ALUMNI NEWS
adjuster was walking around the house he stepped through (literally) the living room ceiling! Both of Ania’s kids live in Houston. Her daughter Hannah is teaching fourth grade at Briarmeadow Charter School. Her son Aaron is practicing law. Helena Papadopoulos Johnson reports that she too was luckily unharmed by Harvey, but many friends were not. Her daughter Anna Maria ’18 is a Kinkaid senior and will be attending Davidson College in North Carolina next year. Her son Will is in fifth grade at The Joy School. She sees Eveta Weingarten Freeman pretty regularly and for the holidays this year she took a cruise around Australia and New Zealand (she actually emailed me in the middle of it!). Linda Lyons Brown (fs) had some big news to share! She is now Linda Lyons Ewing, having just gotten married in January to Tom Ewing. Tom was a Memorial High School graduate, went to UT and was a Delt. Linda’s three girls are great. Carson ’11 (fs) is in Houston and works at ZRS Management. Kaddy ’12 (fs) is a second-year law student at University of Houston and Krissy ’12 (fs) is in Dallas working and writing for Cowboys & Indians magazine. She is also waiting to hear from University of Edinburg for her Masters in Journalism. Rusty Johnson emailed in to say he took his family of four on a “glamping” safari in Kenya this past summer (glamping is right up my alley!). Rusty didn’t have to deal with Harvey because he lives in Princeton, NJ but he is freezing his butt off right now. He took up golf this year and still plays tennis (impressive). As for alumni sightings? He saw Jim Arthur in Philadelphia about 10 years ago and Bruce Phillips at a mutual friend’s house about three years ago. Michael Curran got a new grandbaby for Christmas! Judah Wayne Curran was born on Christmas day to son Michael and wife Megan and his initials are JC which is pretty cool. JC is Mike’s second grandson after Axel Michael Curran who is 20 months. Mike’s daughter Grace graduated with a Petroleum Engineering degree and works for Schlumberger In Midland, TX and she got engaged to an Aggie over Christmas break. Lots of holiday joy in the Curran household! Mike reports he is still working for Young Life and is currently a Development Director running a capital campaign to update their 50-year-old camp, Woodleaf Towne. If you are interested in donating to a great cause, let Mike know. Finally, I was excited to get an email
for the first time from Virginia PittmanWaller!!! She has been away from Houston since we graduated from Kinkaid to pursue college (Vassar ‘86), grad school (Yale ‘88) and then worked at CBS News for five years in NYC. After that, she went to med school (University of Texas – San Antonio ‘97) and then seven years of residency training in general surgery and plastic surgery and 12 years of practice in San Antonio, TX. She just moved back home this past year to join a great group at Houston Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery (we all know who to call for facelifts!). As you can tell, Virginia has been one busy woman so she says she “married” medicine and is a “dog-mom” to her Glen of Imaal Terrier, “Oliver Edward.” She loves hearing about what everyone is doing and hopefully we will see her at our next reunion! I am very sad to report that our classmate Peter “Pito” Pratt passed away suddenly in February. We learned of Pito’s passing after the submission deadline, so his full obituary will be included in the In Memory section of the Summer Magazine. If you would like to share any remembrances of Pito, please send them to me to include in my next round of class notes. Before I leave I want to remember two great moms who sadly passed away: Melisa’s mom and Carol Attwell Bourne’s mom. I have so many fond memories of both of these ladies and was heartbroken to hear of their passing. I will remember them with joy because that is what they always brought to the class of ’82. So, that’s it for now. I have been swamped in a good way…still busy with choreography and my new “baby”…a program for special needs kids at the elementary school called the IN Crowd. It’s a big undertaking but I love every single minute. The next column is in the summer, so start doing some fun and exciting things now so you can give me the scoop later. Love y’all! Maria Semander Crawford
1983 Anthony Brown The Woodlands, TX abrowntex@gmail.com Well, come the weekend of April 6-7 we will find ourselves wondering: Where did the last 35 years go?; Who knew I would live to 35?; Do you know if you transpose 35 that’s how old most of us are?; Heck, I got kids that are almost 30 or older!; We
are old because we haven’t seen each other in over 20 years! I hope you are able to join our classmates to rekindle old friendships, catch up on each other’s lives and basically just see really old friends. Here is Joel Tipton’s story, in his words, that may be like many told in April, or at least one that may inspire you: “As I sit here on the veranda writing this, summertime in the Mississippi Delta is beginning to dawn. It’s very much like the hot, humid summer days of my youth in Houston. Oh the joy of sweating gallons of life sustaining fluids from your body in just five minutes of walking outside...But that, nevertheless, is where I find myself these days. Our adventure, as I find myself calling this new chapter in our lives, started in October of 2015. On that fateful day, my usually jovial boss called me into his office and simply said we have decided to go in another direction, and that my services were no longer needed. For the first time in my career I found myself out of a job…and at the age of 50! Not the best age to find yourself out of work, given this new batch of millennials now taking over the world! Not to worry. That’s what I found myself telling my wife and family. I mean after 28 years of the grinding corporate world spent with Fortune 50 companies, I could use some time off to decompress. And decompress I did! What I didn’t expect though was twofold. One, how tough it would be to find another job that really fed my passion, and two, how utterly disgusted I would feel going through the seemingly long and overly drawn out interview process. I had at least two that literally lasted three or more months. Corporate world at its finest...frozen with indecision. After I had my gut full of that nonsense, my really, really awesome wife Amber suggested we do something we had always talked about...I was like “Ice Road Truckers?” No, she said, “Let’s buy a B&B.” Flash forward almost a year after that fateful day in October, and also add in a near death experience due to my own stupidity...Let me just say, when you feel really, really bad, go see a doctor! But in my defense, we were packing up to move from our old life in Dallas to our new life in the Mississippi Delta, and I didn’t have time for any distractions. I had a job to do. Well, my stupid Type A personality got the best of me. Long story short, I did see a doctor two weeks later, and the next thing I know, I’m being rushed to the ER. Come to find out, my appendix bust two weeks prior and I was in bad shape to put it
ANNUAL REPORT SPRING SPRING2015 2018
mildly. I ended up in the hospital for two weeks. My wife made the move to the Delta one week into my hospital stay because we had a closing date on the Inn we bought while I lie helpless in Dallas. Like I said, she is really, really awesome! I still don’t know how she pulled off moving into an 8,500 square foot house, unpacking in less than a week and also not missing a beat with the business. You see, being the Type A personalities we both are, why would you stop taking guest reservations just because we are moving into an already operating Inn? Life here is interesting to say the least. The region has been called “The Most Southern Place on Earth” (“Southern” in the sense of “characteristic of its region, the American South”), because of its unique racial, cultural and economic history. The Delta is strongly associated as the place where several genres of popular music originated, including the Delta blues and rock and roll. The mostly black sharecroppers and tenant farmers had lives marked by poverty and hardship but they expressed their struggles in music that became the beat, rhythm and songs of cities and a nation. Amber and I also refer to it as an alternate universe. The house itself sits on a major Civil War battlefield, and the large hill in our backyard was once a Union Battery where they defended the town of Helena with their heavy artillery. July 4th, 1863 saw 1,500 Confederate soldiers killed on our property. Built in 1904, the house was home to a rich cotton merchant. The house has been a number of things during its life. The strangest being a funeral home in the late 20’s and most of the 30’s. It’s fun at Halloween! Established as a B&B in 1983, we are the fourth set of owners, and have been fortunate enough to really make it work for us. If you are ever in the Delta, about an hour south of Memphis, stop by for a visit! Check us out at www.edwardianinn.com. Until the next update, take care, and visit the Delta! Maybe by then I’ll be a published writer like Duke Diercks. We have some great stories to tell!”
1984 Jackie Fair Houston, TX jfair36900@aol.com One of the best parts about being class correspondent is hearing from classmates who have been MIA for a while. Grace Quirk Thompson (yes, she’s alive!) reports that she is still
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