C L AS S NOTES
same model we had at Mount Hermon for the auto club to learn on, and that John Gregorian reported in the last NMH Magazine that he has brought a Ford of the same year back to life.” • Wilfred “Will” Holton continues to live in a retirement community in Jamaica Plain, Mass., and is active in three nonprofit organizations in Boston. Seven years into retirement and he is in quite good health. He keeps in touch with three classmates: Albie Booth, Karl Radune, and Randy Oestreicher. Will’s wife, Susan, was in poor health for about 10 years before dying in October 2018. He hopes to attend our 60th reunion in 2020. • George Banziger volunteers as a truck driver and grant writer for the food-recovery program in his area. He’s also doing grant work for a multi-use trail in his township and working on issues of interfaith dialogue in his region, which is not very religiously diverse. He has finished teaching and presenting a course, Healing the Divide, for the Institute for Learning in Retirement at Marietta College, and hopes to offer a follow-up course on skills of civil discourse in our politically polarized world, modeled after a similar course for retirees at Gettysburg College. George expects to attend our 60th reunion. • Doug Barrett can hardly believe his 11 grandchildren are growing so fast, with most graduated from college and only a few still undergraduates. “As you can imagine, keeping up with birthdays, graduations, sporting events, and family celebrations, not to mention travel, is the best part of our lives,” wrote Doug. “Sally — the love of my life — and I celebrated our 55th wedding anniversary in September. I certainly owe a great deal of my success to the time I spent at Mount Hermon. There is no doubt that the carpenters of my early development were the teachers, coaches, staff, classmates, and people of all walks of life at this wonderful school on the top of the hill. God willing and the creek don’t rise, I’ll be back for our 60th reunion in two years.” • Did everyone read Albie Booth’s First Person article in the fall 2018 issue of NMH Magazine, where he expresses his love of the wilderness — “stunning sunrises, bagels fried in bacon grease … following winds” — and the camaraderie of hiking and canoeing with NMH schoolmates and their families over many years? It’s a great read. • Marv Kelly, who is both alumnus and former faculty member, chose to make his contribution in this issue of the magazine to the Faculty and Staff News. With less than a year left before our 60th reunion, the good news is that five of the six generous contributors to this column are hoping (a realistic
response at our mature age) to attend. The other good news is that there is more than ample opportunity for all of us to reflect on our experience at Northfield/Mount Hermon — our friendships over the years, the connections we have continued with the school through reunions, school events, and, for many of us, following sons, daughters, and grandchildren through their time at NMH — to consider attending the 2020 reunion.
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Northfield Mount Hermon Alexandra Groome Scopteuolo sandis10992@yahoo.com • Craig Walley operacraig@aol.com From Sandi: Ayo Shanti (Robyn Weiri) is working online on a master’s in emergency and disaster management; she should be done by the end of this summer at Metropolitan College of New York. She’s also busy taking care of Kirshna. • I had a nice long talk with Cyndi Morse, my roommate during junior and senior years. She’s happily retired, and her wife, Carolyn, is still working as a minister. They live in New Hampshire. • Randy McDonald O’Donoghue’s new granddaughter, Julia, is living in London. • Rea Brazeal is a retired ambassador, and her sister, Ernestine ’59, moved near Rea so that Rea could help care for her. • Cheryl Allen Fuller is a nurse practitioner, teaching at Misericordia University. She taught in Uganda in 2017 and 2018. Cheryl’s husband died five years ago, and she has three grandchildren. • Barbara Baldwin Joe wrote in December, “Lightning and I will be traveling to Hawaii in January: one week on Kauai and a week in Honolulu. Plan to hang out at the pool and go to the local flea markets. Then a girlfriend and I will be driving to Leesburg, Fla., in February for a couple of weeks. We will both be attending the Central Florida Dulcimer and Autoharp Festival in Mt. Dora. Will meet up with old friends and make new ones with lots of music. I will be continuing my mountain dulcimer journey and my friend will be beginning one. Classes all day for two days with awesome concerts each night.” • My husband is still working. My daughter will take over his business and lives next door with her three children. My older daughter, who has two boys, is head of the breast clinic at Greenville Hospital in South Carolina. We are all planning a cruise in the Mediterranean. Last summer, we cruised the Baltic, with stops in Russia, Stockholm, Estonia, and Copenhagen, and stayed in Berlin and left for home out of Ireland. • If you want your info in the next issue, email me! Also, grants are judged on
the percentage of alums who donate, not just the amounts. Even one dollar helps. • From Craig: Allen C. Myers wrote, “My wife and I now serve as co-pastors for the West Brooksville Congregational Church in Brooksville, Maine. I am in my third winter (and fifth summer) of serving the Union Congregational Church of Isle au Haut, an island six miles offshore. Fortunately, my winter visits are midweek, so they do not interfere with the mainland church duties. I continue to restore reed organs in my spare time (of which there is not much). It is an important stress-relieving activity, which also results in a useful and beautiful musical instrument for our times: doesn’t go out of tune, requires no electricity to function, and needs no further repairs for 50 to 100 years.” Allen also laments that those things he was “saving for the grandchildren” are things in which they don’t have the slightest interest. • Ron Calef, a former Mainer, now lives in California. “Still working as a consultant in the executive search business,” he shared, “and my location is still in the Sierra Foothills, about two hours west of Lake Tahoe. I had to retire my skis a while back, as my knees retired. Tough call for a lad from Maine and the land of deep snow.” Fortunately, Ron was not affected by the wildfires in California, but he noted, “It’s California: earthquakes, torrential rains, fires. What a place to live, eh?” • Chuck Bennett said, “Estelle and I moved from Minneapolis to Denver … in search of sunnier winters and in the hope that our offspring and theirs would be more likely to visit … both of which have proven to be the case. We are blessed to have two places here: one in an old neighborhood in the city, and a condo in the mountains near the Winter Park ski area, where I, despite encroaching osteoarthritis, am able to ski often.” Chuck is a teaching assistant at Harvard for a course covering change of leadership for sustainability. He’s also on the board of a nonprofit organization whose mission is to make bikes and bike skills available to people who might not otherwise have access to them. And he plans to continue his work on the NMH Alumni Council. Chuck added, “With one offspring on each coast, we still travel fairly often and spent Thanksgiving in Portland, Ore., with daughter Emily ’94, where we labored to help her restore a recently acquired home in the woods (after living for two years on a floating home!).” • From Cape Cod, Pete Johnson reported, “I have been an active and enthusiastic board member of the Brewster Conservation Trust since retiring to Cape Cod. Carol White Odell has been a long-term trustee and former president
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