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Navarros Honored as Friends of the University Shorty and Elba Navarro, leaders and generous philanthropists of the Mahoning Valley for nearly half a century, received YSU’s 2014 Friends of the University Award this summer, recognizing their contributions to YSU and the community. Flor “Shorty” Navarro came to the United States with his parents from Puerto Rico when he was 14. At the age of 16, with his father as a co-signer, he purchased a gas station on Wilson Avenue, and today he is a leader in the automobile business. Elba earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Spanish, reading and Shorty and Elba Navarro education from YSU. She is a retired Youngstown City Schools teacher. In 2001, the Navarros established at $100,000 scholarship fund to benefit Hispanic students attending YSU. Mr. Navarro also gifted a new facility to the Organizacion Civic y Cultural Hispana Americana and, as a veteran of the Marine Corps, he also contributed $100,000 to the construction of the new Veterans Resource Center at YSU.
IN MEMORIAM… To say Carl Chuey loved trees would be an understatement. So, when Chuey died in April at the age of 70, it was appropriate that a tree was planted on campus in his memory. Chuey was an associate professor of biology at YSU since 1967 and curator of the YSU Herbarium, one of the largest herbaria in the state of Ohio. The YSU Board of Trustees approved a resolution this summer naming the facility the Carl F. Chuey Herbarium.
Dominic A. Bitonte died in March at the age of 89. Bitonte had a distinguished career as a dentist, a volunteer and a philanthropist. In 1999, YSU renamed the Dr. Dominic A. and Helen M. Bitonte College of Health and Human Services in their honor. Dorothy M. Kennedy, professor of Nursing for 25 years, passed away in March at the age of 82. Kennedy was a staff nurse at Sharon General Hospital, a school nurse at Duquesne University and director of nursing education at Sharon General before joining the YSU Nursing department in 1969. Frank A. D’Isa, retired professor of Engineering, died in February at the age of 92. D’Isa earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Youngstown College in 1943. In 1947, he joined the engineering faculty at YC and nine years later was named chair of Mechanical Engineering, a position he held until retiring in 1992.
Campus workers plant a tree outside Ward Beecher Hall in memory of Carl Chuey.
Zbigniew Piotrowski, professor of Mathematics and Statistics, died in January at the age of 61. A native of Poland who came to the United States in 1981, Piotrowski had been a YSU faculty member for 30 years and had published more than 70 scholarly articles in the field of Topology and Real Functions.
FALL 2014
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