Take Note get-togethers. Diana and her husband, John, spend some of the year in the Sun Valley area on their ranch in Gooding, ID. Clarina Schwarzenbach Firmenich
so thoughtfully telephoned me last fall from Geneva after I had written that we are hoping to get to France sometime this summer. She had so much good advice about dates and places and kept us from heading in truly crowded directions! Clarina and her companion, Dusan Sidjanski, live in Geneva where one of Clarina’s sons, Patrick, his wife, Valentine, son, Adrien, and daughter, Laetitia, live. Patrick is the Chief Executive Officer of Firmenich & Company. Clarina’s son Antoine, his wife, Christina, and their two daughters live in Singapore where Antoine is the Managing Director of Aquilus, the Singapore-based research office of Aquilus Management. Clarina always sounds her cheery self! I keep saying “Thank you” to the heavens for email! Mary Jo Laflin Field sent a very nice note from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where Mary Jo and her partner, John Simonds, are spending part of the winter. They are in a writing workshop together, and Mary Jo writes, “It is both therapeutic and fun, especially since I’ve hardly lifted pen to paper since Florence Hunt, my favorite teacher of all time.” Mary Jo is trying to learn Spanish, although I sympathize with her as French was my first foreign language, too, and it is hard to separate the two! Their house in Rockland, ME, has been sold and so they are relishing some new-found freedom of time and place. Mary Jo and John make their home in Chicago.
Congratulations are in order for Missy Turnbull Geddes and her husband, Max, who have just returned from Paris where they celebrated their 53rd wedding anniversary. The Geddeses have grandchildren already through college and in the working world, and Missy and Max have been great about visiting these young ones throughout each year.
Melinda “Linen” Miller Greenough
Lorna Sargeant Pfaelzer, also a
sent a special Christmas card from Sheridan, WY, where they live. The drawing on it was of Santa Claus delivering bales of hay to their friends and neighbors, as Linen’s husband, Doug, was doing just that because the crop yield was much lower than usual on account of drought. Linen and her husband will be great-grandparents in early June! Linen continues to travel to Mexico in support of the medical mission in which she is involved. We had hoped to talk on the phone but kept crossing time constraints. Next time, Linen.
Chicago resident, wrote a nice note from St. Croix where she and her husband, Butch, are spending some of the winter. Lorna sees Betsy McNally Ravenel and Carol Keeney Munro each summer when she visits Betsy, in the Thousand Islands, and they get together with Keeney. That would be fun!
Katherine “Kiki” Judd who lives in Larkspur, CA, near San Francisco, wrote a good note about her family. She has two grandchildren, John (13) and Grace (17), who have spent their entire lives in Plano, TX, a suburb of Dallas. She sees them twice yearly, but does have two children living near her. Kiki has been in the residential real estate business for many years, and just this week I read that San Francisco is having one of its all-time banner years in home sales! I hope that they find their way to you, Kiki!
As you know from earlier correspondence, Gail Sheppard Moloney recently lost her very nice husband, Phil, after a long illness. I’ve spoken with Gail and Virginia “Gigi” Pearson Smithers
recently; both spend their winters in Vero Beach, and I was jealous when they recently had dinner together with other mutual friends. Gail has three daughters: Hillary who lives in England, Courtney who lives in Vermont, and Kim who lives in Scottsdale, AZ. Each of the girls is married, and with seeming effortlessness Gail visits with them hither and yon! Gail will move into her new home in Greenwich in the middle of May. Somehow the phrase VERY WELL ORGANIZED comes to mind! I chuckled when Gail wrote that her daughter Hillary is coming to Connecticut in June for her 25th reunion at Yale; Gail said that she remembered her father’s 25th at Yale and thought that they were “very old looking men!”
Edith “Edie” Radley sent a very cheerful note as she is “winding up about three weeks in Florida (Hobe Sound) with my beloved niece, Katy Gray, and family.” Edie has been very active in her church, St. Andrew’s, in Edgartown, MA, where she lives, and is presently serving on its vestry. “Always interesting work!!!” she says, and I would agree!
Having spoken with a number of you, I can say how very sad we all were to learn that Mary Laird Silvia died on January 29, 2013, after a Mary Laird Silvia ’56 short illness. “An inquiring mind” is the phrase that comes to mind when I think of Mary. We spent time together here in Atlanta two years ago when Mary came to visit one of her adored nephews and his family, and as we talked for most of one day, I learned even more about Mary’s many interests and talents. She really was a perpetual student and investigated deeply those subjects that interested her. In these last few years Mary worked hard on her family’s history. It is painstaking, I know, to go though many boxes and files, but she did it and contributed a monograph about the settlement of Rockland, DE, to the Hagley Library archives. “Versatility” is another word that comes to mind about Mary: She was fluent in French, continued as a singer while finishing her degree at Radcliffe, was courageous in her travels to far corners of the world long before cell phones and the Internet were here, and then traveled with her husband, Peter A. Silvia, a nautical architect-engineer with the U.S. Navy,
SUMMER 2013
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