the Justice Department committee that was created to investigate the US Capitol attack on January 6, 2021.

Sasso, a 2019 graduate of Harvard Law School, helped to draft the committee’s final report to Congress, and later wrote about the experience in an op-ed for the New York Times. He now practices law at a Washington, DC, law firm.

His first months on the committee were spent on a team tasked with digging into the details of how the riot unfolded. The work included interviewing people who pleaded guilty to participating. Later, he helped to write scripts and compile footage to be used during the committee’s televised hearings. Watching body camera footage, he said, made the horror and violence of the day more real. “You hear people chanting ‘Trump’ and ‘1776’ and loving it when cops are getting assaulted,” he said, “And you’re like, ‘What? This is America? What is happening here?’”

The experience opened his eyes to the threat of domestic extremism and the fragility of democracy. “We’ve become completely unmoored from our faith that if we lose an election, it’s okay,” he said. “And the only way democracy survives is that the losers accept the results.”

—Elizabeth Clemente s u m m e r 20 23 v bc m

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Linden Lane // Research

Moral of the Story

The Morality Lab will spend the next two years researching how to influence people to be more ethical consumers.

BY ELIZABETH CLEMENTE

Psychologists have long known that our behavior is influenced by the actions and reactions of those around us. This influence is so powerful that, over time, it creates social norms, affecting the behavior of people in a group and creating informal rules for how we act. But what if social norms could be used for the betterment of the world? That’s the question at the center of the latest research being conducted at Boston College’s Morality Lab. The lab, created by BC Psychology Professor Liane Young in 2011, uses psychology, biology, and neuroscience to study

what happens when people are confronted with a decision that requires them to make an ethical choice. Morality Lab studies over the years have examined topics such as how we choose the friends we keep in our lives and how our impressions of others change based on their behavior. Now, thanks to a $2.8 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Young and a team of thirty researchers from five universities will spend the next two years studying, among other things, if people can be peer pressured into behaving better.

The new research project, titled “The Impacts of Social Norms on Virtue,” began last year and is scheduled to continue through 2024. “What we’re trying to do with this grant is leverage the power of social norms to influence people for good,” Young said, explaining that the grant will focus on promoting virtuous behavior in everything from education to environmental stewardship.

Showing people that lots of others in their peer group are doing something, she said, can be a powerful way of getting them to join in.

For instance, when a billboard shares statistics about the number of residents in a community that have adopted a plant-based diet, it can make others want to do the same.

A different study funded by the grant will examine how religious teaching can affect which social beliefs young children internalize, and yet another will look at how a person’s intersecting identities—like being a gay conservative or a liberal gun owner—might affect their opinions.

Gregg Sparkman, an assistant psychology professor at BC, is a co-principal investigator on the grant, and Schiller Institute Executive Director Laura Steinberg is a primary coinvestigator. Thirty field partner organizations will help carry out the research.

Young said that an area of the grantfunded research that is particularly fascinating to her focuses on people’s anxieties about whether their public displays of “morally good” behavior will be seen as performative rather than authentic. She hopes the lab’s research will eventually help people overcome their insecurities about living according to their morals. “If people are worried about how they’re going to be perceived, then they’re not going to do the behaviors in public that they believe in,” she said. “If people are only doing what they believe in while in private, then social behavior can’t really spread.” n

MORE FROM THE LAB The Lynch School’s Julia DeVoy, Brian Smith, and Martin Scanlan are studying the public health implications of textile waste, thanks to a grant from BC’s Schiller Institute. The team found that Americans’ annual thirtysix billion pounds of discarded clothing is not only thrown in US landfills, but also often shipped overseas under the guise of being reusable, polluting the environment in the Global South and most often affecting impoverished communities of color.

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Two BC faculty members have received 2023 Sloan Research Fellowships, which are awarded annually to leading earlycareer scientists in the United States and Canada by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The recipients were Assistant Professor of Physics Qiong Ma, who specializes in quantum materials research, and Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Gregg Sparkman, who primarily researches the psychology of social change.

The School of Social Work’s Research Program on Children and Adversity is collaborating with the University of IllinoisChicago to study families that have recently evacuated from Afghanistan. The project will evaluate the participants’ mental health and the needs of their families as they settle in the US, and identify effective strategies that refugee-assisting organizations can use to help these populations in the future. illustration: Joyce Hesselberth

When Good Brands Go Bad Carroll School Assistant Professor Larisa Kovalenko on avoiding marketing disasters.

Coors Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water This nonalcoholic drink was launched in 1990 by the Adolph Coors Company, the makers of Coors beer. But it fizzled because people were confused about whether or not it contained alcohol, Kovalenko said. The product also hurt the Coors brand, since it created the impression that the core beer product was watered down. The drink was mercifully discontinued in 1997.

BY ELIZABETH CLEMENTE

Most companies sell more than a single product. Your favorite brand of yogurt, for instance, might also make a coffee creamer you enjoy. If customers like one product a company sells, it just makes sense that they’ll be willing to try something else from that company. But what happens when companies overestimate their customers’ interest in a new product? According to Larisa Kovalenko, assistant professor of marketing in the Carroll School of Management, the results can be as disastrous as they are hilarious. Corporations spend a lot of time and money strategizing how to successfully reach customers with new products, but they still get it wrong surprisingly often.

Kovalenko and her fellow academics Alina Sorescu and Mark B. Houston analyzed data from nearly twenty thousand product launches between 2000 and 2012, and recently published their findings in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.

The authors used the data to create a framework outlining the best way for companies to launch new products.

When a new item flops, the company takes a financial hit, of course, but the failure can also damage the company’s reputation.

That happens most often when the new product is an odd fit with what the brand is known for—like when a company famous for potato chips puts its name on a soft drink, or a toothpaste manufacturer debuts a meat lasagna. And it’s never been more important for companies to get it right, because in the digital age, branding missteps can go viral.

Here, Kovalenko shares three newproduct disasters, and one success.

Frito-Lay Lemonade

This lemonade wasn’t actually potato chip-flavored, but the potato chip logo splashed all over the bottle certainly created that impression. Consumers were put off by the idea of a refreshing citrus drink that carried a salty crunch, and the product was pulled from shelves shortly after its 1998 introduction.

Colgate Beef Lasagna

In 1982, the dental care behemoth Colgate branched out into…the frozen food market. The decision was so disastrous that the minty-sounding Colgate Lasagna was immortalized in Sweden’s Museum of Failure in 2017. It’s become a beloved example in Kovalenko’s marketing classes. “It affected sales in all other categories,” she said. “Even the toothpaste sales went down.”

Dasani

The thirty-year success of Dasani bottled water illustrates Coca-Cola’s winning strategy of launching new drinks sans the Coke branding. “They were smart enough to know it was a completely new product, in a new category,” Kovalenko said, explaining that the company carefully avoided the pitfalls of making people think about the sugary flavor of soda while they were hydrating.

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Linden Lane

Preserving a Way of Life

In his new novel Salvage, the Boston College professor and noted public intellectual Richard Kearney reminds us of our sacred connection to nature.

BY KARA BASKIN

Richard Kearney is an acclaimed philosopher, author, and public intellectual. He is also, of course, the Charles Seelig Professor of Philosophy here at Boston College. His knack for synthesizing ideas about theology, ecology, conflict, peace, the arts, politics, and his native Ireland have informed everything from his own many writings to the conceptual framework behind the Good Friday Agreement that at last brought an end to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. They are also, in a way, what attracted him to BC, in 1999, in the first place. “I was drawn,” he said, “to the Jesuit Ignatian belief in the humanities, philosophy, and theology as being important because they raised the big ethical questions: justice and injustice, good and evil, war and peace, God and being. It’s wonderful to be at a university that gives such a priority to philosophical questions.”

Kearney elegantly wrestles with these dualities, so long at the center of his work, in his new novel, Salvage. The book, Kearney’s third novel, brings to life Rabbit Island, an unspoiled slice of land off the Irish coast of West Cork. There, in the shadow of World War II, fourteen-year-old Maeve O’Sullivan and her family are among the last inhabitants. Maeve, unlike her two older brothers, has chosen to follow in the footsteps of her father as a Celtic healer, but after a series of developments, she finds herself torn between simple island mores and the modern allure of the mainland.

Rabbit Island is a real-world place with a powerful associated legend. It’s said that the island was visited during the fifth century by St. Brigid, a patron saint of Ireland.

The water from St. Brigid’s Well, named in her honor, was long believed to possess sacred powers when touched or swallowed, and Maeve, like her father, uses water from the well in her work as a healer. Maeve may have inherited the calling from her father, but water for him becomes both salve and downfall when he drowns during a boating 16

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accident, leaving Maeve adrift in every sense.

That is, until she meets Seamus, a charismatic medical student bound for Dublin. She suddenly faces a choice: Should she remain on the island, tethered to ritual, or move to the city to study nursing?

The title Salvage has two meanings, Kearney explained. “The obvious meaning, which is the one I intended, is that the islanders live off salvage from sunken ships, since the novel takes place during the Second World War. But it’s also an attempt to ‘salvage’ the old ways of natural healing and a belief that the sacred is in nature, in the sea, in all creatures. It’s an attempt to perhaps salvage that way of life.” He’s currently at work on a film script for the novel.

These themes appear in much of Kearney’s recent philosophical work, including the upcoming book Hosting Earth, which is scheduled for publication in 2024. That work derives from an initiative called the

“

The dynamics of a crucial relationship have animated much of Kearney’s recent work—that of human beings and the planet on which they live.”

Guestbook Project, of which Kearney is codirector, that promotes storytelling as a method of healing for young people who live in communities that are experiencing conflict. The idea is to build bridges by exchanging narratives, a process Kearney calls “narrative hospitality.” This experiential initiative, founded in 2008, sprung directly from his work at Boston College. “It’s really an invitation for young people in divided communities—very inspired by Northern Ireland—to come together, exchange their stories, and listen to those of their ‘opponents’ on the other side,” he said. In one example, a Catholic and Protestant student in Northern Ireland recently exchanged uniforms and visited one another’s schools as peace ambassadors, recording a video of their experiences. Similar exchanges have taken place around the world, from Mexico to Armenia. “Ideally, once they empathize and sympathize with the story of their adversary, the idea is to come up with a third narrative, which they co-create together,” Kearney explained.

The interrelatedness of even the most different-seeming people and societies is a thread that runs through many of Kearney’s

ideas and projects, but the dynamics of still another relationship have animated his recent work—that of humans and the planet on which they live. “How might we host the Earth, as the Earth hosts us?” he said.

“This urgent and timely ecological question is about a deep concern for the earth. It’s an ecological, ethical awareness about our environmental health and climate crisis.”

Like Maeve O’Sullivan on Rabbit Island, we all must weigh our place in this relentlessly modernizing world. “The theme of reconnecting with the vital powers of nature and the body is crucial,” Kearney said. n photo: Lee Pellegrini

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Linden Lane // Books

Kantika

BC English Professor Elizabeth Graver writes a stirring family history.

BY LISA WEIDENFELD

Elizabeth Graver’s latest novel has been decades in the making. When the Boston College English professor was twenty, she interviewed her grandmother, Rebecca, in the hopes of preserving her fascinating, worldcrossing story. That was nearly forty years ago, and those interviews about her life and family now form the backbone of Kantika, a fictionalized retelling of Rebecca’s journey from Turkey to Spain to Cuba to New York.

Rebecca, like her real-life counterpart, was born in Turkey, into a family of Sephardic Jews who had, centuries earlier, been forced out of their ancestral home in Spain. The novel charts the course of the lives of Rebecca and other members of the family from the early years of the twentieth century through to the ’50s as they struggle for survival, make heartbreaking decisions about how deeply to assimilate in new countries, and strive to create a sense of home.

Those threads are evident throughout the book. In the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Rebecca’s family flees 18

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Turkey in 1925 and moves to its former home country of Spain, only to find that they’re not truly welcome there. Rebecca starts a business as a seamstress, but has to operate under a less Jewish-sounding name. She also discovers, after giving birth to two sons, that her children aren’t granted Spanish citizenship even though they’ve been born in the country.

After her first husband dies at the end of the decade, her family sets her up a few years later with a man from Turkey who has American citizenship. The two meet up in Cuba to get to know each other over a whirlwind holiday, and then settle in New York in 1934, where Rebecca’s sons join them and she becomes stepmother to Luna, her new husband’s daughter from his first marriage. It’s a wide-ranging, epic tale of a family moving and resettling across borders in times of global strife, and all of it is based on the reallife saga of Graver’s own family.

While there are abundant Jewish diaspora novels, far more of them tell the story of Ashkenazi Jewish families than of Sephardic ones like Graver’s, in part because there are significantly fewer Sephardic than Ashkenazi Jews in this country. The terms refer to the countries of origin for Jewish immigrants.

Ashkenazi Jews come from eastern or central Europe, whereas Sephardic Jews hail from Spain and speak a Judeo-Spanish language called Ladino (kantika is the Ladino word for “song”).

Included throughout the book are photos of the characters’ real-life counterparts, their shifting appearances documenting the family’s efforts to fit in wherever it happened to be living. “When I was using photos of my grandmother,” Graver said, “she can look Turkish, she can look French, she can look Spanish. She changes a lot.”

It’s a shapeshifting performance that also reflects Rebecca’s keen sense of glamour and her own beauty, which becomes a source of conflict with Luna, who emerges as a foil character. Luna, who has cerebral palsy, tends to withdraw in a world that reacts negatively to her appearance. And little wonder, given her family’s acceptance of the 1940sera conventional wisdom that Luna’s disability necessitates living a constrained life.

But Rebecca rejects this notion and patiently works with Luna to help her become more physically independent. Luna at times resents the constant pushing, but also recognizes that her life has vastly improved because of it. The two characters are keen observers of each other’s faults, but as Graver points out, they’re very similar as well. Both are shrewd, motivated survivors, pushing back against a culture that constantly tries to assign them identities that don’t fit. Their relationship ultimately forms the emotional heart of the book—a story about mothers and daughters connecting in the midst of grief, migration, and change, and one that, unfortunately, remains powerfully resonant today as humans continue to be forced to leave home for safer lands.

“It is a historical novel, but I’m always in implicit conversation with where we are now,” Graver said. “These questions of migration and identity and recompense for the past, and why countries welcome people, and why they don’t, and what are the stated reasons and what are the real reasons, are just urgent and compelling.” n photo: Lee Pellegrini

The Grant Writing Guide

BRIEFLY

How to get funded.

Years ago, when Betty Lai was two weeks into her very first job as an assistant professor, she got some advice that stuck with her.

“I met with an administrator who said, ‘If you want to get promoted, you need to get a federal grant,’” Lai recalled. “So I knew immediately that this was a skill I needed to learn, but I did not know how to write grants or even where to find information about how.”

Now an associate professor in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Lai is trying to help aspiring academics navigate those same waters with her new book, The Grant Writing Guide: A Road Map for Scholars. For the book, Lai interviewed one hundred experts about the grant writing process, including scholars, program officers, and research administrators.

So what are her biggest pieces of advice?

First, once you’ve settled on the work you

Denial: How We Hide, Ignore, and Explain Away Problems

by Jared Del Rosso MCGS ’12 Del Rosso, an associate professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver, explores how denial influences people’s behavior, from handling awkward social interactions to responding to major societal issues. Drawing from examples such as the refusal to accept the existence of climate change or systemic racism in America, Del Rosso explores the profound impact of living in a culture that lacks accountability.

Super Strange Story Starters by T.M. Murphy ’93 A former English professor at the Woods College, Murphy and his childhood friend, illustrator Mark Penta, challenge young readers to push the limits of their creativity in this collection of open-ended stories that allow kids to write or draw their own endings.

The book is the first volume in a series called Totally Weird Activity Books.

When the House Burns by Priscilla Paton, Ph.D. ’79 Romance, social commentary, and murder mix to form the backdrop of this whodunit, the fourth novel in Paton’s Twin Cities Mystery series. This time around, detectives Erik Jansson and Deb Metzger seek the perpetrators behind a deadly arson and the mysterious death of an adulterous real estate agent who had both a stalker and an estranged husband when she met her untimely end.

The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention that Changed History by Edward Achorn ’79

hope to do, identify a funder who’s interested in the same thing. “Funders aren’t just looking for great ideas,” Lai said. “They’re looking for great ideas that further their mission.” Next, identify organizations that have previously offered grants to researchers doing work similar to yours. Her most important piece of advice might sound simple, but it’s crucial: Just submit the application. It’s surprising, she said, how many grant seekers don’t take that most basic step because they’re put off by the daunting odds of actually securing funding.

Lai hopes her research is helpful to all researchers, but she’s especially motivated to help those from diverse backgrounds. To her, it’s an issue of social justice, since white researchers continue to be more likely to receive funding than those from other racial groups. “Grants drive research,” she said, “but they also drive policy. So disparities really matter.”

—Elizabeth Clemente illustration: Joel Kimmel

Achorn’s latest is a look at Abraham Lincoln’s journey from political failure to swiping the 1860 Republican nomination from frontrunner William Seward. Achorn takes readers along as Lincoln carefully navigates the era’s antagonistic political culture, and ultimately secures the victory that sets him on the path to the White House.

WHAT I’M READING

Culture: The Story of Us, from Cave Art to K-Pop

by Martin Puchner This stimulating text argues that every culture is an amalgam, enriched by adopting and reinterpreting artifacts and ideas from outside. “We’re all latecomers,” Puchner writes; what matters is “not what we borrow but how we borrow, what we make of what we find.” Through an array of case studies, he insists that the arts and humanities can only thrive if we communicate the significance and excitement of cultural diversity to the next generation.

—Margaret Thomas, professor, program in linguistics, department of Eastern, Slavic, and German Studies s u m m e r 20 23 v bc m

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How the Right Learned to Take Comedy Seriously Conservatives are suddenly all in on being funny. BC Communication Department Chair Matt Sienkiewicz explains why.

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BY JOHN WOLFSON

OMEDY, AS WE ALL KNOW, is an art form that comes from the left.

It’s created by liberals, for liberals, and its primary aim is to skewer and antagonize The Man—which, for essentially ever, has meant the conservative establishment. Well, no longer, according to Matt Sienkiewicz, the chair of the Boston College Communication Department. In That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them, Sienkiewicz and coauthor Nick Marx of Colorado State University explore the right’s embrace of humor as a political organizing tool. The book, published last year, details how conservatives are suddenly finding influence and profit in laughs on everything from Fox News to network sitcoms to internet podcasts and vlogs. We spoke with Sienkiewicz to discuss the social and political implications of the right getting serious about comedy, including a troubling increase in overt racism, misogyny, and homophobia, and whether comedy from the left has become too risk averse. The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length. →

illustration: Ryan Olbrysh

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Politically speaking, comedy has historically been associated almost exclusively with the left. What explains the right’s growing interest in comedy as a political organizing tool?

It comes very much in the wake of Jon Stewart’s popularity as the host of the Daily Show. You had changes happening at that time in American politics and in the media, and together they made the Daily Show a really important place for political discourse and debate. And of course, that program for various reasons is oriented toward a younger sort of liberal audience, and it all led up to this moment in 2004, 2005 where you could ask, Who’s the leader of the Democratic Party? Is it John Kerry, or is it Jon Stewart?

I mean, who was drawing more people for their rallies? The answer was Jon Stewart. It sort of came together to become an idea that liberal politics and comedy go together. This connection seemed really clear and people took it to be a truism.

The point of your book, of course, is that this is no longer the case.

Things started changing during the early Trump years. Comedy was becoming central to what the right was doing with its strategies, particularly on Fox News. I recall watching an episode of Watters’ World on Fox. They had this bit about liberals prepping for BC Communication Department Chair Matt Sienkiewicz, whose new book explains the end of the world. So I Googled the person who the right’s sudden embrace of comedy. was on the show, and I realized he had, the day before, done the same bit on the Daily Show. We write in the comedy world, and maybe it’s also part of a sort of far-left book about how the correspondents of the Daily Show were comedy world. Joe Rogan doesn’t have politics, really. He asked whether there could ever be a right-wing version of has demographics. Rogan will move to the next thing that their show. And one of them said, “Oh, I think there’s this interests young men, ages eighteen to thirty-four, who are guy, Greg Gutfeld, but forget him.” And Gutfeld’s show not necessarily all that well formed politically. And so after on Fox News was already beating them in the ratings.

Sanders dropped out, he went to Trump. He didn’t go to Eight years later, the media industry’s changed, politics has Biden or Elizabeth Warren or whoever else you might think changed, and there are all these people playing very similar would be closer to Sanders. He went to Trump. And why roles on the right to the one Jon Stewart used to on the left. is that? Trump is more interesting to people in his demoEven if, as comedy critics, we want to say the quality of graphic. And if you look at the comedians Rogan brings on, their material is very different, our argument is that industhey do tend to be these sort of right-wing-ish, libertariantrially and culturally, it’s not very different. ish types because they tend to stir up these young men.

One of the people playing that role on the right is Joe Rogan, Rogan has spread conspiracy theories that have misinformed the host of the wildly popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast. his listeners, and has used racist language on his show. You’ve Spotify is reported to have paid more than $200 million to pointed out that his guests can push these same limits. become the exclusive home of the comedian’s podcast, which He’s a launching pad for a whole—some of the people who is said to have eleven million listeners. There’s some debate, appear on his podcast will call it heterodox, they’ll call it though, about the true nature of Rogan’s politics. sort of free-speech oriented. And partly that’s true. But it A lot of people got mad that we put Rogan in the book. also happens that the free speech in that world is almost They say he’s not right wing—he supported Bernie Sanders, always used to say racial slurs. It’s to tell antisemitic jokes etc. I think that’s correct, and we don’t actually call him and use the N-word. right wing. We say that his show is part of the right-wing 22

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photo: Lee Pellegrini

Rogan has been a springboard for other right-wing comedians.

They may not have his reach, but as you point out in the book, the media has changed in a way that you no longer need a vast audience to have an impact.

There used to be a distribution bottleneck—you needed an actual media outlet to publish or broadcast your content. With the internet, there’s no longer a distribution bottleneck. You can get your content out there on your own. What you need is an audience—but it doesn’t have to be millions. You just need twenty thousand people from a demographic that’s desired by advertisers, such as young men. So now you have these comedians trying to build an audience from that demographic. They’re all looking to make a name. If the cultural winds were different, many of them could have ended up doing totally different political comedy, but the right is where they found reactions.

Another piece of it is a broader cultural framing. Over the past five or six years, the right-wing world has effectively positioned itself as countercultural. And that’s where comedy always wants to be. Comedy always wants to be perceived as countercultural. Meanwhile, the right has been able to position the liberal world as The Man—as the thing that holds you back—and the right-wing world as a place where you can express freedom.

Your book makes the case that the appeal of a certain type of right-wing comedy isn’t even the comedy itself. Tim Allen’s sitcoms, for instance, use laugh tracks and familiar plot lines to intentionally position themselves as alternatives to more cosmopolitan—or “liberal”—shows such as Modern Family and The Office.

There’s this whole world—we call it paleo-comedy—where the idea is, We don’t do what the liberals do. So the liberals make Modern Family. What the right-wing world will say is, We don’t do that. We make good old-fashioned American comedy where dad’s in charge. Let’s look at it through the lens of Trump. There are some who see Trump as MAGA, as this thing from the past when things were better. Others see him as an iconoclast tearing down the Clinton dynasty.

The Tim Allen version is the MAGA version: Remember the eighties? Weren’t they great?

Speaking of decades past, the right-wing comedy of Dennis Miller that emerged after 9/11 seemed primarily concerned with characterizing liberals as soft-headed or wimpy. It was a dismissive critique of a progressive worldview. Even Rush Limbaugh was more likely to hint at bigotry than loudly proclaim it. What’s behind the transformation of today’s right-wing comedy, which you’ve described as more overtly racist, sexist, and homophobic?

I’d point out that Miller and Limbaugh could be explicitly misogynist. And Miller was pretty aggressively Islamophobic. However, when it came to racism, mostly anti-Black racism, I think it was much more subtle. And one thing that you rarely saw from the right-wing world, and now you see all the time, is overt antisemitism. So why do we have that now? Partly it’s that right-wing comedians used to come from credentialing organizations. Miller, for instance, was on HBO. And even when he went to Fox News, it was not a total free-for-all—it might be past some people’s line, but it has a line. Whereas, internet-based stuff has no line. And when you enter into the comedy game, you can’t just stop at someone else’s line—if Joe Rogan is doing edgy stuff and you want to get your audience, well, the easiest way to do it is to be a little bit edgier.

That’s how you get the Legion of Skanks, which is like a nightmarish version of Rogan. They appear on his podcast.

It’s very misogynist. It’s positioned as ironically antisemitic and racist, but it’s really sort of overt. So now they’re established. If you come next, you’ve got to be edgier than they are. There are these guys now, literally, doing Nazi comedy. You get these fine-grained jokes about, you know, Holocaust denial.

You argue that comedy from the left has become too cautious and has lost some of the edge that young audiences are drawn to. What are the political implications of this shift?

Young people—particularly young men—who have yet to find where they stand morally and politically are often shopping in the sphere of culture for their politics. They’re looking for things that seem cool and fun. Joe Rogan seems cool and fun. And he sends them down to the Legion of Skanks, and they also seem cool and fun. If you don’t want that result, then comedy from the liberal world has to be able to be cool and fun, too. I don’t think the right is correct when they say “Oh, you can’t say anything in the left-wing world,” but I do think there’s a risk aversion that’s taken hold in our cultural spaces, and it’s a problem. We need to move away from an idea that there’s a binary between respect and fun, that it’s either one or the other. The right is really successfully imposing that binary, saying, “Yes, they’re very respectful over there, but they’re no fun—and which one do you want to be?” We can expand our notion of respect to include something more playful, and also just, you know…sometimes a comedian makes a joke and it’s a miss and they apologize. That should be enough. If you know that the alternative is sending the people to the Legion of Skanks, then I think we need to expand our willingness to tolerate an occasional misstep. n s u m m e r 20 23 v bc m

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I

t’s hard to imagine

a big game at Boston College these days without Baldwin leading the cheers, taking selfies with fans, and spreading joy among the BC faithful. The school’s mascot started out as an actual live bird, called Margo, whose name combined the BC colors of maroon and gold. But after the beloved bird passed away, one inspired student rented an eagle suit and wore it to a football game in 1976, thus beginning the tradition of student actors. To this day, Baldwin is portrayed not by professionals but by a collection of unpaid undergrads, who hand down advice and lore to each new class of volunteers.

Students who portray Baldwin are expected to keep it a secret until they graduate. They navigate boisterous crowds in a full-body costume with surprisingly limited visibility, all while staying in character and never speaking. And through it all, they entertain us in blistering heat, on ice skates, during road races, and on every playing field imaginable. So what’s it really like to be Baldwin? We asked eight students who currently wear the suit about everything from auditioning for the role to their craziest experiences while playing it. (And don’t worry, we’ve protected their secret identities by giving them pseudonyms.) Oh, and if you happened to portray Baldwin while at BC, send us your favorite memories. We’ll publish the best responses in an upcoming issue.

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Adrian Champion Baldwin

Melissa Montana When it

Adrian Champion When

actually came up to me one day at a football game. I was sitting in the front row and he gave me a huge hug. I’ll never forget that moment.

It was such a happy moment for me, and I was like, if I could do that for other people here at BC, that would just be so awesome. Seeing the joy Baldwin brings to so many people, the way he gets everyone so excited and creates a sense of unity, that inspired me. He brings out the inner child in everyone. He brings out that joy, that enthusiasm, that passion and drive that BC has.

comes to what we’re looking for at the audition, we don’t really ask for skills so much as the energy and the charisma of Baldwin. We’re like, Can we imagine you as Baldwin?

we’re taking pictures, I can’t see the camera, I don’t know who’s taking the picture. I look at people’s feet as my signal for when a picture’s being taken. I’ll put my arms out, people will crowd me, and if there’s a pair of feet, when those feet move, you know the photo’s over.

Melissa Montana Everyone has a different persona when they are Baldwin. For me, he’s everyone’s little brother and he is trying to be cool and hype up everyone and he thinks that his big brother’s the coolest. But at the same time, he’s kind of still a little kid and really goofy and does cartwheels and silly things.

Lydia Ronson I’m the youngest of four kids and we’re a BC family. I’m the last of the pack. So when my mom got the email that said “We’re hiring Baldwins,” she sent it to our family group chat. I was like, No, absolutely not, I don’t have time for it. But I went and tried out and didn’t tell anyone. My plan was to keep it a secret until I actually got it. I announced it to my family at Thanksgiving dinner. I’ve loved it ever since.

Adrian Champion We were in the Fish Field House and they played some music and had us dance around to see if we could keep our energy high. It was like twenty-five minutes of dancing and entertaining.

Lydia Ronson We started on one end and walked as if we were Baldwin. And then there are scenarios they throw at you: Fr. Leahy is walking by and he wants a photo with you. How do you pose? or, A baby’s crying. How do you react?

Levi Stone We met at Conte Forum and they looked at our skating ability. After they had seen us skate, they provided us with the Baldwin head, and they also provided us with a flag, and watched us skate around with that combination.

Mark Preston When we’re hanging out with other mascots, we sometimes try on each other’s helmets. We definitely have the hardest-to-see-out-of helmet. Like, by a mile.

Mike Marston You can only see out of his beak. Most people think you can see out of his eyes, but you can’t, and his beak faces downward. So you are constantly looking down at people’s feet. If you watch carefully, oftentimes when Baldwin’s walking around, it kind of looks like he’s staring up into the sky. And that’s because the people that are inside the suit simply can’t see anything.

Mark Preston We bought this BC beanie that’s really thick and if we fold it in a specific way and put it on right under the helmet, it kind of props it up just enough where you can see a little better than normal, and that really helps.

Lydia Ronson I’m naturally an extrovert, so that’s how I was picturing it as Baldwin. But as soon as I put on the costume, I knew it wouldn’t be the same because it’s so hard for mobility. I can’t be jumping up and down and running around because I’m going to fall over.

Adrian Champion You have to be careful of not moving too fast or too drastically, because you will knock people over or knock a beer or pizza or nachos.

Joel Whitney Every movement you have to do is so exaggerated, like nodding your head.

When I nod my head in the suit, I’m literally leaning my whole body back and forth to create the slightest nod.

Lydia Ronson I can barely walk in the costume—I don’t know how people are skating.

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Levi Stone I’ve played hockey

Melissa Montana You try

Mark Preston It’s fun when

since I was three, so the skating wasn’t so much an issue—more so skating with the suit on. The first time, I almost ran into one of the fire cannons. We also have to deal with the flag. If you don’t watch out where you’re placing it, you could end up stepping on it and then you’ll fall.

to mask it with Febreze, but there’s no amount of Febreze that can mask that.

Adrian Champion Recently, I bought a bottle of cologne and I sprayed Baldwin down. I got a couple of compliments like, “Hey Baldwin, you smell so good today.”

you see people around campus that you know are a Baldwin, and you kind of do a little head nod, and everyone’s like, “How do you know that random person that you’re separated from by two whole class years?” And you’re like, “Oh, you know—just from around.”

Mark Preston I’m basically

Lydia Ronson It’s all vol-

skating blind. You can see like a tiny sliver on the ground right in front of you. So I start counting once I pass the blue line. I have about three and a half seconds before I have to turn or I’ll run into the boards.

unteer—football games, lacrosse games, any sporting event. There’s a list of events and you sign up for what you want.

Adrian Champion It’s the best workout of your life. It’s like being in a sauna and doing Zumba.

You get really sweaty. The protocol is, you finish your shift, you take off your Baldwin costume, you flip it inside out, and then you spray it with Lysol.

Melissa Montana There was one game where there was a fifty-foot radius around Baldwin because it was just so hot and the suit hadn’t been washed. And he smelled so bad. The trainers were saying to fans, “You’re too close.”

Mark Preston I grew up in a hockey environment and the costume smells exactly like the hockey locker room: revolting. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Adrian Champion For a football game, there are multiple Baldwins. Fans can notice that at intermission—suddenly Baldwin is a foot shorter. There’s one that does the tailgate, one that does the march out with the cheer team, one that does the first half of the game, and one that does the second.

Jeremiah Krudapet We’re not supposed to tell anyone that we’re a Baldwin until we graduate.

We have alibis for when we have to disappear for games, like, “Hey, I’m a manager for the cheer team,” or “I’m working concessions at the basketball game.” But all my roommates are big BC basketball fans, so it’s suspicious when I tell them I’m going to the game and then not actually there.

Adrian Champion I told my roommates. There’s no way that I could keep it from them and come up with excuses each time I have to play Baldwin. But outside of them, no one knows. Except, of course, my mom, who loves to brag about it and tell everyone she knows in my town.

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Melissa Montana You become cooler. You definitely are like, Wow, I’m so cool right now!

And then you get out of the suit and you’re like, Wow, I’m not cool anymore. No one knows what I was just doing. So frustrating.

Joel Whitney Everyone has a specific walk. I can’t describe it, but when they’re in the suit you can just look at them and be like, Oh, that’s X person.

Mike Marston There’s a protocol for if the head accidentally comes off. If it ever happens on the football field, we’re all expected to make a ring around Baldwin so he can put on his head without anybody seeing.

Adrian Champion I almost had my head fall off once. My first basketball game. I bumped the beak by accident and the head almost came off, but luckily I was able to grab it before it actually came off my head. That was a nightmare experience—it’s something you dread as a mascot.

Lydia Ronson The best part?

The smile on the kids’ faces—but I can’t actually see the kids at all. But just, like, knowing. The other part is I get to act like a fool and nobody knows that it’s me.

Melissa Montana There are certain people you come to recognize while in the suit. Like, I’ll do hockey games, and there’s this one little kid who comes to every single hockey game and loves Baldwin and one time he dressed up as an eagle for Baldwin. It was just like the most heartwarming thing to see.

Joel Whitney This year I did a women’s basketball game and there were a bunch of little kids there.

And after the game they were all running up to me and asking me to sign something for them. They kicked us off the court because we stayed on there for like twenty minutes after the game ended. So I had to go up to a security guard and ask for a table and I just sat there for another thirty minutes signing different things. It was awesome.

Melissa Montana It’s been one of the greatest experiences at Boston College. It’s like having this superpower because everyone on campus knows your name and knows who you are, and you immediately spark joy. It’s such a unique experience to just be able to walk around and make people happy. n

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Meet Google’s Messenger As the tech behemoth’s vice president of global marketing, Marvin Chow ’95 helps shape the stories told by one of the world’s most important companies.

BY LISA WEIDENFELD PHOTOGRAPHS BY AARON WOJACK

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OOGLE NEEDED TO WALK a tightrope. It was April 2021, and with the country still deep in the pandemic, the Academy Awards had decided to go forward with its televised ceremony. Google wanted to air a commercial during the show, but it would need to strike a balance between cautious optimism—Covid vaccines had been authorized a few months earlier—and somber respect for the fact that family visits were still taking place over screens rather than in person. What could the tech giant say that would connect with people during such a strange, tense time?

The answer turned out to be a ninety-second ad starring an actual Google employee named Tony Lee, who is the adult child of deaf parents.

In the ad, called “A CODA Story,” Lee uses the Google Meet video chat service to introduce his parents to their new grandchild, taking advantage of technology in the program that produces a real-time transcription of his words so his parents can understand what he, his wife, and the baby are saying. Rather than a faceless multinational corporation, the ad proclaimed to viewers, Google is a maker of tools that help you live and love even during what feels like the end of the world. The ad was a sensation.

Its message that life, love, and family endure through a pandemic touched something in viewers, and long after it first ran during the awards show, people continued to watch the ad on YouTube, where it has been viewed more than five million times.

The creative mind overseeing the ad’s production was Marvin Chow ’95, Google’s vice president of global marketing and the guy the company often looks to for its highest-priority messaging. Chow heads a team of around 250 people at Google, overseeing the company’s marketing efforts for everything from its familiar Search and Maps apps to its artificial intelligence, privacy, and government relations projects. He helps Google figure out how it can drive growth across the board, for all its products. Among his most important duties, however, is managing the creative elements each year for one of the tech world’s premiere events— Google I/O, a widely covered presentation during which CEO Sundar Pichai and other top execs wow investors, influencers, and journalists with the tech giant’s upcoming wonders. Chow, fifty, is involved in every aspect of the show, from working with Pichai on the design of slide decks to making sure that the stagecraft adequately dazzles the crowd. Chow’s boss, Lorraine Twohill, has been known to joke that Chow spends more time with the CEO than she does.

So just what is Chow’s job? His chief of staff, Michelle Winters, said 32

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that when something is causing headaches at one of the world’s most important companies, the solution is often “let’s just put it under Marvin, and Marvin will fix it.” Said another way, his job is to help make sure that people understand exactly what Google can do for them. And that just may make Marvin Chow one of the most influential marketing executives in the world.

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HOW’S PARENTS IMMIGRATED TO THE States from Taiwan before he was born. After settling in New Jersey, they moved around a fair amount within the state. Along the way, Chow got himself headed down a troubled path. He began shoplifting at age seven, according to an article he wrote in 2019, and had held a gun by age eight. So the family moved to Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, and Chow began the third grade in what was already the fifth school he’d attended.

Woodcliff Lake was a safer town, but also a significantly whiter one. Chow stood out as one of only a few Asian kids. “I was made fun of at length for being different—the slanted eyes, the funny Chinglish impersonations, the kung fu acting,” he wrote, “and it all made me want to fit in but also drove me to stand out in my own way, on my own terms.” His parents owned a 7-Eleven in the town, and as a teenager he worked long shifts there, folding the newspapers, stocking fridges in the back, and operating the register once he was old enough. “It was fun because it was good people, but you were annoyed as a high school student,” Chow said. “You’d have to spend the whole weekend at your mom’s store, but that was kind of our life, you know? That was the family.”

Attending BC was a transformative experience. Chow made lots of friends and joined as many clubs as he could.

“I just wanted to try everything,” he said. “I went to an all-boys Catholic high school, and I was kind of a shy, notsuper-well-performing student in high school. In college, I became a bit more extroverted, and knowledgeable about more things that were in the world beyond academics.”

“Learning from other people and through conversations or experiences was always his thing,” recalled Ginny McCormick ’96, a friend from BC. “It wasn’t about just what he could take out of the experience. It was like, how

are we thinking about making it better for everyone?” Of course, people had plenty to learn from Chow, too. And that’s what happened one night during his junior year when he attended a dinner at the home of Brenda Goodell ’80, then the vice president of global brand image for Reebok.

Goodell had always been the type of committed alum who enjoyed finding ways to stay connected to current students. So when she was looking for a nanny in the early nineties, she hired a BC undergrad named Bonnie Hungler ’94. Goodell then encouraged Hungler to invite a few of her classmates over for a dinner party at her Duxbury home.

After the meal, as Goodell strolled into the kitchen, she found Chow washing the dishes. They got to talking and it soon came out that Chow, a marketing major, had some experience with the newly emerging internet.

Goodell was intrigued, especially because Reebok was still trying to figure out how to use the internet to its advantage. No one really knew what it might become, but that night over some soapy dishes, Goodell and Chow talked and talked about his ideas for what the future might hold for the World Wide Web. “He saw the possibility,” Goodell said. “He was super smart, but not in a geeky, inaccessible way that I couldn’t understand—because I had no idea what code was or any of that—but in this thoughtful, creative, and passionate way.”

She immediately offered him an internship at Reebok.

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HOW’S INTERNSHIP LED TO A FULLtime job at Reebok after he graduated in 1995.

His knowledge of technology was so unusual at the company that he wound up helping with everything from digital marketing to providing tech support for CEO Paul Fireman. “He really charted our path forward for what was, at the time, crazy, uncharted waters,” Goodell said.

Chow would work long hours at the office, then go home to his apartment and work some more. “He was one of those people that could survive on very little sleep,” said Hungler, who was dating Chow at the time. “He’d be like, ‘Yeah, let’s go to a movie.’ And then, we’d go home and go to bed and he’d stay up and work until two or three in the morning.”

Then, Goodell recalled, he would show up in the morning with brilliant new ideas about e-commerce or online marketing. And just as important in those early days of the internet, he would explain his breakthrough ideas in a way that people could actually understand. “His ability to teach comes from his ability to have a vision and create that as a shared vision for everybody he works with,” Goodell said.

After four and a half years at Reebok, Chow left to become the chief operating officer of a fitness startup. Less than a year later, another tantalizing opportunity beckoned s u m m e r 20 23 v bc m

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When something is causing headaches at Google, says Chow’s chief of staff, the solution is often “let’s just put it under Marvin, and Marvin will fix it.”

and he moved to Chicago to join MVP.com, an e-commerce startup created by the sports superstars Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and John Elway. Chow worked on marketing strategy for the company, but the whole thing came apart amid the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001, and the company was sold. Suddenly out of a job, Chow moved home to New Jersey and slept on a cousin’s sofa for six months. He eventually landed a job later that year as a marketing director at the cable network Nickelodeon, where he worked in e-commerce and marketing. The job was a blast, especially since Nickelodeon shared space with other Viacom properties, including MTV. Chow reported to work every day in Manhattan in an office that loomed forty-two stories above the studio where MTV’s iconic Total Request Live pop music show was filmed. He also got to help build buzz for the launch of a new show that was soon to become a phenomenon: Dora the Explorer. “I had no actual comprehension of how big a deal the show was going to be,” Chow said. “That was just really cool to get a sense of entertainment and youth and how they think about TV.” The Nickelodeon job solidified his sense that his passion lay in storytelling through marketing, but he wasn’t thrilled about using his talents to encourage kids to watch more TV. So when one of his old connections from MVP.com told him about an opportunity to join Nike, he went for it.

Chow started as special projects director at the pioneering footwear company in 2003, working on initiatives for the chief marketing officer. In his new role, he took on innovative—and quirky—projects. Like the time higher-ups at Nike and Apple cofounder Steve Jobs decided that the employees of their famously creative companies should find a way to collaborate. So Chow spent three days in a conference room with the inventor of the iPod, among others, in a strategy session that ultimately led to Nike+, a digital running platform.

In 2004, when Chow was thirty-one, Nike asked him to relocate and work as a marketing director in Korea. Chow was confused—was he being punished? Quite the contrary, his boss clarified, explaining that managing a business unit on his own, in a new country, was an important step in moving up. In Korea, Chow oversaw the company’s consumer-facing efforts in the country, and worked on its World Cup campaign. Plus, he found a real joy in living there. He spoke almost no Korean, but many people in the 34

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Google Vice President of Global Marketing Marvin Chow `95, photographed in May 2023 in his home office.

office spoke English, which helped with the transition.

“It was like this undiscovered gem of a country to me,” Chow said. While there, he began dating a woman named Ji-Young, and they were married in 2005.

At the office, he deftly navigated around the potentially awkward fact that he was younger than most of the people who reported to him. “He was a very confident person and a very young person coming into that role,” said Michael

Kwon, a colleague from his Nike Korea days. “The culture was different. He’s more aggressive, from America. Korea is a little bit more conservative, more sensitive.” But Chow, showing the same ability to bring people around to his ideas that had impressed Brenda Goodell all those years earlier, won over the staff. “We learned so much from him during those short two and a half years,” Kwon said. “One word that really would describe it best was he empowered

us. He let us do our jobs and he didn’t micromanage us, but he was very strategic.”

Impressed, Nike sent Chow to Japan in 2006 to manage a seventy-person team as marketing director. It was a great opportunity, but it came with challenges. Once again, he didn’t speak the language, but in this office, very few people spoke English, and he had to have someone translate for him at all times. Plus, the team had been through s u m m e r 20 23 v bc m

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Chow in the garden of his home in San Francisco.

a rough period. “I think I was their fifth marketing director in like twelve years,” Chow said. Despite the obstacles, he found ways to build relationships with his staff. For instance, when email proved an inefficient form of communication given all the need for translation, Chow said he realized that, “with my broken Japanese and your broken English, I can walk over to your desk and try to figure this out. I think little things like that, extending that bridge, were really helpful.”

Chow was someone with a “sharp, sharp curiosity,” recalled Davide Grasso, who was Chow’s supervisor at Nike and is now the CEO of the luxury automaker Maserati. What set Chow apart from other smart and ambitious executives, Grasso said, was his essential kindness. “Marvin has this ability to work with pretty much everybody. He wasn’t really fighting with this or fighting with that. He was trying to figure out ways to solve problems.”

Chow worked in Japan for three years, a time that coincided with improved fortunes for Nike in the country. He helped to grow both revenue and brand-of-choice numbers, and was involved in the design and creative direction of the company’s first flagship store in Tokyo.

Then, in 2009, the company moved Chow yet again, this time sending him to China as a marketing director. He’d been there for only a few months when Google started recruiting him. He hadn’t exactly been looking to leave Nike, but Google was persistent. “It was like dating,” Chow recalled. “I had sixteen interviews over six months, in three or four countries. It was getting to know them, them getting to know me.”

Chow, of course, was on a successful path at Nike, and a colleague at the company warned him that leaving would be the biggest mistake of his life. But Google was beginning to win him over with its plans for the future of technology, a subject he’d been interested in since college. There was also the fact that Ji-Young saw the potential of a move almost immediately. “My wife is the great counterbalance to me,” 36

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Chow said. “After two interviews, she was like, ‘We’re going to Google.’ And then I had to have fourteen more interviews to be convinced.”

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N 2010, THE YEAR CHOW JOINED GOOGLE, the company was racing to launch its answer to the social media platform that felt like it was taking over the world: Facebook. Finally, Google was going to take on the company that was changing how people used the internet. Millions of people already had Google accounts, company executives reasoned—surely they’d be delighted to link them to a new site, called Google+, where they could post photos, give status updates, chat and connect in groups, and share events…just like they were already doing on Facebook. In his very first assignment at Google, then,

It was 2010, and in his very first assignment at Google, Marvin Chow was going into battle with Facebook, which was already a formidable competitor.

Chow was going into battle with Facebook. The prospect was daunting. Facebook was already proving itself a formidable competitor. “The pace was just ridiculous,” Chow said. “I work a lot, and I was just like, this is ridiculous.”

By Google standards, Google+ turned out to be a flop.

User numbers steadily increased—mainly because Google automatically signed people up for the service when they did things like open a Gmail account—but no one was spending much time on the site. It lingered on until 2019, when Google finally, mercifully, shut it down for good. So, yes, a failure. “But I learned a ton,” Chow insisted. Besides, he added, Google+ may have been a bust, but President Obama still used it for a digital fireside chat back in 2013, and it facilitated an important conversation between the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Such is Google’s reach that, even when something doesn’t pan out, it’s still going to have a chance to shine on a global stage.

Thirteen years later, Chow has ascended through the ranks at Google to become the guy that CEO Sundar Pichai depends on for the biggest event of the year. But what’s kept him at the company is more than just his own growing responsibilities, it’s the opportunities he’s had to bring his entire self to the job. For instance, the article that he wrote about his experiences with racism as a boy in New Jersey came about thanks to a Google initiative in which leaders at the company wrote a “diversity narrative.” Chow expected to bang out a quick page and a half that he’d read to his peers. Instead, he said, “I sat down at this table, and it was dark out, and I wrote for like an hour and a half, and I wrote, I don’t know, seven pages. And I was like, all right, well, clearly I had a lot to think about and a lot to write.”

Google has also given him the opportunity to create a resource group for the company’s Asian employees, something that has extended to providing mentorship to some of the employees. “We talk a lot in the group about how do you advance if you’re on the quieter side, particularly the Asians that are expats,” Chow said. “How do you work toward what your strength is? We always say that you can lead in a lot of ways. If you’re a data person, you lead with data. If you’re more introverted, you do better with sending emails, or other kinds of asynchronous communication.” He has also encouraged members of the group to think about how a community is a shared resource—a place where you should put in as much as you hope to get out of it.

Winters, his chief of staff, said Chow has used his status at the company to advocate for changes that are personally meaningful to him. “I think he’s tried to use a lot of his influence to say, What is the right thing here? And I think he got really energized by the impact and by the work.”

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N MAY, THE ANNUAL GOOGLE I/O EVENT was dominated by a single topic: artificial intelligence.

During his presentation, Pichai, the Google CEO, used the phrase “AI” so many times that a video of all the times he said it later made the rounds on social media.

Pichai’s fixation with AI was in response to ChatGPT, the generative AI service that exploded onto the internet last November. Generative AI is an artificial intelligence that is capable of responding to user queries in a way that convincingly mimics human language. With some fine-tuning, ChatGPT can craft a reasonable approximation of a cover letter, or even a basic college essay. Its release prompted debates about the future of art, writing, teaching, and many, many other endeavors. Was the program going to save us the trouble of menial tasks, or would it kill the Great American Novel?

Whatever the answers, one thing was clear: Generative AI was going to be a transformative engine for change.

At the Google I/O event, the company released the first public version of its answer to ChatGPT, a program called Bard. The competition may have had a head start, but Pichai blitzed through a long list of reasons that, he insisted, Bard is the superior product. The event was the glittering show it always is, with a DJ, flashy new product demos, and an array of company execs showing off Google’s impressive work. Behind it all, as always, was Chow. The event was built around generative AI this time. Next year it will likely be something else. “There’s not an advancement to mankind that has happened in the last fifteen to twenty years that didn’t involve Google,” Chow said. Don’t believe him? Just try to get through a week without using a Google product. The company’s core mission continues to be to help people, Chow said, whether that’s through video chatting during a pandemic, researching cancer treatments, or maybe, someday, going to Mars. “There is always,” he said, “going to be a new technology that’s going to help people do more, you know?” n s u m m e r 20 23 v bc m

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The Change Agent The pandemic was a long and grueling reminder of the feelings of distress and voicelessness that nurses can sometimes experience.

Now Aimee Milliken, who joined Boston College last year, is helping the Connell School train nurses to confront these challenges.

BY BILL DONAHUE PHOTOGRAPHS BY LEE PELLEGRINI

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“I didn’t come into nursing to feel like I’m torturing people to death,” Aimee Milliken thought to herself.

It was 2009. Milliken, twenty-two at the time and just graduated from college, was working at Concord Hospital, in New Hampshire, and caring for an elderly woman whose condition was dire. “She wasn’t interactive anymore,” recalled Milliken, now an associate professor of the practice at BC’s Connell School of Nursing. “She’d been in the intensive care unit for a long time, and she was not making progress. And now she was on a ventilator.” The patient was suffering from the condition anasarca, or body-wide swelling, and “any little puncture wound would just seep as I gave her a bed bath.”

The woman’s family had decided, earlier that day, to keep the patient plugged into life support, and this disturbed Milliken. “She was unable to give words to her pain,” the nurse remembered, “and I worried that we were not doing our best by her in terms of her dignity.” Milliken asked herself, Why is the family doing this? And she had no real answers, in part because she was working at night and had little interaction with the patient’s family.

Milliken just kept working by the woman’s bedside. She didn’t yet know how to identify it, but she was experiencing a problem that plagues many nurses. It’s called moral distress. That’s a term that the ethicist Andrew Jameton minted in 1984, thinking of nurses. Milliken has since refined the concept. Moral distress, she wrote in one journal article, is the anguished feeling nurses get when they try to “do the right thing for patients under conditions of ambiguity or when obstructions occur.”

At thirty-five, Milliken is already one of the nation’s top experts on moral distress—and, more generally, on nursing ethics. She harbors a nuanced, authoritative understanding of what it’s like to be a nurse in a system where doctors’ voices get priority and where all the problems that our society delivers to the medical system—racism, social inequity, limited resources—can come crashing down on each life-or-death decision. She learned hard lessons as she tended to patients and, later, at BC, where she earned her PhD in nursing in 2017. When Covid struck, she was at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, serving as the executive director of the Ethics Service. Now, in the wake of the pandemic, which crowded hospitals and caused such 40

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havoc in medicine that roughly 30 percent of all nurses left the profession, her essential message—that nurses need training on ethical matters and a say in ethical decisions—is in high demand.

This spring, Milliken was the keynote speaker at two medical conferences, one hosted by Duquesne University, the other by Dartmouth-Hitchcock, a leading medical provider in northern New England. With her fellow BC nursing professor Pamela Grace, she published Clinical Ethics Handbook for Nurses last year. As Grace sees it, Milliken is helping drive “a growing trend which sees nurses’ voices being heard more, especially as it relates to ethics. They have something to say that hasn’t always been listened to: They get to hear patients’ stories and see what’s going on with families.”

Milliken is that rare scholar who’s at once deeply familiar with the ethical theory of Immanuel Kant and with how to change the sheets on a hospital bed while barely disturbing the patient lying in it. Nancy Berlinger, a researcher at The Hastings Center, a New York–based bioethics think tank, calls her a “rock star,” explaining, “There’s nobody who’s better at blending the practical and the theoretical.” In 2020, when The Hastings Center was tasked with shaping “ethical frameworks” tailored for the response to Covid, Berlinger enlisted Milliken’s help. “She can tell me about reality,” Berlinger said. “She really understands the rhythms of a nurse’s work. She knows that nurses aren’t just robots or algorithms, and she’s very attuned to the fact that you can have a wonderful plan that just doesn’t work in practice.”

Connell School of Nursing Dean Katherine Gregory, who is the former associate chief nursing officer at the Brigham, worked closely with Milliken at the hospital and sees her as keenly attuned to the political dynamics framing today’s nursing world. “People died in the Covid pandemic not because of their genetic code,” Gregory said, “but because of their zip code. They died because they were marginalized. Aimee understands that, and she understands that none of the complex problems hospitals now grapple with can be placed in a silo. They need to be addressed by interdisciplinary teams, and she’s skilled and comfortable working with such teams, with both nurses and doctors.”

It was for these reasons, among others, that Gregory recruited Milliken to BC. As Gregory sees it, the nurse ethicist was the perfect hire in a fraught post-pandemic world awash in questions about understaffed hospitals and unequal access to health care. “At a Jesuit institution like BC,” Gregory said, “ethics is the cornerstone of the education we provide.”

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n a cold April afternoon,

thirty-five nurse practitioners in training, all graduate students in the Connell School, met for a Nursing Ethics class that Milliken was teaching with Fr. Richard Ross, S.J. At the lectern, Milliken cogitated aloud on how health care authorities might fairly distribute limited medical resources such as respirators and personal protective equipment. “I could do that by a lottery, by putting everyone’s name in a hat,” she said. “Or can we say, ‘Let’s look at who’s going to live the longest?’ Can we look at things like kidney function and at whether people have hypoglycemia and diabetes?”

Deirdre Callahan, a student working as a registered nurse, had concerns about the latter approach. “That ignores historical inequities,” she said, “like the racism that has impacted the health of Black people in America.”

Eventually, Milliken noted that sometimes medical decision makers address Callahan’s concerns by invoking an “area deprivation index” that ranks census blocks based on socioeconomic conditions. “If your neighborhood scores highly for deprivation,” she said, “you may actually get a bump up. You may get more access to resources.”

When I talked to Callahan after class, she said, “I like the way Aimee points out how we can act as advocates. If nurses can find ways to make changes, I think that would reduce their frustration.” But, Callahan added, “Advocacy won’t fix everything. We also need to bring new nurses into the profession.”

It’s true that hospital staffing shortages will likely soon worsen: A 2022 survey found that up to 47 percent of all US health care workers plan to leave their positions by 2025. And Milliken, in her neat, uncluttered Maloney Hall office, explained how Covid has brought her profession to such a perilous spot. “For a long time,” she said, her tone reflective and laced with care, “there was this sense of, ‘Look, let’s just get to the vaccine and everything will be okay.’ Then, when we had the vaccine, there was quickly a shift to ‘Why aren’t things back to normal yet?’” The vaccine didn’t immediately return us to normal, in part, because early in the pandemic, people couldn’t get the

treatment they needed for longer-term illnesses—cardiac disease, for example, and cancer. With the vaccines widely disseminated, those patients began filtering into hospitals for the delayed care they required—along with people who’d decided against vaccinating and were, as a result, suffering severe Covid symptoms.

“There was a logjam,” Milliken said. And often nurses took the blame for it: “We went from being ‘Healthcare Heroes’ to being something like lepers.” And today, with so many nurses quitting, “patients can’t get the care they need,” she lamented, “so they’re stuck in their beds in the ICU. And other people can’t be admitted from the emergency department into those ICU beds.”

The health care system, she continued, “is a really stressful place to be right now.” In 2020, she personally experienced all of its stressors in undiluted form. She was pregnant with her first child that year, and also just starting out as the director of ethics at Brigham and Women’s. No longer working bedside, this new role put her at the forefront of a developing field that sees practitioners stepping into medicine’s most conflictual cases and helping doctors, nurses, and families reach decisions on how to proceed.

With the hospital’s resources strapped by Covid, she found herself asking families to reckon with grim questions like, “If your mom doesn’t respond to life support after five days, can we reconsider?”

Milliken handled five to ten cases at a time. It would have been an excruciating workload under normal circumstances, but amid the pandemic, she said, “We were operating in a war zone and in a complete vacuum of information, without a vaccine. We didn’t know about the natural history of the disease, and we didn’t know how to take care of people who were sick. We didn’t know how contagious it was and we weren’t sure we had enough medical resources.” Milliken worked with others at the Brigham to shape crisis standards of care that delineated how the hospital might ration ventilators, dialysis machines, and ICU beds. “We never actually needed to implement that process,” she said, “but just in the planning, I was experiencing a lot of moral distress. You name a symptom of stress, and I was experiencing it. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about work, and there was this tension between needing to be there to support my colleagues and my protective parental instinct.”

Milliken relieved her stress in part by strolling around her neighborhood with her husband. But these walks came at such a traumatic time that in early 2021, after the birth of her son, they proved haunting. “As the sun came out and the snow melted and the birds started chirping,” she said, “well, those are usually really exciting things for me, but I started getting anxious, and I realized I was experiencing PTSD. The change in the season was triggering me.” s u m m e r 20 23 v bc m

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W

hen she was eight years

old and cavorting about on her family’s deck in Madbury, New Hampshire, Aimee Milliken fell six feet down onto concrete, breaking her arm so badly that her ulna stuck through the skin. As she spent the next three weeks at nearby Wentworth-Douglass Hospital, the broken bone grew infected. Her muscles swelled until they were painfully constricted by the surrounding fascia, and at one point, when she was all alone in her room, a doctor came in and told her that he might need to amputate.

That first deep dive into the medical world wasn’t just traumatic. It was fascinating for Milliken, and she engaged her doctors in nuanced conversations about the gentamicin beads they implanted into her arm for antibiotic purposes.

A fascial surgery helped save the limb, and when she returned home, her mother, Barb Milliken, recalled, “She’d watch surgeries on the Discovery Channel while eating and not feel like it was disgusting. When she went to a dinner at school in sixth grade and there was a salmon laid out, she was really intrigued by the eyeballs.”

Still, Milliken, whose left arm still bears a long, stitched scar from her fasciotomy, said it wasn’t the surgeons who most impacted her. “It was the nurses at the hospital who were my buddies,” she explained. “They supported me and cared for me. They let my mom sleep in the room’s second bed the whole time I was there, and when I asked them to burn my toast—I liked it extra crispy—they just started giving me burnt toast every morning.”

Milliken went on to study nursing at the University of New Hampshire. Upon graduation, she started at the ICU in Concord and found herself facing a dynamic that still prevails: Even as patients languished on life support, their prospects for survival bleak, their families insisted on keeping them alive. Today, Milliken understands that this was happening because Americans often lack ethical vocabulary. “We don’t do a good job talking about death in this country,” she said. “It’s hard for us to say, ‘Hey, Dad, what should I do if something catastrophic happens?’ Because he’ll probably just say, ‘Let’s just cross that bridge when we get there.’” Even when patients prepare advanced directives, the documents often mean little. “They might not discuss them,” Milliken explained, “so their family doesn’t know the context behind the decisions. And so there’s this weight of responsibility that falls onto the surrogate decision makers. No one can ever feel like they gave up on dad.”

Working in the ICU, Milliken felt so alienated from the values of compassionate care she’d been taught as an undergrad that she decided that nursing was in need of

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structural change. So in 2011 she began pursuing a master’s in nurse management at Yale. While in New Haven, she took a class on ethics. “A light bulb went off,” she said.

“It was like, ‘Oh my God, they’re talking about the sort of cases that bothered me and there’s language for it.’ So I decided at that point to focus on ethics.”

At Yale, Milliken helped the Hastings Center shape guidelines on end-of-life care. Then, when she came to Boston College to pursue a PhD, she wrote her dissertation on nurses’ ethical awareness, working with Larry Ludlow, a professor in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, to develop an Ethical Awareness Scale. This tool assesses nurses’ readiness by asking them thirty-three questions, such as whether restraining an intubated patient “always has” or “may have ethical implications.”

In Boston, Milliken worked in local hospitals, often on ethically fraught cases. In 2013, when two terrorists planted two homemade bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring hundreds, Milliken was the charge nurse overseeing two colleagues tasked with caring for the one surviving bomber— nineteen-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who arrived at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center with severe wounds sustained during a shootout with the authorities. He stayed there for a week, watched over day and night by police, as his victims were treated in a separate unit at the hospital.

“Talk about moral distress,” Milliken said. “The whole city had been impacted and suddenly we became the epi-

center of the fallout. We felt at once appalled by the behavior of our patient and committed to providing him with excellent care. There was an overwhelming sense of sadness to the moment, but also a pride that we were able to come together as a hospital and a city to create an environment where he could get the care he needed and the authorities could be there as they needed to be there to move him on to the next step in the process.”

Milliken is always striving toward the order and civility that prevailed in Boston after those 2013 bombs went off.

She doesn’t acquiesce to chaos. Rather, she tries to understand it and to come up with a pragmatic course of action.

In one 2022 paper, she meditates on the “increasing frustration and anger” nurses were feeling toward unvaccinated patients. Then, even as she empathizes with her weary colleagues, she insists that they must transcend the “culture of blame” and “give attention to the full range of human experiences and…respond with an attitude of respect toward both those who hold to anti-vax preferences…and those who are vaccine hesitant.” Because nurses working in the Covid-19 ICU “may not understand the potential impacts of social determinants on vaccine decision-making,” she continues, a proactive colleague “could help them ‘connect the dots’ between issues such as public education, housing, urban development, and vaccination tendencies.”

Milliken believes that today’s nurses can only feel agency if they take action—if, that is, they see caring as not just a bedside act but a fight to remake “the context in which care is provided,” she said. “Even if you’re working sixty hours a week, you can follow the news and vote and maybe participate in research and scholarship. Pick research questions that impact your patients and your working environment.” From there, she summed up her role educating and training nurses at BC: “We have to craft clinicians who get involved,” she said, “and we need to give them a really solid foundation in ethics, so that they can all be ambassadors with a toolkit of ethical knowledge.”

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n some ways, the future of nursing

boils down to numbers. To stay viable, the medical system needs more nurses, Milliken told me during our final meeting, which happened over Zoom as she hunkered down at home in a brightly painted room scattered with toys. “You can see my son’s fire truck behind me,” she said, beaming. “He’s two-and-a-half now. He knows everything about trucks.”

Transitioning, Milliken explained that she’s been working in hospitals since she was a sophomore in college. “And

we’ve always been talking about an impending nursing shortage,” she said. “Then Covid became this accelerant where the ‘impending’ shortage turned into an actual acute, right-now problem. And so I think a lot of people are trying to think of creative solutions. Meanwhile, Covid has drawn a lot of people to the helping professions. If we change the profession quickly enough, we will be able to retain the newcomers.”

Change will come, Milliken is convinced, if nurses are given a voice—and also if the rest of us proffer a little care to these caretakers. “Nurses are feeling burnt out,” she said.

“They’re feeling drained, and people are doing a lot of work around resilience. They’re saying, ‘If you’ve experienced something stressful, go do yoga. Download Headspace [a meditation app] and do some mindfulness work.’ My challenge with those sorts of interventions is that they’re very individually focused.”

The problem, Milliken said, is that “moral distress is really a system-level problem, which interventions targeted at the individual are ineffective at addressing.” So, in March, Milliken took a more systemic approach, coorganizing a daylong workshop at BC entitled “Using the Liberal Arts to Explore and Heal from Moral Distress.”

The twenty or so participants discussed what causes moral distress and how to mitigate it, not only in nursing but in other caring fields such as social work, theology, and teaching. Then the group took in performances from both a modern dance troupe and a BC a capella ensemble. The intent, Milliken explained, was to “provide a multi-modal immersive experience where, in community, people could work through the feelings and emotions.”

The workshop was just part of Milliken’s larger quest to build a “moral community” for nurses. “We need to create spaces for ethical discussion,” she said. “We need to assemble groups in hospitals—not just nurses but physicians as well—to talk about difficult cases. People need to be able to feel safe saying, ‘That was distressing.’ We need to create a community in which disagreement is normalized and everyone feels comfortable speaking up.” She paused—maybe a second of silence, and I became aware, suddenly, of how swiftly her considered words had been rushing at me, and of how her hungry idealism seems never to sleep. Then she stated the obvious. “We’re not there yet,” she said, “but I’m trying very hard to get us there.” n Bill Donahue is a writer living in New Hampshire.

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Class Notes // Alumni News & Notes

Growing up is hard We hope this helps What’s the right gift to bring to a wedding?

Where can I meet new friends?

Hang on, you’re telling me I have to cook?

How often should I wash my jeans?

The struggle is real, and growing up can be hard. Living away during college eases the transition from adolescence into full-blown adulthood, yet some life lessons are learned only through experience. Enter youngalum.bc.edu—a one-stop shop offering recent Boston College grads lifehacks and advice as well as platforms and networks that keep them connected to their classmates and the Heights.

“As opposed to disjointed threads, groups, emails, etc., it just seemed to make sense to create a website to host all things young alumni and ensure we are staying engaged,” says Zac Basile ’18, co-chair of the 5th Reunion committee and member of the GOLD (graduates of the last decade) Leadership Council, a group that was influential in making this resource a reality.

“The site is a hub for any and all alumni information, is very easy to navigate, and is always up to date. It is certainly something that I leverage and enjoy checking in on.”

Visitors to the Young Alumni site are able to view upcoming events and explore benefits available to them as valued members of the BC family, including the Eagle Exchange career network, continuing education opportunities, special discounts, and more.

EVERY NIGHT? FOR, LIKE, EVER?!

Are you a recent grad interested in receiving Adulting to your inbox?

Visit bc.edu/youngalumsub

They are also invited to participate in alumni affinity groups and local chapters and to share news about their lives through a class note.

Still, how do young alumni get answers to life’s burning questions, like the ones above?

BC Young Alumni features a dedicated section with links exploring a wide range of topics like filing taxes, traveling on a budget, meal prep, and setting up a winning LinkedIn profile. Periodically, these articles, podcasts, videos, and other media are curated and distributed through an informal companion newsletter exclusively for young alumni and appropriately titled “Adulting.”

As young alumni venture further away from the nest, BC plans to be right alongside, helping them gracefully soar into their next adventures. By starting off on the right foot, these alumni will recognize the value of their degree long after graduation and, ultimately, BC will benefit, too. Haydn White ’18, co-chair of the 5th Reunion committee, is excited about this forward momentum.

“I feel cared for as an Eagle in the greater BC community,” she says. “I look forward to seeing what else our young alumni cohort is able to do to cause lasting positive change.”

Adulting (v): to do grown-up things and hold responsibilities, such as a 9–5 job, a mortgage/rent, a car payment, or anything else that makes one think of grown-ups.

Source: urbandictionary.com

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b c m v s u m m e r 2 0 23

Alumni Class Notes STAY CONNECTED Submit your news and updates for inclusion in Class Notes at bc.edu/classnotes Follow us on social media bc.edu/socialmedia View upcoming chapter, class, and affinity group events at bc.edu/alumni To get the latest info on programming and to stay in touch with your BC family, update your profile in our alumni directory at bc.edu/update Some alumni notes have been edited for length and clarity. To view the full notes, visit bc.edu/bcmnotes or scan this code

summer his family submitted an article to Boston College Magazine about his Habitat Golden Hammer award. He was excited to see the article in print. The year 2022 was a very good one for Mike, as he was blessed with two new great-grandsons and got to celebrate his 95th birthday with over 40 family members at his house in Falmouth. Class correspondent: G. Warren Lewis // gwlewis4@gmail.com

1952

George Cyr lost his wife, Sheila, after almost 50 years of married bliss, an irreplaceable loss. However, the Lord provides, and over the years, not having children of their own, they became very close to their neighbors and their children. They became members of their family, celebrating marriages, births, and deaths, and one of their young men and his wife became close to George and his wife. Last week, George celebrated his 92nd birthday with a luncheon for this great young couple and their family.

Class correspondent: George Cyr // cyriousone@aol.com

1954

1945

“The Case of the Illustrious Banker”

by John McAleer ’45, MA’49, was published in the mystery anthology Edgar and Shamus Go Golden, released in December 2022. His son Paul ’87, MBA’05, discovered the 85-year-old handwritten manuscript among his father’s papers. Professor McAleer taught English literature at BC from 1947 to 2003.

He was one of the English department’s most distinguished and prolific authors, winning the Edgar Allan Poe award and the New England History Society award and receiving a Pulitzer nomination. The book is co-edited by his son Andrew ’90.

1950

Anthony Michael “Mike” Briana passed away suddenly in December 2022. Last

Betty Hannon sends greetings from the San Francisco Bay Area. She’d love to host a gathering in Bel Marin Keys, just 20 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge and also very close to Sonoma County.

She’s been blessed to live to such a great age and still do most of the things she loved when she was young, including lap swimming at the local Y. When it’s a bit warmer, she’ll be swimming outside her house in the salt water. Join her to chat and catch up on life. Class correspondent: John Ford // jrfeagle1@gmail.com

1956

Cathy Hickey skipped two weeks of winter weather with her daughter, Naomi, and her family at her beautiful home in Puerto Rico, “Casa Naniki.” The week after, she met up with the intrepid Gail O’Donnell, then off to Albany where Naomi was being honored by the state senator for Women’s History Month. Big hugs to all; she wishes everyone lived closer. // Norbert Michaud ’56, MA’57, and wife Edie have moved from Baltimore to Riderwood Senior Living in Silver

COURTESY OF NORBERT MICHAUD ’56, MA’57

Spring. They’re expecting two additional great-grandchildren and are excited their daughter is moving from Tampa to their area with her two children for a job. // Florence Gosselin has been retired from nursing since 1994, yet continues to stay active with volunteering in a local hospital system a few hours a week. She enjoys playing cards and bingo, being with other retirees, and always loves to hear from BC Eagle friends! Class correspondent: Frank Higgins // higgs92@comcast.net

NC 1957

Marion Sullivan Lucy and husband Paul are enjoying retirement by the sea in York Harbor, Maine, and looking forward to their 59th wedding anniversary. They are delighted that all seven grandchildren are now living in Massachusetts. // Barbara Lowe Eckl has planned a trip with her husband, Winston, and son John to Indonesia in May—a 15-hour trip.

Barbara and her husband’s 60th wedding anniversary falls on St. Joseph’s Feast day and they will celebrate later at the Half Moon in Jamaica, Barbara’s home country. Barbara also reports the passing of Norma Parchment McCarthy NC’55.

Class correspondent: Connie LeMaitre // lemaitre.cornelia@gmail.com

1958

65th Reunion, June 2023 Bob Johnson turned 87 in January. He lives in Hyannis with his wife, Brenda, and retired from active portfolio research in a small cap mutual fund five years ago (finally). He retired from being the su m m e r 20 23 v bcm

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Class Notes

third year. He will teach a course this summer at the Truro Center for the Arts entitled “Writing Your Own Memoir, A Path to a Brighter Future.” He intends to stay active indefinitely.

NC 1958

COURTESY OF JEAN CROWLEY ’58

chairman of the HOA three years ago. He is healthy, but his knees talk back to him; sometimes they yell. BC has made incredible progress over the years and is a crown jewel, hats off to everyone involved. // Jean Crowley is enjoying her family and afternoon naps in her retirement. She became a greatgrandmother in August 2022, when her oldest grandchild had a baby girl, Odette. She splits her time between her daughter’s home in Arlington, Virginia, and the Outer Banks, North Carolina.

Jean is grateful she has stayed in touch with her classmate, Joan Keenan Barry, who remains her forever friend. // Larry Ruttman, JD’58, recently celebrated his 92nd birthday. He lives in Brookline with his wife of 59 years, Lois. He still practices some law but works full time at his second calling of writing. He has published two books and a short memoir entitled My Eighty-Two Year Love Affair with Fenway Park and has two more on the way out; one on classical music, Intimate Conversations: Face to Face with Matchless Musicians, and his memoir, Larry Ruttman, A Life Lived Backwards.

His 2013 book, “American Jews and America’s Game,” was named the best baseball book in America for that year by Sports Collectors Digest. Larry was elected a fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society. His papers have been collected by the New England Genealogical and Historical Society and the Jewish Heritage Center. Larry’s podcast, Larry Ruttman, A Life Lived Backwards, One Man’s Life, is now in its 46

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65th Reunion, June 2023 Sheila Hurley Canty keeps busy with needlepoint, canasta, line dancing, book club, and once a month “sip and sew” with her sisters. She and John plan to go to Florida this year. // Jo Kirk Cleary is sorry not to be able to attend the Reunion. A grandson is graduating from college and the occasion is a family reunion. She sends blessings and love to the Class of ’58. She thanks all for the four wonderful years, the education, and the memories. // Gail McDonough Sullivan will be returning home for the summer around the beginning of June.

All is well with Gail and her family, and she looks forward to seeing many at the 65th Reunion. // Mary Jane Egan English sends love to all. She misses the get togethers the locals had at the Wellesley College Club. There was always a lot of catching up to do. She keeps in touch with Joan Sextro and Sue Fay Ryan. She can’t believe it is the Reunion year and wonders if anyone is coming. // Judith Young Runnette reports that after living in Darien, Connecticut, for over 30 years, she moved from a house to a condo in Norwalk, Connecticut, and now after 27 years she is moving back to Darien to a new apartment complex that has an elevator and a garage and is all on one floor. She is delighted with her new situation. She was a homeowner for too long and is happy now to be a renter without the worry of fixing anything. // Patty Peck Schorr is looking forward to seeing her classmates at the Reunion.

Following that, she and 25 family members will be traveling to Ireland to visit family and to celebrate Dave and Patty’s 65th wedding anniversary.

In September, they will celebrate her grandson Tim’s wedding to Julia Canty in Dennis on the Cape. Class correspondent: Patty Peck Schorr // dschorr57@verizon.net

1959

The year 2022 was a good one for James E. Butler and his wife, Maureen. In January, they traveled to Disney World to see their daughter Kerry sing in the Disney Broadway series at Epcot. They returned to Disney World in February to the Wide World of Sports, where their granddaughter, Emily Smith, was a cheerleader for Scarsdale High School in a competition. For the first time, the school won in their division. In April, James was lucky to celebrate his 91st birthday. Yikes! Before Covid, their daughter Kerry was performing in the Broadway musical Beetlejuice, which had to close but reopened in 2022, and she rejoined the cast in her role as Barbara.

They are currently in Venice, Florida, living the American dream, enjoying life, and playing tennis three days a week.

Stay healthy everyone, keep punchin’. // Bob Paquette retired from dental practice in 2007. He lives in Florida between November and May and on Prince Edward Island, Canada, May to November. He is awaiting his seventh great-grandchild. // Jane Steinthal is sending love to all ’59ers! A year and a half ago, Jack experienced a stroke!

Physically he is good, but their lives have changed. Grandchild #10, Hannah, graduated with honors from NYU in 2022 and is applying to med school. Daisy will graduate from Georgetown SFS and Henry from Lafayette. Only four more to go! All 30 Steinthals were in Texas for Courtney Kent’s wedding to Brian Stephenson; only 14 more to go! She feels very blessed to have a large, ever-growing family that is healthy as they carve their careers and future. Friends are dear to her heart. Class correspondent: William Appleyard // bill.appleyard@verizon.net

1960

Jim Reilly reports all’s well in Cohasset.

He is enjoying retirement in good health, which is a blessing at this age. He enjoys golf, book group, and social events at Hatherly Country Club in North Scituate.

He is happy to have his three kids and five grandchildren who come by frequently, especially in the summer. He is also happy to report he has been elected president of Cohasset’s OLD GOATS, a group of 40 retired Cohasset gentlemen

from all walks of life. // Paul J. Rigazio has been retired for over 25 years after a successful financial career. He recently moved to a condo and is enjoying life with his wife of 54 years. He just returned from a weekend of skiing at Wildcat in New Hampshire, surrounded by three granddaughters and two daughters.

He also enjoys being Abe Lincoln in his daughter’s third grade class in Andover.

He is active in the town and the local Knights of Columbus council. God Bless BC. // Gerald Finnegan, S.J., is a senior priest here at St. Ignatius and would enjoy hearing from anyone from his time. He graduated from BC in 1960 and 1961. He also graduated from Boston College High School in 1954. Class correspondent: John R. McNealy // jmcnealy@juno.com

NC 1960

Lennie Coniglio DeCsepel is active in her community, serving as vice president of the Greenwich Symphony Orchestra. // Ann Blunt Condon continues to practice as a psychotherapist on Cape Cod. // Pat McCarthy Dorsey, Carole Ward McNamara, and Elaine Holland Early met Berenice Hackett Davis on her arrival from Naples, Florida, for lunch.

Berenice came to see her granddaughter Ava perform in a Westport HS theater production. Carole plans to be busy with bridal showers and weddings for her three grandsons. Class correspondent: Patricia Winkler Browne // enworb1@verizon.net

1961

Nick Moriarty and his wife of 57 years, Janet, are enjoying a winter reprieve in St. Martin in the Caribbean. They moved back to Massachusetts to Southgate at Shrewsbury to be close to family. // Jane Cunniffe survived the pandemic with no problems. She continues to learn more about painting and spends time helping friends understand their medical problems and medications. She visits Boston twice a year to renew her accent. She is happy to be 89 and still on her own. Class correspondent: John Ahearn // jjaeagle@ hotmail.com

NC 1961

Missy Rudman has been NC’61 Class Correspondent for the past “umpteen

years.” // Beth Good Wadden is still teaching yoga, but was in a play recently. // Gael Sullivan Daly has been meeting up with relatives and friends.

Class correspondent: Missy Rudman // newtonmiz@aol.com

1962

The A&S Class of 1962 included the first Geology majors. They numbered less than a dozen. Joe McKniffe is wondering if anyone is still out there? // Stephen McKenna has finally “thrown in the towel,” after more than 45 years of practicing law in New York and the Washington, DC area, so he can spend more time at his beachfront home on the Outer Banks of North Carolina in a little town named Duck. Most fortunately, his son, Matthew ’92, a surgeon, and his beautiful bride, Patty ’92, live nearby so they get to spend some precious family time. // Life continues onward for Kathleen Beaton. // Ronald Dyer, the founder of the Falmouth Veterans Collaborative, spoke recently about the volunteer work he continues to do as commander of the DAV and quartermaster of the VFW. // Bill Novelline died soon after his daughter, Tricia, died. He is survived by his wife, Eileen, and sons Tom, Brian, and Andrew. Bill graduated with a degree in economics and was the manager of the BC baseball team, traveling two years with the team for the College World Series. He founded Abbot Financial Management, which he managed with his son Andrew. Bill’s friends loved to spend time with him. He was loyal, generous, kind, always with a story to tell. He loved his BC. // John “Jack” MacKinnon has four grandchildren at BC: one senior, two sophomores, and one graduate student. There is also a freshman at BC High. Jack is looking forward to traveling to Lourdes for a week with his son Kevin. // Eileen Faggiano enjoys visiting with her first great-grandchild, Isla Grace. She is a happy baby, which helps parents Lauren and Steve manage their work schedules. // Ronald Campanelli, known to his friends as Ron, has passed away. He focused on studies and played hockey at BC. After graduation, he served in the US Marine Corps and graduated from Suffolk Law School. His successful career was spent working in the family

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business, Campanelli Companies. Ron leaves his wife, Mary Margaret, and family of four daughters, their husbands, and grandchildren. His classmates offer their condolences. Class correspondent: Eileen Faggiano // efaggiano5@gmail.com

1963

60th Reunion, June 2023 Fran(cie) Lamey Ludwig, “rewired” science teacher, is now co-chair of the Boston Catholic Climate Movement. After the recent death of her beloved husband of 50 years, she is slowly returning to political advocacy and engagement in Laudato Si’ work, including actions against banks that fund fossil fuel projects. Her greatest joys are her four grandchildren and their parents. // Jim Cunningham retired to Vero Beach, Florida. He has four grandchildren. His granddaughter graduated from Duke with honors and his grandson is applying to BC. His daughter retired as a detective with Suffolk County Police. He is active in VA after serving with the 25th infantry in Vietnam. // Jim Norton attended the BC High reception, followed by the BC alumni gathering at Boston Beer Garden and the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Naples, Florida. A bustling, busy, maroon-and-gold BC social week. // Wayne Budd was featured in a fascinating TV football film, Lou Montgomery: A Legacy Restored. Lou Montgomery ’41 was BC’s first Black football player. Class correspondent: Ed Rae // raebehan@verizon.net

1964

Marshall Hoffman and his public relations company, Hoffman & Hoffman Worldwide, announced new global pledges of $32 billion to provide medical services for mothers, children, and adolescents. // Dan J. Tannacito is professor emeritus at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where he taught and directed graduate programs for 36 years. He published two books in 2022: Autoethnographic Perspectives on Multilingual Lives and his memoir and family history, In My Life. Dan resides with his wife, Sumon, and lab in Salem, Oregon. // Paul Sullivan is retired and living in the On Top of the World Retirement Community in Ocala, Florida, su m m e r 20 23 v bcm

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Class Notes

enjoying life with his wife of 58 years, Donna. He also enjoys golf, guitar, banjo, ukulele, writing, and just chilling. // Helen and Lester MacLaughlin have their first great-grandchild, Bo MacLaughlin.

1965

Ed Barry looks forward to being able to talk with his BC friends. It has been such a long time. // John Feeney and his wife, Laura, had their first grandchild, a girl, in September, thanks to their elder son and his wife. They are hoping for similar luck from their younger son, a BC 2011 grad. In 2013, John retired as an ambassador from the Foreign Service.

Laura was recently appointed to Secretary Blinken’s advisory board. They split their time between homes in Washington, DC, and Boston, Virginia. They still travel abroad on occasion. // Patricia and Neal Harte were at the Laetare Sunday Mass in Naples. They joined classmate Jeff and his wife, Mary Somers. Later in March, they were joined by Jim and his wife, Sarah Ann Mahoney, and the three couples had dinner together. Frank Previte was at a BC Trustee meeting that weekend.

Class correspondent: Patricia Harte // patriciaharte@me.com

1966

Richard E. Chiozzi has been honored by the National Financial Planning Association as a final nominee to receive the prestigious P. Fain Kemp, Jr. Lifetime Achievement Award for 2022, the highest individual award for lifetime achievement granted by the profession. // Jane McDonough is going to Ireland to celebrate her 80th birthday! // Joe “JX” Meehan is retired and living in Fort Lee, New Jersey. His daughter, Meghan ’00, has two sons, James (six) and Cooper (four). Joe’s son, Joe, lives in Pound Ridge, New York. His two sons are Alrik (seven) and Eskil (five).

NC 1966

Katherine Byron Kahr, NC’66, MSW’68, and her husband retired, sold the family house in Providence, and landed at their little cottage in South Chatham on Cape Cod. Last winter, they bought a condo in Bend, Oregon. The big draw is their son, Tony ’04 and his wife, 48

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Annie ’05, and their wonderful children, Madlyn (nine) and Max (seven). From Bend, they can catch a two-hour flight to Los Angeles where their son Byron lives with wife, Molly, and Oona (eight) and Otis (six). It is wonderful to have everyone in the same time zone. In May, they headed back to Chatham, where the BC Club is thriving. // Judy McCluskey Flood has passed away. She received a master’s in psychology from Cambridge College and worked as a guidance counselor in the Lowell Public Schools.

She was the founder and past president of the Spindle City Garden Club of Lowell and a longtime communicant of the Immaculate Conception Church in Lowell and the Monastery of St. Clare in Andover. Her husband, Jimmy, died in 2018. She is survived by four children: James III, Catherine, William, and Thomas. Nine classmates attended her funeral. // Jo Bogert Pieper died early in 2023. // This past December, Mary Ryan-Smith and her husband moved from Garden City, New York, to Newton Highlands, 10 minutes away from her daughter and family. She is enjoying learning about gardening in Massachusetts. // Betty Wahn Goletti has written two children’s books: Felisa and the Magic Coqui, about the first female mayor of a capital city in the western hemisphere, and Lindsey and the Jedgar, an adventure which takes place on a fantasy island called Elsinore and turns kids on to the fun of Shakespeare.

Class correspondent: Catherine B. Hurst // catherine.b.hurst@gmail.com

1967

After she retired from her position teaching art to K-8 students at St. Gerard Majella School in Kirkwood, Missouri, Barbara Volk, CSJ, MEd’67, trained to become a docent at the St. Louis Art Museum and tours with visitors, helping them to really look at and enjoy the fantastic works in the collection. She continues to spend time at Nazareth Living Center in South County, St. Louis, working to give them creative ways to express their feelings with one another and others through art. // Bob Zimmerman died after a valiant battle with esophageal cancer. He had contracted polio as a child but never let it stop him. He worked for IBM for 30

years in Buffalo and the Bay Area. Bob owned and ran a wine and cheese shop.

Bob is survived by his wife of over 30 years, Karen. Class correspondent: Charles and Mary-Anne Benedict // chasbenedict@aol.com

NC 1967

Kathy Ohm finally “retired” from years of organizational effectiveness consulting and coaching work. Now she’s looking forward to finding volunteer work to love closer to home. Though they are slowing down, Kathy and her husband headed for Ireland in March. The older she gets, the more deeply she appreciates the years she shared with her peers at Newton— enrichment of self and family and the grounding it provided to serve others well, both professionally and in volunteer work. // Christina Crowley, Kathleen Hegenbart, Maureen Dailey Young, and Paula Lyons decided that mini-reunions were a terrific way to stay connected after renting a home in the Berkshires last June for four days. Christina and Paula traveled to Pittsburgh for another get-together. Maureen promised to introduce them to all the best museums, gardens, and restaurants in her city while they catch up on their lives. // Christina Crowley has been going on her own travels. She was in Morocco and Andalusia delving into Islamic history in North Africa and Spain. She and Kathy Hegenbart were in Wellesley for the event that was prepped by Paula in memory of her husband, Arnie Reisman, described as a memorial service “production!” // Sharie Mullen Welch reported that Mary Feldbauer Jansen’s son Lucas Jansen is creator, writer, and executive producer of the Apple TV series Hello Tomorrow! Sharie thinks classmates will enjoy it! // Richard Prior, husband of Anne Caswell Prior NC’67, P’95, has passed away. He was with her as her faithful assistant when Reunions were first being organized many years ago. Prayers to the family. Class correspondent: Adrienne Free // thefrees@ cox.net

1968

55th Reunion, June 2023 Ken Hackett ’68, HON’06, published The Vatican Code: American Diplomacy in

the Time of Francis. This is a memoir of his four years serving as US Ambassador to the Holy See during the exciting early years of the Francis papacy. Last year, BC asked Ken to speak at the Church in the 21st Century Center. After 40 years working within some of the world’s worst tragedies, Ken and Joan are enjoying serene retirement on Amelia Island, Florida. // Bill Fitzgerald, Steve McCarthy, John Manganelli, Greg Sullivan, and their wives gathered for their traditional annual reunion in Nashville over St. Patrick’s Day weekend. // Joanne Calore Turco and her husband still reside in Wakefield, and their children (Al and Cathy) and their families are nearby as well. // Bill Plunkert and his wife of 49 years, Donna, have moved from the Washington, DC, area to Reedville, Virginia. Although Bill continues much of his spiritual direction work remotely, he now spends more time “on the Rivah” both figuratively and literally—no boats, just kayaks. // Valerie Sowinski Wood went to London and Paris last September. After 16 years, she retired from MGH in December. She is bored staying home, so she’s looking for a part-time job. She had back surgery in March and is hoping to be more mobile.

She is also planning a family vacation this summer, possibly a cruise. Class correspondent: Judith M. Day // jnjday@aol.com

NC 1968

55th Reunion, June 2023 June Davison has been enjoying the Newton College/Boston College Book Club via Zoom led by Pam McGrath ’76. // Betty Barry Sweet designs interiors and has completed over 125 primary residential projects since 1997, including numerous historic register antiques and newly constructed projects in Boston, Newport, and Florida, and has recently been retained to redesign a co-op at the iconic San Remo Tower in NYC. // Betty Downes will not be able to attend the 55th Reunion. She is a member of the International Women’s Forum-New Mexico and will be attending a global conference in Helsinki for that organization. She also enjoys chairing the New Mexico Historic Women Marker Program that celebrates over 400 years of women who shaped New Mexico’s

history. Class correspondent: Jane Sullivan Burke // janeburke17@gmail.com

PMC 1968

Melinda Roemer Barrett has been selected to serve on the Louisiana State Executive Board for PEO, an organization that supports women who wish to take the next step in their educational pursuits. .

1969

Shane Murphy and his wife recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.

They retired seven years ago and are living in the Ft. Mill, South Carolina, area. They enjoy time with their nine grandchildren, five of whom live in the area as well. // Bitsy Vogel Graham and Tim Graham recently passed the third anniversary of their kidney transplant where Bitsy gave Tim a kidney. Both are doing well and are very grateful. // Chuck Klemballa is retired and loving life—living in NYC and traveling with his wife JoAnn. They have 10 grandkids between them and all are within an hour of Manhattan. The 50th anniversary weekend was awesome. It had been 50 years, and seeing some old classmates felt like it was a lot closer than that. // James Cronin has published a new book, Fragile Victory: The Making and Unmaking of Liberal Order. // Michael Barry lives in Chatham with his wife, Dee Shippelhute. Michael is volunteering at the Council on Aging and is semi-retired, still representing estate planning clients from his years of law practice in Framingham. // Jim O’Reilly completed his 43rd year of teaching medicine and law students at the University of Cincinnati. // James J. Foley ’69, JD’74, retired after 47 years as an assistant clerk-magistrate in the Massachusetts court system. His book about the police, A Blue Life: An Inside Look at Policing, was just published. Class correspondent: James R. Littleton // jim.littleton@gmail.com

NC 1969

Please remember Jill Hendrickson Daly on the loss of her daughter, Jen. Jen survived 9/11 only to succumb to pancreatic cancer just before Thanksgiving. // Kathy Hartnagle Halayko opened her beautiful Kiawah Island home to welcome several

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classmates for a week by the ocean.

There was cake by the ocean too, because several 75th birthdays were recognized. Sue Davies Maurer, Bebee Carroll Linder, Carol Romano Tuohey, Polly Glynn Kerrigan, Pam DeLeo Delaney, Jill Hendrickson Daly, Paula Fisher Paterson, and Mary Gabel Costello enjoyed getting together for the first time since Covid began. // Mary Gabel Costello ran into BJ Weber Faller in Akron at an event. BJ told her she had recently reconnected with Jody Cleary, who lives out in California. // Pat Connolly Henry, along with a group of women, filed the first federal wage discrimination suit in Massachusetts. The suit was won, but sadly this nation is backsliding on women’s rights. May we all do what we can for all. Class correspondent: Mary Gabel Costello // mgc1029@aol.com

1970

Bob Begiebing, professor emeritus of English at Southern New Hampshire University, reports that his 10th book has been published by LSU Press. The book joins several other books, two documentary films, a play, a television series, and a conference held at the University of Texas, Austin, in acknowledging the centenary of Norman Mailer’s birth in 1923 and in reassessing his body of work. // Lou Milkowski is happily enjoying retirement with his wife, Gloria, but is far from inactive. He is a commissioner in Beverly Hills and chairs the Rent Stabilization Commission.

He is also a board member of the Beverly Hills Active Group, which provides activities for the mature population. He is watching and hoping to see continued improvement in BC sports. // Jan Geist Krause Greene’s second novel was released in February, the same month as her ninth grandchild was born.

Publisher’s Weekly’s Book Life described The Space Between Dark and Light as “a time-crossed climate fiction story as thrilling as it is urgently relevant.” // Steven Galipeau retired last year as executive director of Coldwater Counseling Center, a nonprofit in Studio City, after almost 40 years. He remains on the board and still has a small private practice. Last year, Lisa Heimann, daughter of Steven’s roommate of two su m m e r 20 23 v bcm

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Class Notes

NC 1971

COURTESY OF STEVE FOGARTY ’71

years at BC, Fred Heimann, retired after many years on the board of directors. // Ed Murray and wife, Mary, finally downsized from their house in Everett.

They moved north to the Riverside section of Haverhill, which is quiet, near everything they need, and surrounded by golf courses. Mary is thrilled to be only five minutes from their daughter, Mary-Liz, in Georgetown. Ed is still tending to some long-term clients but slowing down. // Richard Habecker is still kicking. He is a re-educated architect and still working though fighting off the yokes of aging. He went to the 50th Reunion this past summer. He keeps in touch with Tom Turick and the family of Bob Fiorentino. Richard will be attending some hockey games this year.

He still skates and swims distance, keeps the mind going! He is living the dream in Natick. Class correspondent: Dennis Berry // dennisj.berry@gmail.com

1971

Vince Costello, former BC basketball player, would like to honor Boston Celtic greats Bob Cousy and Bill Russell by naming a local thoroughfare after them.

He shared his idea on the Dan Rea Nightside radio show. He is hopeful government officials will make this happen. // Jim Riordan has been keeping busy in retirement. He and wife, Alice, recently visited England, Scotland, and Wales. He is also a regular essay contributor to Newsday, Long Island’s 50

bcm v su m m e r 20 23

main newspaper. He also attended his 55th reunion at Chaminade high school.

He recently celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary with Alice, who has received many honors for her painting and sculpture work. // Jim “Rocco” Centorino received the Outstanding Educator Award from UChicago in 2021. He and his wife, Susan, moved to Cambria, California, where he released his 10th music album, Notes on a Triangle, a 35+ year project. // Don Weber started a two-year transition to retirement after a 20-year career at Edward Jones as of January. It has been a fabulous ride, and he is looking forward to more travel. // Rosalie Dance, MA’71, completed a PhD at University of Maryland while teaching at Georgetown University and doing teacher training assignments in Africa for the Peace Corps.

In 1998, she left Georgetown to join the mathematics department at the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI). She retired in 2010 and worked as a mentor for high school math teachers. // Mark Lance’s young adult mystery novel, The Weber House, has been released by Atmosphere Press. // Chris and Kevin Fee hosted a lively dinner reception in Bonita Springs, Florida, including Denise and Steve Fogarty, Maureen and Larry Lawler, Renee and Jim Lozier, and Dave Amborski. Next year, they hope to be joined by more ‘71 classmates living or wintering in Southwest Florida. Class correspondent: James R. Macho // jmacho@mac.com

Melissa Robbins is embracing her second chance at life, spending lots of time with her two granddaughters who live in Attleboro, and looking ahead to three trips in 2023. The first will be a week in Iceland with her daughter, Sarah, and her sister, Eileen. The next will be three weeks at her second home in Idaho, fly fishing with her husband, Mike Lombardo. The third will be a river cruise from Paris to Normandy, also with Mike. // Anne Butler is currently living in Naples, Florida, most of the year. Her daughter and two grandchildren live in Miami. Anne spends July and August in East Hampton, New York, where her son and daughter-in-law live. She is interested in meeting with classmates in either location. Anne spends time doing limited work for a public board, on which she has served since 2012, and playing bridge. Sadly, Anne lost her husband, Carlos, to cancer in January of 2022.

Class correspondent: Melissa Robbins // melissarobbins49@gmail.com

1972

Ron Hood, Esq., is retiring from the practice of law. He was a trial attorney with the IRS for 25 years and retired in 2002. For the past 20 years, he had a solo law practice on Cape Cod representing clients with criminal and civil issues with the IRS. His original class was 1968, but after his sophomore year, he enlisted in the US Army for three years. He and his wife, Xiaoni, have three children and two grandchildren. // Four classmates met to attend the BC–Clemson game and tour the facilities. Ed Prisco of Charlotte has retired twice, once as a newspaper executive and once as a football coach.

He continues to coach basketball. Roger Egan of Morristown, New Jersey, is the retired CEO of Marsh and McLennan.

Kevin Begley of Cincinnati is a retired CPA. Joe Waters of St. Louis is a retired corporate executive. // Condolences to friends and family of Coleman Szely, who was the voice of BC basketball on WVBC and later a CPA in Dumont, New Jersey. // Bill Kelly’s daughter, Meredith Kelly ’10, gave birth to his first grandchild. Class correspondent: Lawrence G. Edgar // ledgar72@gmail.com

NC 1972

Diane Vigneau and Jake Britt live on Nantucket, where she is an associate veterinarian at Offshore Animal Hospital.

Diane worked in Cigna’s government relations arm and with Congress on national health policy issues. After a break to care for her son, daughter, and parents, Diane earned her degree from Saint George’s Veterinary School in Grenada at age 61. // Gail Hegarty Fell has survived two years of the Covid-19 pandemic without falling ill. Gail and Greg have three kids, two of whom are married, and most recently a fourth grandchild. Six years ago, Gail and Greg downsized to a home in Rye Brook, New York. Last year, Gail finally realized her dream of owning a pied-a-terre—a one-bedroom cooperative with several amenities—in New York City. // Lisa Greissing hosted Shelley Noone Connolly, Margie Molidor Dooley, Margot Dineen Wilson, and Nancy Brouillard McKenzie for lunch in Bethesda, Maryland. Shelley was in Maryland for a short visit before returning to her home in New Hampshire. // Linda Noselli Kontovounissios and Christos Kontovounissios have lived abroad in Sweden, Australia, Canada, Ukraine, Kosovo, Kazakhstan, and Finland, with Greece as their home base, as Christos was a Greek diplomat. Their son has followed his father into diplomatic service, and their daughter is also in Athens. // Grace Regan Conway and John Conway ’72 live outside Albany.

Their six children and 14 grandchildren are nearby. Her oldest, Grace Clark, is married to Marcia Picotte NC’74’s nephew. The oldest grandchild, Grace (13), is the family’s fifth Grace in a row. In 2005, Grace and Grace Clark opened Gracie’s Apparel and Accessories in Newton Plaza, Latham, New York. // Joyce Andrews Fitzsimmons and her husband, John, live in New York City. For over 30 years, Joyce worked as an advertising executive and now enjoys pursuing other interests. // After living in Dubuque, Iowa, for 31 years, Mary Coan and Greg Paulsen, MD, moved to Frederick, Maryland, in 2020. Now, they have a much easier drive to North Carolina to visit their children and grandchildren. Their Dubuque family

uses Facebook to keep in touch. // Sadly, Maureen McFaull Newcomb passed away on Christmas Day. Her husband, Donald, their son Andrew, and two grandsons survive her. Maureen, a biology major, was a speech language pathologist for many years before she retired. She enjoyed singing in two church choirs and a civic chorale. // Barbara Bolton, a 1972 graduate of the Open Institute of Education at Newton, reports that her classmate John Mayer passed away last September. His wife, two daughters, and two grandchildren survive him. // Jane Donovan de Vries and Lloyd de Vries were on a private guided tour of Israel last November and received news of the early arrival of their second grandchild and first granddaughter, Daisy, to their son, Marc, and daughter-in-law, Jackie. // Suzi Gregory Silvia retired from teaching French and Spanish at Catholic high schools in 2012.

She was department chair often and served on NEASC Committees for reaccreditation. She also taught at Bristol Community College but deferred to working a full-time job and caring for her mother. Suzi and Frank travel here and abroad and love seeing their grandsons. // Ellen Conway Morse just finished a three-year research project documenting the effectiveness of civic education. Her other passion is traveling. Ellen and Weld started to make up for lost travel time this year. They traveled to Ireland last June on their first Rick Steves tour. In the fall, Carolyn Isaak joined them for a self-arranged hiking trip along the Amalfi coast. Class correspondent: Nancy B. McKenzie // mckenzie20817@comcast.net

1973

50th Reunion, June 2023 Mary Ellen and Joe Fitzpatrick ’70 look forward to Commencement when their granddaughter Kailee Anne Fitzpatrick will be the 13th member of their family to graduate from BC. Kailee will join her cousin Lizzie Splaine, also a member of the class of 2023. The family chain of BC graduates started with Dr. Patrick J. Mogan ’40. It includes, among others, Kailee’s father, Matthew S. Fitzpatrick ’93, and Lizzie’s father and mother, Jenny ’90 and Neal Splaine ’90. // Stephen Black met Barbara Flaherty at BC, and they’ve been married for 47

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

years. They have three wonderful sons, Matthew, Andrew, and Keith, and two adorable grandkids. He has enjoyed his career in dentistry where he practiced for 37 years before retiring and working part time at Bristol Community College.

Barbara taught for over 20 years before retiring from Stonehill College. They are currently living the life in Bridgewater, traveling and playing with their grandkids! // Lynn Kelly retired after 29 years as a national certified school nurse.

She spends summers in Ireland with her daughter and family. // Joseph E. Steffano, MBA’73, and his wife, Carole, have been blessed with two greatgrandchildren. // Jim Schlesinger is trying to locate former 9A roommates Mike Walkenstein and Lou Difrancesco.

Please get in touch; Jim wants to catch up! // Katherine McCarthy was awarded The Rita P. Kelleher Alumni Leadership Award from the Connell School of Nursing, for her work in elevating the level of professional school nursing in Massachusetts. She is also a founding member of the Massachusetts School Nurse Research Network. Class correspondent: Patricia DiPillo // perseus813@aol.com

NC 1973

5oth Reunion, June 2023 Patrice Muchowski retired two years ago, and her life is filled with exciting opportunities. She and her husband, David, spend their time between Clearwater, Florida, and Rindge, New Hampshire. They have increased their involvement in the Clearwater community, especially at the local hospital. They began a development company in NH, building beautiful mountain homes. They are enjoying this new venture, which is so different from their careers. Class correspondent: Mimi Reiley Vilord // mimivi@optonline.net

1974

Sil Orlando, MSW’74, has retired after 52 years working in child welfare and mental health in Montreal, New York, and Los Angeles. His last 23 years were spent serving as the CEO of Optimist Youth Homes and Family Services in Los Angeles. // Rosemary Collins Weiss recently retired after 17 years teaching su m m e r 20 23 v bcm

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Class Notes

special education students with learning disabilities. She had a long career teaching in many different placements. // Robert Harnden is happy to announce the adoption of four sons, the marriage of his number three son, and the birth of twins, which now means he celebrates four sons, eight grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He would like to give a shout out to the Catholic Pentecostal people, especially Patrick, who befriended him. // This is Dave Hinchen, MDiv’74,’s 13th year as director of Ignatian Volunteer Corps (IVC) New England. Dave and his wife, Karen, were among the “pilgrims” who successfully walked the 300+ mile Ignatian Camino. // Kathy McGintyDunn was in Cambridge to attend a “Short Course on Nuclear Energy in a Low-Carbon Future.” Kathy is the senior aide to the chair of the Maryland House Environment Committee in Annapolis. // Zane Robinson Wolf, MS’74, PhD, RN, CNE, ANEF, FAAN, is Dean Emerita School of Nursing and Health Sciences and Professor, La Salle University; member of the St. Christopher’s Quality and Patient Safety Committee; board member of the Barbara Bates Center for Study of History in Nursing; and editor of International Journal for Human Caring since 1999. Her recent book is titled Breaching safe nursing practice: Case studies of failures omission, commission, and crimes. Class correspondent: Patricia McNabb Evans // patricia.mcnabb.evans@gmail.com

NC 1974

It was 49 years in the making, but seven friends from Duchesne East met in Marco Island, Florida, in February 2023 to celebrate their septuagenarian birthdays. Trisha Keough Almquist arrived from Rhode Island, Crystal Day from Massachusetts, Deirdre Finn Romanowski from New Jersey, Robbie Grassi Magee from upstate New York, Mary Faith Schilling Saavedra from North Palm Beach, Elise Gaudreau Bradley from Delaware, and Julie Hirschberg Nuzzo from Naples. They have all retired except for Robbie and Deirdre, who work part time. They are grateful to Newton for introducing them as freshmen. // Covid forced Josephine 52

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Shields to retire as executive chef at the Faber Jesuit Community at BC, but she was ready. She is teaching at Brookline Adult Ed: cooking, creative darkroom, and a painting and drawing open studio.

Daughter Isabel is the best roommate Josephine could want. Josephine is in touch with Kym Corbett. Class correspondent: Beth Docktor Nolan // nolanschool@verizon.net

PMC 1974

Kathleen Simmons Dwyer feels compelled to see where her classmates might be now—Kelly, Pam, Leslie, Laura, and others whose names have escaped her! She is living on Long Island and working as a marriage and family therapist. She married Matt in 1989, has two children, and comes to Boston often as many family members are there—she lived there in childhood.

1975

Mark Frey retired following a 35-year career in healthcare. Following retirement Mark traveled to Krakow, Poland, to assist Ukrainian refugees. He is now CEO of GlobalHeart, a charity focused on relief efforts. Mark also crews for the Los Angeles Maritime Institute and has been background acting in film, TV, and commercials. // Tom Anderson, MA’75, had his short story “Custodian” published in the Cambridge-based literary magazine Pangyrus. He also had two punk-folk EP releases in 2022: Girl from Osaka and General Ledger of Lunatics. // Shawn Sheehy’s wife of 28 years, Caroline Rocha Sheehy ’22, graduated from Boston College and the family is proud of her. They moved to Newton near the BC Law School campus.

Shawn also established a probate estate law practice in Newton. // After 35 years in the Orlando area, Joe Zornik moved to Ormond Beach, Florida, last July with wife Pamela and two dogs, only a few minutes from the beach. // After much research, Vincent Quealy completed and self-published his new book, Reflections of an Irish Grandson: A Story of Grandmother Bridget (Meade) Quealy and the Meade family of Miltown Malbay, County Clare, Ireland. // Tom Cannon’s youngest son, Robert, graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University and Officer

Training School and now is a lieutenant in the US Marine Corps. Class correspondent: Hellas M. Assad // hellasdamas@hotmail.com

NC 1975

Laura Zerbinati shared news from Panama noting that she survived Covid-19 twice. She has missed her travels and is looking forward to spending some time in Europe in 2023.

Laura’s Boston memories are close to her heart. // Carol Fitzsimons retired in January from Connecticut Conference of Municipalities (CCM) and is looking forward to having more time to travel, visit friends, and enjoy time in Connecticut. She squeezed in a quick trip to Naples, Florida, to celebrate and is busy filling in her calendar! Class correspondent: Karen Foley Freeman // karenfoleyfreeman@gmail.com

1976

After BC, Paul McElligot received a doctorate in chemistry and an MBA. He worked in the chemical industry, first as a chemist, and rose to research director for over 15 years. He resides in Arizona with his family. He was the CEO of a small company and has taught college for 30 years. He will be retiring in a year and looks forward to trying something new. // Michael Brosnan’s latest book of poetry, Adrift, was just published by Grayson Books. It’s available wherever books are sold. // Doris Pholeric Gruel and her husband Larry have enjoyed retirement in Melbourne, Florida. They love being an important part of their grandchildren’s lives. They are having fun exploring the Space Coast. // Kay Dong, MS’76, who has been retired since October 2019, downsized and moved to Marina Bay, Quincy. Kay was the only Korean student in 1974, but now sees that there are many Korean students, including a few Korean faculty members!

Class correspondent: Gerald B. Shea // gerbs54@hotmail.com

PMC 1976

Nancy Latzanich Smith is so sad Pine Manor is gone.

the tree, she had a plan to get her power back: Laurie chased power company trucks. All is well now.

1978

COURTESY OF KAREN GRACE-BAKER ’77

1977

Mary Morin Zajac recently narrated an audiobook called Jeans on a Beach Day: A Book for the Beautiful Woman Hiding Her Legs. It is a book about a disease called lipedema, which affects 10–11 percent of women worldwide. // Penninah Kanzi wishes to share gratitude to God for still feeling great and blessed. // Cat Sanders Lamkin saw Kamau Burton ’17, the son of her roommate LaVern Mosley Burton, perform with his band, JUICE. Kamau calls her Aunt Cat. The band, formed in Kamau’s freshman year, stopped in Charleston. The Burtons have visited yearly since 1997. // Karen Grace-Baker was recently awarded the Distinguished Instructor Award from the UCLA Extension College counseling department. This award is conferred to less than 2 percent of instructors and recognizes exceptional service and contributions to the UCLA program, students, and the organization. Class correspondent: Nicholas Kydes // nicholaskydes@yahoo.com

45th Reunion, October 2023 Rob Steeg, JD’78, continues to practice real estate law in New Orleans and is co-managing partner of a firm. He is the former chair of the City Planning Commission of New Orleans and is presently a commissioner there. Most recently, he has welcomed his first grandchild, Amelia, into the family. // Lynne Spigelmire Viti, PhD’78, JD’84, has been appointed the first poet laureate of Westwood. // Larry Ehren, MDiv’78, completed his master of divinity at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in 1978. After many years of professional lay ministry in the Roman Catholic Church, he was received and ordained in the Episcopal Church in the last 10 years. He recently completed his doctor of ministry degree in Christian spirituality at Virginia Theological Seminary, one of the oldest and largest Episcopal seminaries. // Kevin Donovan had an eventful year. In late 2022, he and his wife of 41 years retired from the English department at Middle Tennessee State University after 33 years there and moved to Tacoma, Washington, to be close to their grandchildren. His book on King Lear, for the series Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition, has just been published. // Bruce Fador reminds his classmates that the 45th Reunion is coming up this fall and is scheduled for the weekend of

NC 1977

Not planning on a major windstorm and rain to add to her previous plans for necessary repairs to her Nashville, Tennessee home, Laurie Loughlin stepped up to resolve several challenges.

A tree split and severed all the wires to her home. After a tree surgeon removed

COURTESY OF GERRY FLAHERTY ’78

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

October 27–29, 2023. // Heidi Dunn Meadows worked in the cardiac care unit for 25 years. She became a community advocate for youth, developing a community service program and winning a citywide award. She created the Prevention Campaign to teach healthy habits to fourth graders, utilizing her book, The Adventures of George the Germ, and inviting medical professionals to give advice. // Thomas Heimbach retired to “of counsel” status with Flamm Walton Heimbach in Allentown, Pennsylvania. // Gerry Flaherty retired from Chevron recently after a 36-year career with assignments in Australia, Thailand, Nigeria, Angola, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Indonesia, as well as Alaska and California. He and his wife, Linda, are now located on the shore of Lake Tahoe, in Stateline, Nevada. They recently completed a two-week trek to Everest Base Camp in Nepal, reaching an elevation of 17,600 feet. Class correspondent: Julie Butler // julesbutler33@gmail.com

1979

Priscilla Paton, PhD’79, has a third book being published in her Twin Cities Mystery series featuring Detectives Erik Jansson and Deb Metzger: When the House Burns, a “smart page turner” with sex, death, and real estate. // Stephen Watson joined the increasing number of classmates in retirement. Following a 40-year career as a managing director and national director of client services at Bessemer Trust Company, Steve and his wife, Lynn, spend their summers on Nantucket and winters in West Palm Beach. First bucket list item for Steve was walking the ancient 500-mile Camino de Santiago in Spain in 2021. // Jim Sano has recently released his fifth novel and the fourth in the Father Tom series, Self Portrait. His Catholic novels have now received 15 book awards and have been endorsed by several archdioceses for adult faith programs. He and his wife, Joanne, celebrated their 36th anniversary and still live in Medfield. // Pedro Carrasquillo has retired after 39 years of high school teaching and now spends his time in Florida and Massachusetts. // Frank Roach Rider will retire in 2024 as senior human services financing specialist at the su m m e r 20 23 v bcm

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Class Notes

American Institutes for Research. He has provided technical assistance to federally funded grantees developing mental health programs for children, youth, and families in 40+ states since 2006. Living in Greensboro, Frank and his wife are proud of their two children, Destiny and Stephen. // Ben Wolf, JD’79, retired in 2022 after working at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois for 38 years, including serving as the legal director from 2016 to 2021. // Betsy Nedeau Millane announces that her historical fiction book, Sixty Blades of Grass, based on her family’s work in the Dutch underground during WWII, will be published in June. Mod 33 roomies Betsy, Nancy Stark, Sarah Carvalho, and Tracy Lucido celebrated the wedding of Tracy’s son, Jonathan, in Newport, Rhode Island, in June 2022. Betsy was featured in the Wall Street Journal newsletter, Women In. Betsy sells real estate with Gibson Sotheby’s in MetroWest Boston. // Brenda Fields has sad news that her dear friend and roommate at BC from 1976 to 1979, Sue Ellen Acinapuro Commender, passed away on March 6.

She fought a valiant fight with cancer and passed away at her home in Larchmont, New York, surrounded by her family. Brenda has such fond memories of great times with Sue Ellen at BC and beyond. She will be missed. Class correspondent: Peter J. Bagley // peter@ peterbagley.com

1981

Robert Nolan retired from orthopedic surgery/sports last year after a career in private practice in Connecticut, Denver, and Lexington, Kentucky, and moved to the hometown of his wife of 35 years.

They are now happily living in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, with their 30-yearold daughter nearby—life is so good! // Glen Turner, senior vice president, parted ways with Merrill Lynch in October 2020 to assume the role of managing director and partner at Eagle Harbor Advisors in Boca Raton, Florida. // Ed Kornack officially retired from dentistry two years ago and sold his practice in Norwood after 35 years. At the same time, he was promoted to deputy fire chief of the Dover Fire Department and is entering his 33rd year there. Class correspondent: Alison Mitchell McKee // classnotes@bc.edu

PMC 1981

Arlinda Halliburton works for a federal agency in the role of industry outreach and business development with companies that do business for the federal government. Her principal focus is emergent technologies within the professional services domain. She finds working in this arena fun and forward thinking!

1980

Debbie Russell Gallant retired as president of sales for a large national franchise, now resides in Naples, Florida, and has a boutique real estate office. She travels to Europe with her retired architect husband and a group of 10 women each year. This year’s trip is to Positano, Puglia, and Sardinia. // Jacqueline Jones has worked with Shapiro Plastic Surgery and Skin Klinic in Paradise Valley, Arizona, for 20 years, specializing in advanced laser and skin rejuvenation for face and body. // Mark Young is enjoying retirement; summers on the Connecticut shore boating and golfing and winters in Texas, north of Dallas, spending time with his two grandchildren. Class correspondent: Michele Nadeem-Baker // michele.nadeem@gmail.com 54

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COURTESY OF LINDA EKIZIAN ’82

1982

Sue Ryan is currently the executive director of the Delaware Coalition

Against Domestic Violence. In her spare time, she writes short stories. Sue is very happy to share that she recently selfpublished a collection of fictional little stories called Just a Glimpse. As the title suggests, the stories provide a brief glance at the power of relationship, connection, loss, and love. // Linda Ekizian often thinks about her BC experience and continues to value the friendships and lessons learned. // Charles D’Atri can’t believe it’s been 41 years since graduation! It’s his and Jan Colby ’83’s 25th anniversary this year, and they’re going to celebrate with an extended trip to Italy. There’s been great expansion in Charles’s business buying music rights. // Susan K. Plante, MS’82, is still working full time as an APRN at the same group she joined in 2002 in North Easton. Dealing with all the technology has been a challenge, as she grew up on a manual typewriter, but she’s adapting and not quite ready for retirement. Class correspondent: Mary O’Brien // maryobrien14@comcast.net

1983

40th Reunion, October 2023 Amy Tate Berenson, MBA’83, has been living on the North Shore of Boston since graduation. As a certified career and life coach, Amy enjoys helping those who wish to find a career better aligned with who they are and what they believe in!

She does lots of sailing and skiing, even fun part-time work in Jackson, Wyoming, visiting her son. She is friends with Deb De Sherbinin, and looking forward to seeing Bob Niswander and Dave Clarkson in the fall at the 40th Reunion. // Six years ago, Joan Stein Harris accomplished her goal of opening her own geriatric care management practice in the Greater Boston Area. // Jeanne Hunter Zarrilli received her MA in spirituality from Loyola Chicago and a month later welcomed her first grandchild, Leo Charlie Fusco. His middle name is for his great-grandfather, Charles William Hunter ’51, MA’53. // Gerry Nowosacki, MSW’83, retired from 45 years as a social worker for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and elder care. He is still working as a varsity boys’ basketball assistant coach in Shrewsbury and is proud of a recent player, John West, pitching for Boston

COURTESY OF PETER HOBAN ’83

College. // Tony Sullivan, John Almy, Dan Nova, Bill “Soup” Campbell, Pete Hoban, and Charlie McCann got together to celebrate Bill Campbell’s retirement. Class correspondent: Cynthia J. Bocko // cindybocko@hotmail.com

1984

Juliette Dacey Fay’s seventh novel came out in April 2023. The Half Of It is the story of a woman reflecting on the most impactful night of her life—and reuniting with the man involved after 40 years apart. Juliette and her husband Tom Fay ’83 live in Wayland, where Tom’s role on the Select Board has him eating breakfast with half the town, and Juliette can often be found in her garden up to her elbows in dirt. // Richard Stefanacci was recently named chief medical officer of TauRx Pharmaceuticals as they pursue regulatory approval of their oral treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. // Mod 30A roommates Janet Barth Maxwell, Betsy Fenton Hargreaves, Ellen Cook, Suzanne Troy Cole, Maria Pistorino Keroack, Lisa Ciccolini Strain, Kara Grady Boudreau ’89, and Joanie Cahalane Flaherty gathered at the Clemson football game in October to cheer on the Eagles surrounded by family and friends. After 40 years of friendship, the connections made freshman year have lasted a lifetime. // Virginia Saunders Pflueger, MDiv’84, received an award in November of 2022 for star performer of Ohio’s Hospice, for her work in chaplaincy among the Amish and English communities of Holmes County.

Saunders Pflueger is completing her 12th year as hospice chaplain in this community, following pastoral ministry, family ministries, and chaplain ministries since her graduation in the masters of divinity program. // Dr. Philip Cate Huckins ’84, MAT’85, PhD’95, has completed the end-of-life doula professional certificate program at the University of Vermont’s Robert Larner College of Medicine. // Jim Fallon ’84, MS’86, recently retired, resides in Bradenton, Florida, and will spend summers in the White Mountains working on his tree farm and traveling.

Class correspondent: Carol A. McConnell // classnotes@bc.edu

1985

Congratulations to Cathy Savage-Eysie for joining the BC Alumni Board. The Board’s mandate is to strengthen relationships among the more than 200,000 Eagles worldwide. Cathy lives in Medfield and has two children attending BC. // Mary Beth Ogulewicz was appointed as an Associate Justice of the District Court in Massachusetts by Governor Baker in August 2022. She returned to school mid-life to earn a masters in social work and practiced mental health law. Mary Beth worked at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Stockbridge and taught mindfulness to high-stress professionals around the country. She and Robert Sacco ’84 have four grown children who have launched into the world. // Very sad to share that George Cooley passed away in October

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

2022. George retired from the MBTA after 23 years of service and was living in Tarpon Springs, Florida, since 2021. // Maria Leonard Olsen is remotely working as an attorney, writing, and podcasting. Her next book covers the unintended consequences of DNA testing. She regularly contributes articles to AARP’s The Ethel, Authority Magazine, and other publications. Her Becoming Your Best Version podcast is available on eight platforms. // Jean-Charles Dibbs has retired after working 37 years at Shutts & Bowen, Miami’s oldest law firm.

He’s living and splitting his time between Miami and Europe. // Janice Lavoie graduated from the University of Virginia with an acute care NP post-master’s certificate in 2022. She previously graduated from George Washington University in May 2016 with a primary care NP certificate. She is working as a urology NP at Sentara Health in Woodbridge, Virginia. // Matthew Sullivan retired in August 2022 after 31 years of teaching and educational leadership in England, Wales, Thailand, India, and Singapore. He is now settled in his ancient cottage in rural Suffolk, UK, and is involved in school governance, prison education, charitable fundraising, academic research, writing, sailing, gardening, and church activities.

His three sons are in Edinburgh, Manchester, and Bath, and he now has an empty nest for the first time in 27 years! // Tanya Mason is in her 38th year of teaching in Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. She and her husband celebrated 36 years together.

They have four sons, one of whom was a dissertation fellow at Boston College and now has his PhD. Their other three sons are happily employed in Maryland. One is married with three children, and they all keep grandma and grandpa busy.

Tanya misses her former roommate, Antonia, very much and wants her to submit a note. // Theresa Rahikka recently retired from the Department of Defense after 22 years of service as a mathematician. Class correspondent: Barbara Ward Wilson // bww415@gmail.com

1986

Caroline Long McKinnon is in her 10th year as faculty at the Augusta University su m m e r 20 23 v bcm

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Class Notes

College of Nursing and was recently appointed to serve as the director of the Psych-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner program. // Michael Hickey, MDiv’86, after having had his latest book, Holy Silence, published in 2022, is now working on finalizing a new book titled Rising Light. The new release will be focused on the resurrection of the body. // Lisa LaBanca Rogers, MA’86, is excited to share her upcoming picture books: Beautiful Noise: The Music of John Cage, publishes in October; Ronald Reagan: A Little Golden Book Biography, publishes in November; and Woody’s Words: Woodrow Wilson Rawls and Where the Red Fern Grows will be out in 2025. Her poem has been chosen to title the anthology If I Could Choose a Best Day: Poems of Possibility. // Teri Anderholm retired from her investment compliance career and bought an inn in Bar Harbor, Maine, with her husband, Jeffrey Anderholm. The inn was sold in 2018. Teri has written her debut memoir, Inn Mates: An Innkeeper’s Memoir, which she plans to publish in 2023. Class correspondent: Leenie Kelley // leeniekelley@hotmail.com

1987

Paul McLaughlin was recently promoted to commander of the Boston Police Homicide Unit. Paul has spent 34 years with the department, working mostly in investigative positions in drug enforcement, intelligence, and homicide.

Paul and his wife, Paula ’88, recently celebrated their 34th wedding anniversary. They have three children and three grandchildren. // Jere Shea was recently appointed director of the Massachusetts Film Office. After appearing with fellow Eagle Matt Del Negro ’94 and Kevin Bacon in City On A Hill, Jere is thrilled to return to public service, working to promote and support film and television production in the Commonwealth. // After graduating from BC , Diane Pintabone earned a master’s degree in Classics at U. Colorado at Boulder and then went on to study at USC, where she earned a PhD in classical philology in 1998. For a few years, she taught as a lecturer/adjunct at various colleges/universities. Since the 2000– 2001 academic year, she has taught Latin at Westridge School for Girls in Pasadena. // Brian Cardoza, JD’87, was 56

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recently elected to the National Board of Directors of the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA) and to the position of director of California ABOTA. He is also the president-elect of ABOTA California Coast Chapter. // Ro LaFleur Bach got together with Cheverus buddies Ann Gallo, Jamie Smida, Ingrid Van Zon Borwick, and Sue Shey Dvonch at Ingrid’s home in the Berkshires. Ro’s daughter, Allison, works at BC as a social media marketing specialist for the Department of Residential Life and is enrolled in BC’s master’s program in higher education. // Alicia Dvoskin Moya, JD’87, joined the Southern California office of PlayCore, a national company building healthy communities through recreation and play, as service center manager for Southern California and Nevada. She was previously founder and vice president of business operations for a general contractor specializing in playground construction and residential remodeling.

1988

35th Reunion, October 2023 Inspired by their work with people with disabilities, Paula McLaughlin recently took on the role of chief advancement officer at the House of Possibilities on the campus of Stonehill College. // Bob Rivers has been nominated to serve on the Massachusetts State Committee of the American College of Trial Lawyers (ACTL). Bob is a fellow of the ACTL as well as the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. He practices family law at Lee & Rivers LLP in Boston.

Class correspondent: Robert K. Murray Jr. // murrman@aol.com

PMC 1988

Merrilee Campbell Bridgeman has joined Wells Fargo bank in Charlotte as lead marketing consultant in the digital marketing group, with a focus on building consumer financial wellness initiatives. She was previously SVP of marketing at Bank of America.

1989

Megan Carroll Himmer continues her arts law practice and enjoys participating in ballroom dance competitions in

Boston. She is open to BC friends connecting on Facebook or LinkedIn. // Christina Schipani lives in South Hampton, New Hampshire. She and her husband, Ron, have a 16-year-old daughter who is well on her way to the Olympics for swimming, having competed and scored in the top of her age group in Junior Nationals. // After being out of school for 31 years, Brenda Davis Morano went back and earned her MSN-Ed at Curry College! // Lori Mann Brightman recently traveled to San Antonio to visit with Eleanor Phelps.

They are hoping to reconnect with classmates this summer, possibly at a girls weekend! // Kathleen Zinzer McCarthy passed away on December 2, 2022, after a valiant, five-year battle with colon cancer. Even after 96 chemo and radiation treatments, she never allowed cancer to define her. She leaves behind her soul mate of 19 years, husband Brett, and her 3 teenage children. Her funeral Mass was celebrated on December 9, 2022 (55th birthday). Her mother, Elizabeth Reagan Zinzer, was a BC 1963 graduate, and her grandfather, James Reagan, was a triple Eagle. // Robert Franks, president and CEO of the Baker Center for Children and Families, was featured in a January 2023 interview in the Boston Business Journal, describing the current pediatric behavioral health climate. // Chuck Hogan was featured in the winter ’23 Boston College Magazine, highlighting his latest novel Gangland, his first book in 10 years after focusing on TV and film writing work, including the TV and novel versions of the vampire pandemic series The Strain, which he created with the acclaimed director Guillermo del Toro. Hogan is the author of several Boston-based crime novels, particularly Prince of Thieves (the basis for the film The Town).

Class correspondent: Andrea McGrath // andrea.e.mcgrath@gmail.com

PMC 1989

Kathleen Healey Willcox and Tracy Chapin Maher got together in Greenwich, Connecticut.

1990

Molly Schweizer Brown and Danny Brown moved cross country with their

Class Notes // Weddings

Donna Brien Sullivan to Loren R. Miller III ’67, 11/12/22 Dee Shippelhute to Michael Barry ’69, 9/17/22 Megan Carroll Himmer ’89 to Alan Himmer, 8/18/20 Rebecca Wadsworth Diallo PMC’94 to Clarence Banks, 8/20/22 Christy Cronin to Scott Cronin ’99, 6/24/22 Courtney Madigan ’05 to Mike Skvasik ’05, 6/4/22 Anastasia Mirgian to Edwin Xiao ’07, 12/25/22 Alison Finck ’08 to David Lanni, 8/6/22 Megan DeLaney, MEd’09, to Brad Deaton, 6/4/22

Hyun Choi ’09 to Gavin King, 4/22/22 Leela Assefi ’09 to Justin Barnes, 5/8/21 Caitlin Buchheit to Max Bindernagel ’11, 12/10/22 // Eagles in attendance: Billy Cody ’11, Alex Aune ’10, Fr. Grayson Heenan ’10, Eric Hinz ’10, and Faith Hill Hinz, JD’13 Kristina Fusco ’13 to Joe Doren ’13, 10/15/22 Leah Nees ’14 to Kenny Ierardi ’13, 9/11/21 // Eagles in attendance: Michael Fogarasi ’14, Alexander Tingle ’14, Samyr Laguerre ’14, Beth Farmer ’15, Molly O’Dea Tyler ’14, Rob Raimundo ’13, and Derek Robinson ’13

Sara Seonmin Chung ’19 to Paul Woo Lee ’15, 5/15/22 Grace Molla ’19 to Michael Lane ’18, 5/6/2022 Zhongyu Yvonne Cheng ’20 and Yuqi Tang, 3/21/23

Andrea Stanton Hemborg, MA’14 to Scott Hemborg, 10/8/22 // Eagles in attendance: Fr. Robert Jones, MA’12, Dean Michael McCarthy, S.J.

COURTESY OF LEAH NEES ’14

COURTESY OF MAX BINDERNAGEL ‘11

COURTESY OF LEELA ASSEFI ‘09

COURTESY OF MICHAEL LANE ‘18

Marissa Manhart ’14 to James Loeffler, 6/4/22 // Eagles in attendance: Charlotte Shih ’14, Alice Chen ’14, Diana Tran ’14, Cecilia Huang ’14, Rob Granara ’14, Charlotte Randall ’13, Alyssa Zaprzalka Campbell ’13, Meredith Irvine Casper ’13, Claire Marinello Fisher ’13, and Brian Keller ’06

COURTESY OF EDWIN XIAO ‘07

COURTESY OF MEGAN DELANEY, MED’09

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

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Class Notes

two black labs to Seattle last May, where Danny took a position as a neuropathologist with CellNetix. They are enjoying exploring their new city and are hoping to meet up with BC alumni in the area. // In his role as cofounder of ReVision Energy, Phil Coupe is helping northern New England transition from a fossil fuel-based economy to a sustainable, renewable energy-based economy. // Paul Turner and his wife, Cindy, recently transplanted from the Bay Area to Charlotte. Paul is still with the Corporate Communication team at Wells Fargo and looks forward to connecting with any North Carolina Eagles. // Susan Gagliano has lived in Florence, Italy, since 1992. She works as a professional counselor with a private practice and as a teacher trainer on an EU platform called Erasmus+. She has two daughters, Alessia, who works in Amsterdam in graphic design and digital communications, and Sofia, who is an interior designer. // Nancy Noll Kolinski and Joe Kolinski have finally moved to Cape Cod from Northern Virginia. Joe continues work as a federal government IT contractor remotely, and Nancy, after running a horticultural consulting business for 15 years, has taken a new position with Sesuit Landscapes. Joe, Nancy, and Motoko (the cat) really enjoy being out of the city, surrounded by conservation land, and the 10-minute drive to the beach. // A well-timed text resulted in a mini reunion in February in the Irish pubs of Manhattan. New Yorkers Patrick Langhenry, Mike Salve, and John Flanagan were joined by Ken Forton, who traveled from the Boston area, and Kara Corso Nelson from Connecticut. It’s amazing how the years melt away among good friends and Guinness! Class correspondent: Missy Campbell Reid // missybc90@comcast.net

1991

Joseph D. Lewandowski, MA’91, writer, researcher, avid pugilist, and professor of philosophy at the University of Central Missouri, has recently published On Boxing: Critical Interventions in the Bittersweet Science and “Sport after Auschwitz.” // Kate Chadbourne has recently launched The Celtic Wisdom School, offering online classes in Irish folklore, storytelling, and tradition. She 58

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COURTESY OF KATE CHADBOURNE ’91

began her Irish studies journey at BC, going on to earn a PhD in Celtic Studies from Harvard, where she currently teaches Irish language and folklore. // Curtis Owens has been appointed to the Fidelity Management Trust Company board of directors. // Richard Murphy, MEd’91, has engaged in multiple weekly volunteer activities since his retirement from full-time teaching and school counseling in 2021. He works part time as an academic advisor at Metropolitan Community College in Kansas City, and he mentors multiple new teachers at his old high school, where he worked for 34 years. // Kathy Barry, Andrea Benoit, Ann-Marie Breen, Debbie Wardlow Brown, Kellie Moroney Chavero, Shelby Lovett Cuevas, Lynn Page Flaherty, Meg Gross, Heather Garrigan Hentz, and Debra Page Mooney got to spend time together in Westerly, catching up with one another and spreading BC cheer throughout the Rhode Island beaches.

Debra has a small consulting practice for nonprofit organizations and is an empty nester with both her daughters in college. Meg is working in public relations, living in New Jersey, and is busy raising her daughter, a high school junior. She is teaching undergraduate PR at Seton Hall. Lynn is vice president for advancement and external affairs at Friends of the Public Garden in Boston.

She and her husband, Sean, are getting ready to send their son off to college.

Heather is still enjoying the Atlanta lifestyle, volunteering, and traveling.

Kellie is teaching in Massachusetts and raising amazing children. Debbie is

helping others as a social worker in her own private practice in Massachusetts.

Ann-Marie loves living in the mountains of Asheville with her family. Andrea is living in the Boston area and is eastern regional counsel at the Defense Contract Management Agency. Kathy moved back to North Carolina after many years in government service and is now senior counsel at SAS and almost an empty nester. Shelby is still rocking the Phoenix life and is senior associate general counsel at UnitedHealth. Class correspondent: Peggy Morin Bruno // pegmb@comcast.net

1992

Tony Munchak is enjoying a second career as the owner of Mighty Dog Roofing of MetroWest Boston located in Needham. After 20 years as a portfolio manager at Invesco, Tony has embarked on being a small business owner managing roofing, gutter, and siding projects, and he is enjoying every minute. Tony and Amy Hyland Munchak recently celebrated 25 years of fun together. They live in Wellesley with their two daughters, and they all love tailgating on Robsham for BC football games! // David “Foz” Dering graduated from BU Law and has been a civil trial attorney in New Jersey since 1995 and a partner in the firm Leary Bride Mergner & Bongiovanni the whole time. He and his wife, Karen, live in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, and have two children. They are excited that their son Joseph Baldwin is in the Class of ’26, and they hope their six-year-old daughter Elizabeth Dering will be the same. // Emily Barrows Cianchette MSN, FNP-BC is board certified as a family nurse practitioner and has practiced in primary care for 23 years. She is the lead primary care provider at Northern Light Health SVH Primary Care in Pittsfield, Clinton, and Newport, Maine. Emily is also the vice chief of the Northern Light Health SVH Medical Staff. // Marietta Courtney was honored with the award of 2022 Business Person of the Year by the Tri-Town Chamber of Commerce. Marietta is a CPA and owns Courtney CPA, P.C. in Mansfield. Class correspondent: Katie Boulos Gildea // kbgildea@yahoo.com

PMC 1992

Liz Cary Blum’s daughters, Caroline and Leah, will graduate from high school this June. Caroline will be attending Villanova University, and Leah will be attending the University of Pennsylvania. Liz is looking forward to seeing her PMC friends in the greater Philadelphia area! // Gillian Dennehy Russo has recently moved from her home in New York to a home in Southern New Hampshire. She and her husband have two daughters, Gabby, who is 23, and Ally, who is 20.

Gillian is a wedding events manager at two different venues in New Hampshire.

1993

30th Reunion, October 2023 Shea Sitzer Fleming’s daughter Paige ’23 went viral on social media platforms as she unintentionally represented BC (and Costco card holders!) this past November at a BC men’s basketball game. In the stands, Paige was captured

by ACC cameras reacting to a fellow BC student in the stands as he showed her his Costco card. It was randomly captured by a viewer, posted on Twitter, then viewed 21 million times. // Kevin Edgar has been elected as a partner at BakerHostetler. He co-leads the firm’s Congressional investigations practice and specializes in public company and financial services legislative and regulatory policy. // Elizabeth Talia, JD’93, was recognized by the Rochester Business Journal as a 2022 Woman of Excellence. She is vice president and general counsel and chief compliance and privacy officer at Thompson Health in Canandaigua, New York. She is currently on the board of directors for United Way of Greater Rochester and the Finger Lakes and Compeer Rochester. // Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook, PhD’93, recently retired as the vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at Claremont School of Theology, and is continuing as a professor, teaching World Christianities and Practical Theology. She is the editor-in-chief of the journal Anglican and Episcopal History and continues to teach as a professor of Anglican studies at Bloy House, the Episcopal School of Theology in Los Angeles. Class correspondent: Laura Beck // laurabeckcahoon@gmail.com

1994

The third book in Ted (T.M.) Murphy’s Totally Weird Activity Books series, Unusual Objects in Fantastic Places, was released in spring 2023. His motto is #GetKidsCreating. For the adults, Murphy’s Cape Cod-based thriller, Macabre Trophies, will be released this year under his new pseudonym, Declan Rush. His mystery writing has always been inspired by the late John McAleer’s class and his late father James F. Murphy, Jr.’s Craft of Writing class. // Jennifer Sullivan Sulewski started a new position as the associate director of the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire. Jen lives in Newton with her husband, Steve, and two daughters, Anna and Mae. // Ned Thompson is now working for an NYC-based company, Tassat, which provides blockchain solutions to US-regulated financial institutions. He is glad to see that BC is getting involved in educating students about blockchain, because there will be huge demand for workers within the next five to 10 years. // Dr. Kristin Kahle’s story of success was included in the anthology Lead Like a Woman: Tales from the Trenches, a collection of the testimonies of powerful women sharing their perspectives on leadership, failure, and resilience. She also appears in Lead Like a Woman: Audacity, a complementary text that focuses on the action of taking risks. These books, along with Crash and Learn: Lessons in Business and NOtivation, are now part of Dr. K’s bestsellers. // Roger McAvoy moved back to the US with his wife and three kids after 22 years living in Singapore and Hong Kong, after what was supposed to be a 15-month assignment in 2000. He has relocated to Connecticut and has set up an office in NYC with his employer, Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd., to lead its North America sales and marketing team. // Tracey Johns Delp was appointed an associate judge of the District Court of Maryland. // Wayne Klug, PhD’94, found that social resilience helps trauma patients to heal.

He presented his findings at a recent New England Psychological Association conference, with a dedication to Donnah Canavan, the late BC professor. Class correspondent: Nancy E. Drane // nancydrane@aol.com

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

1995

Steve Riden recently celebrated his 50th birthday by finally completing his goal of visiting all 50 states. A family road trip to North Dakota finished the list. Steve remains a partner at Beck Reed Riden LLP, a law firm in Boston, and recently completed a three-year term as chair of the board of editors for the Boston Bar Journal. // Melissa Conlon has been named as the director of special programs and data reporting for Longwood Central School District after 18 years as an assistant principal at Longwood High School. Melissa is currently the president of the Stony Brook University Men’s Lacrosse Parent Club as her son, Renz, is in his senior year of studies and lacrosse at SBU. // Deirdre Sanders, a principal at Hamilton Brook Smith Reynolds, has been elected to serve on the advisory board for the newly established chapter of the National Academy of Inventors at Northeastern University. // Matt Chapuran’s latest short story, “Coyote,” was published in Constellations Magazine, which is available on Amazon.

Class correspondent: Kevin McKeon // kmckeon@gmail.com

COURTESY OF KELSEY ABERNATBY MCLEAN ’95

PMC 1995

Kelsey Abernatby McLean is living outside of Philadelphia with her 11-yearold son and husband. She is enjoying being a stay-at-home mom and would love to hear from PMC friends! // Kaley su m m e r 20 23 v bcm

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Class Notes

Strane DeGoursey and her husband, Rob, recently took ownership of their longtime family restaurant, Stony Creek Market (Branford, Connecticut) and are enjoying great success as small business owners. Kaley also continues to fuel her wanderlust as a travel advisor for an upscale boutique travel agency.

1996

Jennifer Sierveld Doty recently published Just Lead, detailing advice she has gleaned through years of leadership experience that a boss can’t teach you. // Mary McDow passed the Philadelphia bar and began working for the City of Philadelphia as an assistant city solicitor in the tax and revenue department after graduating from Temple Law School in 2020 and clerking for a common pleas judge for two years. // Juan Alexander Concepción ’96, MEd’97, MBA’03, JD’03, has joined the legal team at Boston Scientific. // Adrien Ong returned to full-time education and completed the prestigious Sloan Fellows MSc in Leadership & Strategy at London Business School after 25 years in corporate life as an investment banker and then leading global strategy for one of the largest humanitarian NGOs. // Chris Campbell recently started a new position as vice president, user experience at the live-entertainment company, AEG Presents. He also serves on the board of two mental-health nonprofits: Bring Change to Mind and Backline. He has a 14-year-old dog

COURTESY OF EDUARDO VICTOR J. VALDEZ, MA’96, PHD

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named Bennett. // Dawn O’Brien is proud to announce that her son AJ Wladyka was accepted ED1 to the BC Class of 2027. He will enter CSOM this fall. He joins his sister, Faith, who is currently a first-year student in MCAS. // Nicole Franconere Ward was appointed deputy commissioner for the department of children, youth, and families in Albany County, New York. Her son obtained his MBA and is working for Credit Suisse in NYC, and her daughter graduated this May. // Lisa Cummings-Knight has two boys, Christopher and JP Knight, and a daughter, Bitsie Knight, who is currently a senior at BC. Lisa has her own private practice in downtown Boston. She is also a consultant with Boston Public Schools and supervises BC interns. Her husband is a partner at Morrison Mahoney and runs the mock trial program at BC High. // Eduardo Victor J. Valdez, MA’96, PhD, is serving his second term as vice-chairman of the University Research Ethics Committee of the Ateneo de Manila University Loyola Schools. He also sits on the board of the Rizal Library of the Ateneo de Manila.

1998

25th Reunion, June 2023 Tracy Sendor Woodrow, JD’98, has been named chief administrative officer of M&T Bank Corporation. // Juv Marchisio, MBA’98, is excited to share that his son Christian will be attending the Boston College Experience two-week pre-college session on Government, Globalism, and Capitalism. Class correspondent: Mistie Lucht // hohudson@ yahoo.com

1997

Kevin Dooley Kent has joined international law firm Clark Hill PLC as a member in the litigation practice. Kent will co-lead the firm’s transatlantic strategy. Kent works from the firm’s Dublin and Philadelphia offices. // Kerry Niedermeier Lake was selected as a Fulbright Teacher for Global Classrooms for the 2022–23 year. She will be doing her international field experience in Uruguay this June. After graduating from BC, she began her teaching career on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Since 2000, she has been teaching and learning with students, teachers, and families in Oregon and Vermont. // Gretchen Hunt ’97, JD’00, received the Woman of Distinction award from the Center for Women and Families for her work on preventing gender-based violence.

Gretchen currently leads the Office for Women for the Mayor of Louisville, where she advances policy, programs, and training to promote gender equity.

Class correspondent: Margo Gillespie // margogillespie@gmail.com

COURTESY OF CLARENCE PERERA ’99

1999

Michelle Wynn, MEd’99, a Donovan Scholar, has been accepted as a doctoral student in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. // Just after Thanksgiving, Dr. Jaime T. Snarski was inducted into the Manchester Memorial High School Hall of Fame as a graduate of prominence for her work as an emergency medicine physician in Florida and extensive medical mission work in Central America and the Caribbean. She is living in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, and has two children, Jett (eight) and Jemma (six). // Carole Hughes, PhD’99, was named Pillar of the Profession by the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. Dr. Hughes has served in a variety of positions in the Division of Student Affairs at Boston College since 1988. // Scott Cronin’s daughter Ashley,

MSW’22, graduated from the BC School of Social Work. // Christian Baird was recently given responsibility for sales and marketing in the expanding territories in Tennessee and North Carolina for OSCAR Healthcare. He is now managing director of these new areas, as well as Texas and Oklahoma, overseeing more than 100,000 customers and over $500 million in premium sales. // Clarence Perera, principal at Amazon Web Services, has been focused on driving innovation in both the capital markets enterprise customer and AWS startup segments. // Sister of Saint Joseph Deirdre Griffin, JD’99, is in ministry with Annunciation House and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center at the US/Mexico border in El Paso, welcoming people seeking safety in the United States and providing pro bono immigration legal services. // Lorraine Bonk recently became a grandmother to twin boys! Her daughter and her wife welcomed them on July 20, 2022. // Lynn Peyser Capadona was selected as the deputy chief engineer for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. // Maria Finaro Cleary, MEd’99, created Readeezy, the first interactive digital library for older struggling readers, with inspiration from her learning-disabled daughter. The library has six illustrated books (and counting) with text-to-speech, checks for understanding, “dyslexia-friendly” text, and no teacher training necessary. // Colleen Madigan, MSW’99, received the Resolve New England 2022 Advocacy Award in recognition of her efforts of sponsoring and passing fertility care legislation in Maine. Ms. Madigan is in the Maine House of Representatives for District 64.Class correspondent: Matt Colleran // colleran.matt@gmail.com

2000

Mary Taylor has built a wine company called Mary Taylor Wine, selling wines in 44 US states and five countries. They were featured in the New York Times among other great press. Their wines are in stores around Boston, and they are distributed in Massachusetts by Mise Wines of Newton. // Chris Keswani is working at Meta as a senior product marketing manager. In this capacity, he is the voice of both the engineering team

and internal stakeholders. // Jim Murray, president of the Tiburon Company real estate group and attorney with Murray Co., LPA, has been unanimously elected to serve as the president of the board of trustees for Leadership Ohio. As a member of the 2017 class of Leadership Ohio, Jim received the Leader Among Leaders award. Jim and his wife, Anna Marie, have three children and live in Huron, Ohio. // Kevin Diebold Lehnert was promoted to full professor of marketing in the Seidman College of Business at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. // Claudette LaVerdiere left for mission in Chad. The group consisted of Claudette, originally from Maine, and three other Maryknoll Sisters, one each from the Philippines, El Salvador, and Vietnam. Class correspondent: Kate Pescatore // katepescatore@hotmail.com

2001

Jocelyn Walters now resides in Washington, DC (after 10 years in New York). Along with her own small business, she works for Next Street, a missiondriven firm creating a more inclusive economy through small businesses. // Sean Guthrie ’01, MEd’14, H’21, would like to thank Boston College for selecting him to be one of the honorary doctorate recipients for the 2021 Commencement ceremony. It was an amazing experience. // This year, Matt Stevens, MA’01, accepted a post at Saigon South International School in Ho Chi Minh City.

He currently serves on a team of university guidance and social/emotional counselors providing support to high school students. This is his 22nd year as a high school counselor and first year working internationally. Class correspondent: Sandi Birkeland Kanne // bcbubbly@hotmail.com

2002

Lawrence Napoli just completed his first manuscript and attended a writers’ conference in Atlanta in March, where he pitched his novel to literary agents. Class correspondent: Suzanne Harte // suzanneharte@yahoo.com

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

COURTESY OF COLLEEN COSTIGAN ’03

2003

20th Reunion, October 2023 Dr. Richard Grijalva, MA’03, began a two-year ACLS Emerging Voices postdoctoral fellowship with the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. While there, he is continuing his research on politics and spirituality during the period of Mexican independence. // Teresa Sullivan, MA’03, moved to Denver to begin Association of Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE) certified educator training at the University of Colorado Hospital. After serving many years as a National Association of Catholic Chaplains board-certified chaplain in Boston, South Bend, and St. Louis, Teresa will become a CPE educator. // After 20 years, Patty Báez Zamora went back to BC and had an amazing time reminiscing about her time as an undergrad there. A lot has happened since—marriage, her beautiful son was born, and a career that she loves. While taking into consideration all her blessings, Patty has decided to move back to Boston, which is home for both her and her husband. She is looking forward to this change and continuing to enjoy life’s blessing at home with loved friends and family. // Wendy Jeffus is teaching sustainable finance at Babson College. // Sarah Sedlock Call has been working as a staff physician at Mountain Laurel Medical Center, a Community Health Center (FQHC), in Western Maryland, since 2014. She has recently su m m e r 20 23 v bcm

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Class Notes

2007

accepted the new position of chief medical officer over their three health centers. // Colleen Costigan currently lives in Eldoret, Kenya, with her husband and two young children. She runs a nonprofit, BEAM Kenya, which she founded in 2017. BEAM Kenya provides educational scholarships and psychosocial education for at-risk children. // Andrea Bevis was recently named by Forbes as one of America’s Top 100 Women Wealth Advisors.

2004

Jessica Honeyman Costanzo, JD’04, is general counsel at MK Enterprises Inc., a family office and holding company founded by Maurice Kanbar, the creator of SKYY Vodka, with business interests spanning a wide array of industries. She also oversees the office’s philanthropic giving. She is living in San Francisco with her husband, two sons (aged 10 and four), and a new puppy. Class correspondent: Allie Weiskopf // allieweiskopf@gmail.com

PMC 2004

Sarah Beal-Fletcher graduated with honors from Suffolk University in May of 2023.

2005

Adam Koneman recently joined the University of Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery as The Estelle B. Goldman Museum Educator for School Outreach, after 18 years as a special education classroom teacher and school leader. // Elizabeth Hassan, Cheryl Reither Damilatis, and Kellie Faircloth Hawkins rang in their 40th trip around the sun together. // Patrick McDonnell, MBA’05, celebrated the graduation of his daughter Bridget from Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences. Bridget majored in political science with a minor in Irish studies. Bridget gave back to the BC community as the lead choreographer of Boston College Irish Dance. Slainte! // Colleen Thornton will be celebrating her 10th wedding anniversary to Dr. Owen Aftreth this summer. They are parents to Peter (eight), Joshua (two), and welcomed Rose in November of 2022.

She has worked as an oncology physician 62

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COURTESY OF CH (MAJOR) MICHAEL MORISON, CAP-USAF AUX, MDIV

assistant in Boston, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles over this past decade. She is taking some time from her clinical practice to snuggle her babies and drive a minivan. The family moved to beautiful Anchorage in the summer of 2022. Class correspondents: Joe Bowden // joe. bowden@gmail.com; Justin Barrasso // jbarrasso@gmail.com

2006

Shen Chen was recently promoted to managing director at Bank of America where she has been working since June 2013 and based in London, UK. Previously she worked at Citi for seven years, based in New York. In addition, Shen recently joined the board of trustees at Career Ready, a UK- and Scotland-based charity focused on social mobility for young adults aged 14–18. // CH (Major) Michael Morison, CAPUSAF Aux, MDiv, was recognized by the Military Chaplains Association as the 2022 Distinguished Chaplain of the Year for Civil Air Patrol (CAP). // Michael Cherkezian and his business partner, Justin Barad, appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank on March 17 to pitch their company Chubby Buttons. Several years ago, the two invented and manufactured a durable Bluetooth wearable remote for gloved adventure sport athletes. They’ve sold over 16,000 units to date. Chubby Buttons has been featured at the X Games and in Ski Magazine, Outside, Entrepreneur, and Mashable. Class correspondent: Cristina Conciatori // cristina.conciatori@gmail.com

Rebecca Mergenthaler Hayes ’07, MHA’18, earned her doctorate in nursing practice and was promoted to associate chief nursing officer at Boston Medical Center overseeing perioperative services. // Edwin Xiao, formerly of the Tesla Supercharging team, now runs an electrical engineering and contracting company focused on sustainability; his wife, Anastasia, runs her family’s export/ import company dealing with Asia/ Europe trade. // Marisa Ramirez is proud to share that she is in the third year of owning her own business as a coach and consultant! She partners with leaders and organizations who are ready to dream, expand, and deepen their commitment to equity and liberation.

Marisa loves her work as an experience designer, facilitator, and healingcentered coach. // Daniel H. Park was promoted to shareholder at Berman Fink Van Horn, a business law firm in Atlanta.

He has also been selected to the 2023 Georgia Super Lawyers list. // Erin N. Book Bruno has announced her candidacy for magisterial district judge in District 15-4-03 in Chester County, Pennsylvania. If elected, she will be the first woman in that position in at least 24 years. A career public defender for the last 15 years, Erin was elected tax collector for her township in 2021 and looks forward to further serving her community as a judge in the local court system. Class correspondent: Lauren Faherty Bagnell // lauren.faherty@gmail.com

2008

15th Reunion, October 2023 WilmerHale is pleased to share that as of January 1, 2023, Mark Nylen will be elevated to partner. // Mandy Collier Scipione, MBA’08, still works at Fidelity Investments and has been promoted to senior vice president, relationship management group manager. In this role, she manages a team with clients leveraging Fidelity’s stock plan services and equity administration in the central region of the country. // Julie Foss, MBA’08, MSW’08, was promoted to assistant director of Eliot’s Community Behavioral Health Center for the North Essex area. // Lindsay Winget Schlegel published The Road to Hope: Responding

2010

COURTESY OF MARGY BURKE FABRY ’08

to the Crisis of Addiction with her coauthor, Keaton Douglas. They hope this book will be a game-changer in the field of addiction and recovery as well as in the body of the Church. // Margy Burke Fabry, Carolyn Lynch Blair, Laura Maguire Jones, Meghan Crann, Meg Gambale, Aubrey Timm Ritter, Lauren Kelly, and Caitlin Gordon descended upon South Bend, Indiana, this past November for a reunion of their epic RV adventure to South Bend in fall ’07.

There may have been a different game outcome, but the enthusiasm for BC football remained as strong as these friendships have been over the last 18 years. A few original 2004 “Soaring to Glory” Superfan shirts even made an appearance. // Caitlin Leutwiler Meenan and Duncan Bourgoin had a chance meeting in Vail, Colorado, and were able to hit the slopes. Eagles on the Eagle Bahn! // Mary Mycroft has joined Sungage Financial as head of compliance-legal counsel. Class correspondent: Maura Tierney Murphy // mauraktierney@gmail.com

theater and entertainment public relations firm in New York City, which just celebrated its second year in business. // Katie Sellers successfully defended her dissertation about the experiences of critical educators in urban Catholic schools. Dr. Sellers would like to thank the faculty who mentored her at BC, especially Margaret Guider, O.S.F.; Jennie Purnell; James Keenan, S.J.; and the Himes brothers. // Molly Levitt is heading up the US arm of the Remarkable Disability-Tech Startup Accelerator. Remarkable supports and funds startups building products for people with disabilities. The accelerator is always on the lookout for great mentors (and startups), so if this is something you’re interested in, please reach out to her on LinkedIn. Class correspondent: Timothy Bates // tbates86@gmail.com

2009

Nathan Gerbe retired from professional hockey after 13 years. He also earned his bachelor’s degree after returning to Boston College to finish his degree 13 years later. // Michael Jorgensen recently celebrated one year working full time as the public affairs official for NASA’s Langley Research Center on their Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration project. Additionally, Michael still leads Jorgensen PR, a

COURTESY OF NATHAN GERBE ’09

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

Jennifer Blewett was named a diplomate in clinical social work (DCSW) by the National Association of Social Work (NASW). This is the highest level of advanced practice credentialing available to social workers. She is currently a clinical social worker and the assistant director for community outreach and engagement in the department of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. She also has her own private psychotherapy practice in Boston. // Veronica Yu Welsh has been named a partner at the Baltimore-based employment and labor law firm Shawe Rosenthal LLP. She was recently recognized by Super Lawyers magazine as a Maryland Rising Star in the Civil Litigation-Defense and Employment and Labor practice areas for the sixth year in a row. // Ashley Galvez Perryman is now the vice president of global human resources for Spiceworks Ziff Davis. She is the founder and the elected president of the Ziff Davis Latinx ERG, Mezcla. She is a Gallup-certified strengths coach and a certified force management facilitator.

She provides graduate-level instruction at Acton School of Business and mentors students in the Women’s Initiative on Entrepreneurship and Leadership Development at the University of Texas at Austin. // Geoff Sanzenbacher, PhD’10, recently published a book, The Six Facts that Matter: Understanding Economic Inequality in the United States. // Shane Dunn, MA’10, is now chief advancement officer at Rosie’s Place.

Additionally, Shane was recently elected to be president/chair of the board of directors of GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) in Boston. Shane and his wife, Elizabeth ’04, live in Roxbury with their two young children. // Meghan E. Gavin has been named a partner at Cascadia Law Group, PLLC and an advisor to Yale University’s Carbon Containment Lab. She has also joined the Building Tribal Leadership Initiative to support Tribal Nations developing and evaluating carbon dioxide removal projects.

2011

Barton Gilman is pleased to announce that Thomas M. Dolan III, JD’11, has su m m e r 20 23 v bcm

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Class Notes

spend time in East Africa, as well as in their hometowns, San Francisco and Auckland.

2012

COURTESY OF PRINCESS HYATT ’11

joined the firm as of counsel in the Providence office expanding the firm’s civil litigation practice. // After serving as assistant chair and chair for liberal arts and sciences at Berklee, Dr. Michael C. Mason ’00, PhD’11, is the inaugural chair of Africana studies at Berklee. Mason will collaborate with all Berklee campuses and learning environments regarding the impact of the global African diaspora on arts and culture. He will build the curriculum for a bachelor of arts in Black music and culture as well as designing future master’s degrees in Africana studies. // Keli Bannister Callaghan, MBA’11, was named partner at Arrington Capital. // Greg Pidgeon was promoted to senior vice president as a financial advisor at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. // Naz Keskin has started a new position at Amazon Turkey as senior vendor manager. // Princess Hyatt joined Grace Academy, a tuitionfree middle school serving underserved girls in Greater Hartford, as their executive director and head of school in September 2022. She continues to work closely with Sarah ’83 and Matthew Fitzsimons ’80, cofounders of Grace Academy and Boston College alumni! // Madeleine Moore and Eddie Howe met in Tanzania, where they lived and worked for 5+ years—Madeleine working in designing public health programs and Eddie building businesses in agriculture and hospitality. They now live in Amsterdam. They continue to work and 64

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Jeff Cohen, MBA’12, is excited to share that his son was accepted early decision to Boston College. Andrew plans to study finance at the Carroll School of Management. A happy announcement from Washington State as Andrew gets back to his roots. // Semira Zereit has two beautiful kids and a new career. // Pamela Naab, MA’07, MA’12, recently started a career as an assistant professor at Lasell University, where she teaches undergraduate psychology courses, collaborates with Lasell Village (an intergenerational campus community), and researches topics related to health behavior change. // LCDR Joe Horton, JAGC, USN, JD’12, graduated from University of Hawai‘i at M ā noa William S. Richardson School of Law, receiving his LLM in both environmental law and ocean law and policy. At graduation, Joe was honored by his classmates to serve as the 2022 LLM class commencement speaker. LCDR Horton currently serves in the national security and environmental law fields as the force judge advocate for Commander, Joint Region Marianas in Santa Rita, Guam. // Karen Wilfrid, MEd, signed a book deal with HarperCollins Clarion for her first novel, Just Lizzie, a middle-grade book scheduled to be released on November 14. Class correspondent: Riley Sullivan // sullivan.riley.o@gmail.com

2013

10th Reunion, June 2023 Pedro Pereira Tomás, S.J., is grateful and proud to be a BC alumnus. He was able to realize his first desire, to contribute to the peace process of genuine reconciliation in Angola through Christian faith. He has created the Association of Angolan Friends for Peace, helping families and neighbors to reconcile. Class correspondent: Bryanna Mahony Robertson // bryanna.mahony@ gmail.com

PMC 2013

Karm-Syndia Augustin made her

directorial debut with her first feature film, A Heart On the Mend, at the Strand Theater in Boston. The film was written

by Brunir Olivier Shackleton and produced by CineLions, a company co-owned by both Karm-Syndia and Mr. Shackleton. AHOTM has been selected by the Boston International Film Festival and will also be touring the US.

2014

Cristina Costa, MSW’14, LICSW, opened her private practice. // James Patterson is the new clinical director of perennial recovery in Westborough and also has a private practice based in Brighton. After practicing in the addiction medicine/substance recovery field, James is delighted to be building an agency and a program from the ground up. // Reigning Ark Trivia champions of Iggy A31 all now find themselves on the wrong side of 30, but the right side of the Jersey Shore thanks to host David Farley. Michelle Cunningham Gulen and Altan bought a purple house, which only shows up on Apple Maps, that they are painting. Willis Wang finally got Covid (he’s fine now). Lani Frankville got a big fancy business promotion so she’s an even fancier business lady now and also really good at actually getting tickets to the Eras tour. She also became a dog mom. Charlotte Parish finally has a working office chair and dabbles in carpentry. Clara and Cooper Aakhus are in Santa Monica with a big yard.

Christine Zhao started drinking more water but then had to stop. Wonchan Yi is somewhere in Southeast Asia (we think). Allie Rottman is working in medical writing at the cutting edge of innovative medicine.

2015

Paulina Canales completed her PhD in leadership and human development. // Annie Weber Lizzul was honored to stand on the podium and participate in the bell ringing ceremony on International Women’s Day at the New York Stock Exchange, as a result of her work with KKR’s Women’s Employee Resource Group (ERG). // Sara B. Fraser has published her second novel, Just River, with Texas-based publisher Black Rose Writing. Just River recently won the

American Fiction Award for humor/satire and has been a finalist in Foreword Indies Humor category as well as the Wishing Shelf Book Awards for general fiction. Class correspondent: Victoria Mariconti // victoria.mariconti@gmail.com

2016

Luke Reynolds recently had his nonfiction book, Braver Than I Thought: Real People. Real Stories. Real Courage., published by Simon & Schuster. It was chosen as an official Junior Library Guild Selection. // Matthew Pierce is a senior restaurant success manager with Toast, specializing in mid-market/enterprise accounts. Matt is celebrating his fifth year with Toast. He and Maggie Mullins are engaged to be married on September 9, 2023, in Portland, Maine. // Haley Wallace graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School and begins her federal clerkship with the Honorable Eric C. Tostrud in the fall.

2017

Kierstin Giunco, Urban Catholic Teacher Corps alum and current doctoral student in the Lynch School, was named to the International Literacy Association’s (ILA) 2023 30 Under 30 list. As a teacherresearcher, she supported sixth-grade Mission Grammar students as they explored meaningful questions about current events, their communities, and their lives. // Aaron Rothbard, PhD, is still savoring his high ACT score while working hard to recruit top talent at Bain & Company. As a lucrative side hustle, he has entered the luxury watch market as both investor and advisor. // Christopher Calderón, S.J., MDiv’17, has been appointed the next president of Cristo Rey High School in Sacramento. // Kimberley Zakka found her passion working at the intersection of medicine and artificial intelligence. After graduating with an MD from the American University of Beirut, she pursued an MSc in health data analytics and machine learning from Imperial College London. She is currently working as a data scientist and machine learning researcher at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Class correspondent: Joshua Beauregard // joshf94@charter.net

Mission Driven Whether he’s balancing the state’s budget or building community among recent BC grads, Chris Marino ’14 carries his formation everywhere.

Most weekends you can find Chris Marino ’14 and his wife, Cayla Gandolfo ’14, along with their golden retriever, Mac, rounding Chestnut Hill Reservoir, touring their old stomping grounds at Boston College. For the Brighton-based couple, there’s no such thing as being too close to the Heights. Well, moving into a Mod might be a bridge too far.

“Every time we go back, a new story comes up,” says Chris. “It’s just a place unlike any other.”

The couple, who met during their junior year while studying abroad in Parma, Italy, were deeply formed by their time at the Heights and remain involved with the University.

“My time at BC strengthened my passion for teaching and helped me realize I wanted to serve our youngest learners,” says Cayla.

Having served on his senior class gift committee and co-chaired a reunion committee, Chris leverages that experience for his work on the GOLD (graduates of the last decade) Leadership Council, helping recent alums get reconnected with BC. “It’s great building bridges for alumni to get re-engaged in the life of the University and its community,” he says.

The formation he and Cayla received at BC informs their work as budget director of the Massachusetts Senate Committee on Ways and Means and a K1 teacher for Boston Public Schools, respectively. Shaped profoundly by their service with the Campus School and 4Boston, Chris says he and Cayla “are both driven to public service; BC will teach you that.”

His work can feel like whack-a-mole at times—trying to respond to myriad issues and stretching the budget to make the most impact. “You’re not going to be able to do everything to the extent people want, but it’s crucial to remember that behind all the numbers are real people, struggling to afford healthcare, education, housing, food. Keep your focus on the people you’re trying to support.”

Chris brings a similar approach to his service and support on behalf of current and future Eagles. “I wouldn’t trade those four years for anything in the world,” he says, “and I want the same for them.”

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

“

My time at BC strengthened my passion for teaching and helped me realize I wanted to serve our youngest learners.”

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Class Notes // Baby Eagles

Dina Wall Andrews ’05 and David Andrews ’05, Dylan Skye, 11/1/22

Lisa Roughsedge Twomey ’08 and Patrick Twomey ’08, Josephine, 12/1/22

Meredith Koch ’12 and Ryan Hayes, Grant, 12/14/22

Tiffany Anzalone McCasland ’02 and Chris McCasland, Banks, 7/26/22

Lauren Ciarci Langendorf ’14 and Thomas Langendorf ’13, Owen Lewis, 2/6/23

Holly and D.J. Murphy ’11, Mackenzie Abigail, 12/5/22

Alexandra Crockford Luisi, MA’18, and James Luisi, MDiv’18, Samuel Lee, 11/19/22

Susan Groden McDonald, JD’12, and Tucker McDonald ’07, Henry John, 4/26/22

Suzanne and Ryan Peffer ’17, MBA’21, Winston, 8/21/22

Melissa Navarro and William Waters ’97, Zoey Isabella, 1/19/21

Meredith Kelly ’10 and Travis Brimm, Brooks, 1/26/23

Kelsey and Preston Hayes ’07, Maggie, 1/21/23

Breeana Blalock, MSW’20, Amado Meruk, 9/11/22

Sam Lipscomb Spain ’10 and Kevin Spain, Jayce, 2/1/23

Corinne Gabelli Fallon ’07 and John Fallon, Emily, 12/29/20

Jessica Gage and Jamie Martz ’08, James, 1/4/23

Katrina and Andrew Chung ’10, Ainsley, 4/24/21

Courtney Kuhn Callegary ’13 and Henry Callegary, Grant Kenneth, 8/6/22

Katherine ’12 and José López, Joaquin

Lizzy Robbins McCarthy ’09 and Michael McCarthy ’09, James, 6/15/22

Madeleine Moore ’11 and Eddie Howe, Edward David, 12/30/22

Jen Yoo ’12 and Jared Collins ’12, Edward Britt, 8/1/22.

Lauren Galinsky ’09 and John C. Driscoll ’07, John Trager, 1/21/23

COURTESY OF TIFFANY ANZALONE

COURTESY OF COURTNEY KUHN CALLEGARY ’13

COURTESY OF MEREDITH KOCH ‘12

COURTESY OF VICTORIA CARTER ‘14

COURTESY OF SAM LIPSCOMB SPAIN ’10

Victoria ’14 and Ian Carter, Liliana Zuri, 7/11/22 Christine Garbis Elmore ’90 and Bill Elmore, Emily Grace, 2/26/22 Caitlin Corrieri Augusta ’07 and Joe Augusta, Charles Roger, 9/24/22 Craig ’22 and Dylan Stacey, Lily, 6/21/22

MCCASLAND ’02

COURTESY OF JAMES LUISI, MDIV’18

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Class Notes

2018

labor and delivery patients for outstanding care during the delivery of their first child, Jake is a shining example of pursuing the passion he found while at BC. Outside of work, Jake is a Mentor with TERN Mentoring, giving back to college students by sharing the lessons he is learning along the way. // César Muziotti, S.J., MEd’20, has been the director of identity and mission at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas, Venezuela. He is also the new chair of identity, leadership, and commitment. In December 2022, he was appointed as the coordinator of the Network of Pastoral, Identity, and Mission of the Jesuit Universities of Latin America. He also teaches educational management in the graduate program in education on campus.

5th Reunion, June 2023 Clayton Trutor, PhD’18,’s book Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta— and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports was named one of Sports Collectors Digest’s best baseball books of 2022.

Public Books named Loserville one of its “Public Picks” of 2022.

2019

Sean Mayer, FSP, ’03, MA’19, of the Daughters of St. Paul was appointed the new editorial manager at Pauline Books & Media, a Catholic publishing house located in Jamaica Plain. // Erin Anderson is completing a masters in lower elementary Montessori teacher training with the hopes of becoming a lead teacher in her Montessori elementary classroom. // Ryan Gardner is a stage manager on the National Tour of the Broadway musical Les Misérables.

Managing all of the backstage technical elements as well as the cast on stage, Ryan and team work around the clock to make sure the show happens eight times a week as they travel across the country.

2020

Celine Lim graduated with her master’s degree in clinical psychology from the University of Indianapolis. She earned this master’s along the way, while working toward her doctorate of psychology (PsyD) degree, which she will be matriculating from in 2025! She passed her two competency examinations, is currently proposing her

COURTESY OF RYAN GARDNER ’19

dissertation, and continues to deliver psychotherapy as part of her training. // Alex Benoît was awarded the position of department chair of English at Greenfield School in Wilson, North Carolina. // Adam Renda became superintendent of Ayer Shirley Public School District. // Breeana Blalock completed her certificate in animal assisted psychotherapy and is working on publishing a literature review of animal assisted psychotherapy for refugee and asylum-seeking youth. // Jake Nowak is the first recipient of the DAISY Award For Extraordinary Nurses at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston.

Having been nominated by one of his

COMMUNITY DEATHS Dolores Joyce, of Newton, MA, on February 2, 2023. She was a Lead Cashier, Dining Services Newton from 2011 to 2021.

Edward J. Kane, of Tucson, AZ, on March 2, 2023. He was Professor and James F. Cleary Chair in Finance, Carroll School of Management from 1992 to 2009, Professor of Economics from 1968 to 1972, and Associate Professor of Economics from 1966 to 1968, (Morrissey) College of Arts and Sciences.

Luis Madera, of Lynn, MA, on December 27, 2022. He was a Custodian, Facilities Services from 1989 to 2022.

Adaline Mirabel, of Revere, MA, on February 5, 2023. She was Assistant Director, Intersections from 2017 to 2019 and Assistant Director, Learning to Learn from 2004 to 2017.

Thomas Stegman, S.J., of Weston, MA, on March 11, 2023. He was Professor, The Ecclesiastical Faculty from 2022 to 2023, Dean, School of Theology and Ministry from 2016 to 2022, and Associate Professor, The Ecclesiastical Faculty from 2008 to 2016.

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

2021

Hunter Bruhn graduated from Navy Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, where he was commissioned as an ensign in the United States Navy. He is stationed in San Diego, where he serves as a Division Officer at Strike Group Oceanography Team San Diego. He will deploy on an amphibious warship, where he will lead a team of forecasters. // Rebecca Bianchi graduated from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health with a master’s of healthcare administration.

2022

Caroline Rocha Sheehy is a real estate broker and operates her own practice, Seaport Properties Advisory Group. She is a first-generation graduate whose parents are Manuel Rocha and Eileen Mary Rocha, who were her inspiration for completing her degree. Caroline is married to Shawn K. Sheehy and is the proud mother of Conor (25), Seamus (23), and Sinead (21). // Jillian Yuhas, MHA’22, was chosen as a fellow for the 2023 cohort of the Trinity Health Administrative Fellowship Program out of 145 applicants. She couldn’t have done it without all the knowledge gained from the MHA program and the help of her favorite professor, Dr. Basel Tarab!

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Class Notes // Fond Farewells

1940s

John McAuliffe ’54

James Salvo ’59

Robert Johnson ’63

George McCarron ’54

Charles White ’59

Elizabeth Murphy Joseph ’63

Gordon Morrissey ’54

1960s

Madeline Kearney ’63

James Baron ’60

Charles Mathys MBA’63

Francis Scarpaci ’54

Catherine Lynch Barrett ’60

Linda Foley McGillicuddy ’63

Robert Shea ’54

Arthur Byron ’60

Francis Noonan ’63

Lawrence Warren ’54

John Corcoran ’60

Philip O’Brien ’63

Margaret Aubin, MA’55, PhD’73

Pat Coughlin PMC’60

Justino Penna, MEd’63

Elinore Laffey Bergomi ’55

Karen Cooley Doyle PMC’60

Charles Pike ’63

Charles Hogan ’55

Lorraine Esterhill ’60

Edward Rogan ’63

Norma Parchment McCarthy ’55

Rosanna Dawson Gagne ’60

Mary Ryan MBA’63

William Murphy ’55

Sally Stearns Healy ’60

Robert Shaw ’63

John Sheedy ’55

Adeline Matthews ’60

Ann Diloreto Staffier ’63

Paul Sheehan ’55

Robert Moroney ’60, MSW’62

Richard Stanton ’63

James Athens JD’56

Susan Murtha, MSW’60

Barbara Gildea Sullivan ’63

Edward Marshall ’49, MEd’51

Robert Devaney ’56

Jim O’Brien ’60

James Sullivan ’63

1950s

Peter Farrell ’56

Burton Robinson ’60

Rita Beaudoin ’64, MA’67

Francis Goslin ’56

Phillip Bistany ’61

Anne Burns ’64

Leonard Healy ’56

Roberta Bristol PMC’61

Gail Gurczak Chencus ’64

Bill MacDougall ’56

Alfred Carolonza ’61

Lish Collins NC’64, MEd’71

Gerard Maher ’56

George Carrigg, MSW’61

Michael Curran ’64, MBA’83

Frank Moniz JD’56

John Cashman ’61

Bill Daly ’64

Edward Buccigross ’57

William Curtin ’61

Beyene Fassil, MBA’64

Nancy Gegan Doyle ’57

Richard Delaney, JD’61

Paul Gallagher ’64

Bill Heavey ’57

Angela DeSimone, MS’61

Edward Hinko, MEd’64

Harold Radochia ’50

James Kelley ’57

Karen Schaumber Ferguson ’61

Michael O’Leary ’64

Barbara Hopkinson Scheerer PMC ’50

Gerry Kelly ’57

Richard Haggerty ’61

Paula Plourde, MA’64

Ernest Leduc ’57

Timothy Hurley ’61

Jay Stewart ’64

David Lane ’51

William McCann ’57

Frank Keenan ’61

James Taylor, MSW’64

Edwin Smith ’51

Irene Gage Munsey ’57

John Mackey ’61

Fran Angino ’65

Mary Agnes Anne Wilcox ’51

John O’Leary ’57

8John McDermott, MA’61

James Brown, MBA’65

Joseph Connolly ’52

Charles Rose, JD’57

Robert McNamara ’61

Mary Costello, MA’65

Carol Kilby Crowley NC’52

Claire Gardner Sherrill PMC’57

Judith Chabot Monahan ’61

Fred DeCaro ’65

Janet Dunphy ’52

John Slattery ’57

Rene Mongeau, MA’61

William Ferris ’65

Barbara Hixon Foster PMC’52

Ann Labadie Sullivan NC’57

Wilfred Montminy ’61

Jeffrey Forster ’65

Margaret Miller Kulik ’52

Edward Waters ’57

Robert Raymond, MSW’61

Alfred Fraga, MA’65

George LeBlanc ’52

Alfred Wheeler ’57

Thomas Sheehan ’61

Madeleine Joy ’65

Peter Martocchio ’52

Fred Bortolussi ’58

Michael Annunziata ’62

Karen Kinnealey ’65

Dan McElaney ’52, MA’53

Thomas Charlton ’58

Linda Besse ’62

Melvin Mercer, JD’65

Alice Reardon Porell NC’52

Louise Demeo ’58

Irvin Feins ’62

Joan Cotter Santoro ’65

Anthony Vignone ’52

Joan Lingard Dugas ’58

Richard Greechie ’62

Bob Sullivan ’65

Thomas Aglio ’53, MSW’55

Jan Holly PMC ’58

Phil Kiel, JD’62

Walter Trybulski ’65

Marian Atcheson PMC’53

Ken Joyce ’58, JD’61

Mary Klueber Leary ’62

John Yauckoes ’65

Jack Coleman ’53

Bill O’Brien ’58

John Milan ’62, MSW’64

Daniel Adams ’66, MA’68

Alan Cross ’53

Daniel O’Connell ’58

Bill Novelline ’62

Francis Carter ’66

John Gallagher ’53

Patricia McGuire Taupier ’58

Leo Reed ’62

Marie Thonis Colucci ’66

Joseph Iarrobino ’53

Burton Abel ’59

Vin Restivo ’62

Thomas Flinn ’66

Ray Kenney ’53, JD’58

Cornelius Daly JD’59

John Tretton, MSW’62

Judy McCluskey Flood NC ’66

Jerry O’Sullivan ’53

Francis Garbarino ’59

Robert Cholette, MEd’63

Thomas Lutz ’66

Dorothy Scanlon, MA’53

Denis Minihane ’59

John Conway ’63

Kathleen Ahearn Weaver ’66

James Wright ’53

Mary Miller Murphy ’59, MEd’60

Marion Kelly Daley NC’63

John Anzivino, MSW’67

Evelyn Higgins Beveridge NC’54

Paul Natale ’59

Dorothy Feller ’63

Dorothy Bujold, MEd’67

John Creedon ’54

Janet Chartier O’Hanley NC’59

Richard Holm ’63

Barbara Butler NC’67

George Criss ’43 Sudie Ernst Geier PMC’43 Tony Lee Hampton PMC’43 Jean Schmidt Lindemann PMC’43 Stephen Stavro ’44, MS’48 John Greenler ’45 Helen Garvey O’Meara, MSW’45 Peggy Hubbell Beebe PMC’46 Natalie Quigg Albers PMC’47 Pat Baillargeon PMC’47 Charles Burns ’47, MA’51 Mary-Lu Stephenson Schaller PMC’47 Libby Irwin Gordon PMC’48 Van Carr Smith ’48

Mike Briana ’50 Gerald Curtis ’50 John Kvicala ’50 William McCarthy ’50 George O’Shea ’50, MSW’56 Frank Paul ’50 Robert Quinn ’50

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Peter Nobile ’54 Walter Opolski ’54

Judith Shannon Lynch ’63

Richard Cunningham, MEd’67

Rosalie Patrello, MEd’71

Sue Commender ’79

Kelly Flynn Brown, MBA’89

Ramon Hite, MBA’67

Barbara Sager ’71 John Wright, CAES’71

Rita Mullen, MA’67, PhD’71

Gregory Conway ’72, MA’74

1980s

Michael Ferriter, MSW’89

Paul Lydon ’67 Sarah Kane Nelson, MA’67, PhD’75

Ruth Hensley, MSW’72

Jerri-Ann Clark Cortese ’80, MA’82

Thomas Kenneally, MBA’72

James Evans, JD’80

Tom O’Reilly ’67, JD’72

William Morin, MBA’72

Janet Fallon ’80

Sandra Miller Pasquale NC’67

James Murray, JD’72

Joseph Lopes, PhD’80

Paul West ’67 Rita Carrier, MA’68

Maureen McFaull Newcomb NC’72

Margaret Lang McGillivray, MA’80

Ellen Connolly Doucette, MA’68

Kevin O’Hagen ’72

Arthur Grimes ’68

Jean-Charles Soucy, MEd’72

Mary Kennedy Toomey ’80, MS’90

Brian Henehan ’68

1990s

Gilbert Arbuckle, MTS’90 Jen Labus ’90 Kathryn Dellaporta Tucker, MEd’92 Teresa Wansley, MA’92 Thomas Hawes ’93 Charles McCabe ’94

Coleman Szely ’72

Gladys Frontera, MA’81

Rick Stanley ’94

John Hession ’68

John Adams ’73

Douglas Miller ’81

Paul Hurley ’68

Timothy Anderson ’73

Patricia Morais, MA’81

Thomas Stegman, MDiv’94, STL’96

Larry Jeffers ’68

Robert Brown ’73

Debbie Noyes PMC’81

Brian Monahan ’96, JD’99

Mary Loughran, MA’68

Joseph Cloutier JD’73

Kerry Trunkett ’81

Sandra Spera, MSW’96

Katherine Lopez Natale ’68,

Lila Sidoons Foye, MS’73

Margaret Berard, MS’82

Peter Dixon ’97

MA’69, PhD’77

Susan Lawlor, MEd’73

Irene Haraldson ’82

Richard Bergskaug ’98

Chuck Scalesse, JD’73

Demetra LaCrosse ’82, MA’84

William Denehy, MBA’98

Albert Annunziata ’74, MEd’76, PhD’81

Suzanne Roberts, MBA’82

Peter Fernandez ’98

Marilyn Shea, MDiv’82

Judith Ryan Berg ’74

Janice Duffy, JD’83

LaVerne Bertin, MEd’99

Stephen De Garavilla ’74

Marguerite Quist, MA’83

Frederick Linehan ’74

Edward Becker ’84

Ronald Persuitte ’68 Mary Powers-Fell ’68 George Thurnher ’68 Claire Appling, CAES’69, PhD’74 James Callahan ’69 John Capobianco, MA’69 Bill Evans ’69, JD’73 Edward Frydl ’69 Bob Gallagher ’69 Arlyne Gonczewski PMC’69 Richard Johnson, MSW’69 Cornelia Kelley NC’69, H’13 Mimi Hoffmann Marks NC’69 William McKay ’69 Ken O’Donnell ’69 Kenneth Sullivan ’69 Mario Trubiano MEd’69

1970s

Robert Borucki ’70 James Brennan, JD’70 Jane Brightman, MS’70 Norm Cavallaro ’70 Annlouise Devenney ’70 Kathleen Hogan Fanning ’70 Charles Gibbons, JD’70 David Hathaway, MA’70

Rebecca McDermott PMC’74 Michael Seymour, MBA’74 Thomas Sullivan ’74 Audrey Jones PMC’75 Claire Labbee, MEd’75 Janet Sullivan McDermott, MAT ’75 Vitas Rasys ’75 Robert Ellis ’76 Richard Gaffney, PhD’76 Patricia O’Connell, MEd’76 Victor Ortiz, MEd’76 Carol Bartnick Begley ’77 Jerry Boren, MA’77, PhD’86 Bernadette MacPherson, PhD’77

Kathleen Kane, MEd’84 John Miller ’84 Timothy Murphy, MA’84 Mary Provencher, MEd’84 Robert Cullen, MBA’85 Mark Downing ’85 Martha Gallagher, MSW’85

2000s

Jeffrey Morrison, MS’00 Diana Steel, JD’00 Joseph Katchpole ’02 Marie Santry, MEd’01, H’02 Michael Coppola ’04 Patricia Clock, MDiv’05 Jim Walker, MS’05

Thomas McLaughlin ’85

Ted Smith ’08

Evie Ramsdell PMC’85

2010s

Karin Hasbrouck ’86 Mary Hockmeyer, MSW’86

Stephen Conley ’12

Kenneth Danley, MEd’87

Nanci Fiore-Chettiar ’15, MSW’16

Yvette Desrosiers-Alphonse ’87

Jacky Merilan, MDiv’15

James Henerberry ’87, MA’89

Alex Dunbar, MSW’22

Walter McGinn, PhD’77 Mort Newton, JD’77 Patricia Podsadowski, MA’77 Alfred St. Cyr, PhD’77

Community Deaths can be found on page 67.

Anne Annunziata ’78 Claire Dowling ’78 Carol Fagan ’78

Daniel McAuliffe ’70

Barbara McEnaney Houlihan, MSW’78

Paul Meunier ’70

Jeremiah Kellett, DED’78

Janet Thomas ’70

Margaret Lavonis, MEd’78

Linda Amadeo ’71, MS’73

Robert Letourneau ’78

Michael Casey ’71

Thomas Marcella, PhD’78

Carol Roddy Donovan ’71

Martha Rooney ’78

Dick Kilpatrick ’71

Jeffrey Webber, MBA’78

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

The “Fond Farewells” section is compiled from national obituary listings as well as from notifications submitted by friends and family of alumni. It consists of names of those whose deaths have been reported to us since the previous issue of Boston College Magazine. Please send information on deceased alumni to Advancement Information Systems, Cadigan Alumni Center, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 or to infoserv@bc.edu. su m m e r 20 23 v bcm

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Class Notes // Advancing Boston College

Flexible. Independent. Unrestricted.

Necessary.

BC’s discretionary funds enable deans and administrators to address critical needs quickly—and in impactful ways.

According to Partners in Health, 1 in 20 women in Sierra Leone—one of the poorest nations in the world—faces a risk of dying in pregnancy or childbirth. Infants and children under five also die at an alarmingly high rate: 122 deaths per 1,000 live births. Many of these deaths could be prevented with the right care.

Over the past several years, Brittney van de Water ’09, MS’10, an assistant professor at the Connell School of Nursing, has worked with Sierra Leone’s government to implement a midwife training program, a critical first step to reversing the trend. A portion of this life-saving work is supported by donations to the Connell School’s Dean’s Innovation Fund.

Funds like the one above, which is administered by Dean Katherine Gregory, have many names—Innovation Funds, Discretionary Funds, Strategic Initiative Funds—but all are indispensable tools that help the University meet the needs of our times while planting seeds for new ideas and solutions for the future. These unrestricted sources of funding are critical to each Boston College school and division.

Immediate-use funds are bolstered through gifts of all sizes from alumni and friends, and their impact ripples across departments and the Heights. Following are examples of how BC’s deans and administrators make strategic use of these discretionary dollars.

Catalyzing Academic Excellence New ideas and opportunities spring up every day across campus, but it can be challenging to plan and budget for them in advance. One central mechanism for supporting cuttingedge work across the University’s academic units is through the Provost’s Discretionary Fund. Every aspect of the University’s academic activities are the purview of Provost and Dean of Faculties David Quigley.

Accordingly, the Office of the Provost provides vital support to BC’s outstanding faculty and most pressing academic 70

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priorities. These include recruiting and retaining talented faculty who are dedicated to combining excellence in teaching and scholarship, enhancing our students’ formative educational experiences, and launching major University initiatives like the BC Prison Education Program.

“The world—and our students—need a strong Boston College, rooted in our Jesuit, Catholic heritage and committed to excellence in liberal arts education. This critical work to which we are called requires sustained investments in faculty renewal, integrated sciences, formative education, and emerging opportunities,” says Provost Quigley.

Each of BC’s schools also have flexible resources to administer to the areas of greatest local need. Through the Lynch School of Education and Human Development Dean’s Innovation Fund, Dean Stanton Wortham has been able to launch the new Department of Formative Education, fund a visiting professor who taught two courses for the Transformative Educational Studies major, and establish a new master’s program in urban mental health counseling, which includes professional development workshops for communities in Boston, Lynn, and Springfield. The BC School of Social Work’s Center for Social Innovation backed the development of the new Interdisciplinary Certificate in Humanitarian Assistance.

It also funded faculty to work with undergraduate students from across BC on interdisciplinary research projects.

Gifts to the Carroll School of Management Dean’s Innovation Fund allow John and Linda Powers Dean Andy Boynton ’78, P’13, to respond quickly and imaginatively to emerging opportunities that shape the school’s future. Efforts include an ongoing effort to design and launch minor programs for students in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences. To date, 1,300 arts and sciences students are pursuing a minor in the Carroll School.

Meaningful research in the laboratory and the field has become an increasingly critical part of the educational experience for this generation of Boston College undergraduates, particularly in the Morrissey College, the University’s largest school, where intensive opportunities are made possible in large part by gifts to the Dean’s Fund for Strategic Initiatives.

When faculty and students in the Morrissey College sought new equipment for chemistry labs in Merkert Hall, Dean Gregory A. Kalscheur, S.J., moved quickly to respond. Thanks to unrestricted support, he was able to purchase exactly what was needed to allow students and faculty to keep pace with their rapidly changing field.

“Discretionary funding is very helpful,” Fr. Kalscheur says. “The flexibility of the fund allows me to respond to urgent needs— from equipment to Undergraduate Research Fellowships.”

Investing in the Community Flexible funding also benefits campus life beyond the classroom. At BC Law School, the dean’s fund has focused on funding initiatives in support of its diverse community such as allocating resources specifically to recruit students of color and from underrepresented communities. Earlier this year, with some prospective students unable to afford transportation to campus for the Law School’s Admitted Student Day, the fund made it possible for them to visit.

The BCSSW Center for Social Innovation supported an annual formation retreat for students in the Latinx Leadership Initiative and Black Leadership Initiative.

And thanks to donor support, Woods College of Advancing Studies Dean Karen Muncaster had the resources to expand access to Woods College and support student service learning opportunities in the community.

Gifts to the Dean’s Fund for Strategic Initiatives at Messina College—a pillar of BC’s new Pine Manor Institute for Student

Success—provide important funds that will help get the program successfully off the ground, such as technology, transportation, and dining.

Providing Opportunity While BC has an exceptional financial aid program that mitigates the effects of tuition on our students, discretionary funds also help students overcome other obstacles so they may enjoy the fullest BC experience possible.

The Leo Sullivan Fund at the Carroll School provides textbooks, laptops, interview attire, and other resources to students in need. Similarly, the Mission and Ministry Fund, under the direction of Haub Vice President John T. Butler, S.J., removes financial barriers so that all BC students can participate in formative experiences such as retreats, service opportunities, and immersion trips.

Shawna Cooper Whitehead, vice president for student affairs, works closely with several offices and departments across the Heights to address a multitude of issues students face. “College is a pivotal time in a student’s life. It’s a new place with new people, and in some cases students are making their own decisions for the very first time,” she says. “We are grateful to the BC alumni and parents who have provided support through the Student Affairs Discretionary Fund.”

The Dean’s Innovation Fund is a critical instrument to support many different initiatives within our school. It allows us to do new and different things in academic nursing and strengthen student programs, faculty research, and community partnerships.”

—Katherine E. Gregory, PhD’05, RN, FAAN. Dean, William F. Connell School of Nursing

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of mind—that usually means being pleasant.

Being in front of a group of happy people and making beautiful music helped me to get better and better at it.

Be the pilot. When I was conducting at Symphony Hall, there were two thousand people in the audience and one hundred people on stage. I liken the experience to being the pilot of a 747 airliner. I was responsible for getting everyone there safely—in the sense of getting everyone on stage to do their job, and giving everyone in the audience a beautiful music experience. I had to keep track of everything: the playing of every instrument, the singing of every voice, and the audience response. But that was the invigorating part of it.

Success requires time and a plan. When preparing music, you have to know every aspect of what everyone is going to do.

Almost everything in life that’s worth doing involves a process of starting from the beginning, laying the foundation, learning every aspect of it, and then growing with it. So many things are like that—they don’t happen fully formed.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED

John Finney John Finney, BC’s wildly popular leader of all things music, retired in May after thirty years as the director of the University Chorale of Boston College and more than two decades as conductor of the Boston College Symphony Orchestra. Finney, who’d been BC’s distinguished artist-in-residence since 1999, gave more than five hundred concerts both nationally and abroad, and directed the Chorale in every Pops on the Heights performance, BC’s biggest annual fundraiser, since its 1993 launch.

—Elizabeth Clemente Master all aspects of your craft. I am the youngest of five children, and all of my brothers and sisters took piano lessons before me in our tiny Ohio farming town. So I grew up hearing the piano being played in the house. My piano teacher, Esther Scudder, was also an organ teacher and a professional singer. Over the years, she saw my talent and encouraged me to start learning the organ and music theory, solfège, and dictation. She was the main reason I became the musician that I am.

Emphasize the positive. I was very introverted all through high school and most of college, too, but I knew that I wanted to be 72

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a professional musician. After college, my first jobs playing the organ in churches and watching other conductors helped me. My mentor and teacher, Janet McGhee, was the essence of positive reinforcement. No matter what was going on in rehearsal, she’d find one little thing that was good and build on that. That’s really where I learned how to be a conductor.

Singers are inherently happy people. That might sound a little superficial, but it’s true, and it helped me become more of an extrovert. When you’re a singer, your voice is your instrument. And to get the best out of your instrument, you have to be in a good state

Focus on the job at hand. Working with large ensembles, I don’t look out and see a faceless mass. I see a hundred individuals and each has their own background, their own voice, their own instrumental ability. One of my jobs is to focus everybody on the actual performance for those hours we have together.

I say to everybody, “You may be focused on an exam, or worried about some other aspect of your life right now. You can come back to it after the concert, but God will keep it for you while we’re focused on making beautiful music together.”

Sometimes you get the best performances by not conducting at all. If you’ve done your job well in rehearsals, the conductor doesn’t need to do anything. When we wave our arms around, it’s basically to help people stay together. I can’t show them which fingers to put on the clarinet to play the note, or what exactly to do with their bow on the violin. I’m helping them get started together, stop together, and know where the phrases should be loud or soft. In my farewell concert—there’s one really complicated part in Beethoven’s ninth symphony—I just stopped conducting and smiled at everybody. It was magnificent, because they knew it so well. n

photos: Lee Pellegrini (Finney); Charlotte Ward (Parting Shot)

Parting Shot

Picture This The rapper Flo Rida, performing as the headliner of the annual Marathon Monday festivities, snapped a selfie while being simultaneously photographed by a crowd of cheering students.

Capturing the entire scene—and adding to the smartphone synchronicity in the process—was Charlotte Ward ’25, whose photo was posted by the official Boston College account on Instagram. The mutual appreciation continued on the app, with Flo Rida commenting on Ward’s pic with a series of flame, party popper, and party horn emojis.

—Lisa Weidenfeld

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