1965 Class Notes for 2019
Blue Class of 1965
Thank you all for sharing your lives with me and the other blue class members. Terrel Funk Gagermeier reported a lovely 2018 including the marriage of her son Michael to Karon, a family reunion with Terrel’s siblings in Big Sky, MT and time spent with daughter Kate and Luke and their four children. Kate’s family lives only 25 minutes away.
Sandra Skwirut Jaszek has retired from her major involvement at the library and enjoys visits with son Alex, his wife and their twin granddaughters who are in third grade. She also is trying to deal with their forty-year accumulation of “stuff.”
Eileen O’Donnell Jacxsens has also sorted through their accumulations in preparation for a move to Richmond, VA, where they will live across the street from their daughter. Eileen and Peter have 11 grandchildren to enjoy and sent a photo of nine of them.
Purging the accumulation of many years is something Mary Reinhard Webster and I dealt with before moving to our respective continuing care retirement communities. Mary and Gary keep busy with volunteer activities at church and the Denver Metro community. They also take cruises about twice a year and have been to seaports on five continents. They hope to add a sixth this year. Gary was among the veterans honored with a “Quilt of Valor” in recognition of his military service by a quilting group affiliated with their church.
Dominic and I had two wonderful trips in 2018. The first was to northern Spain and Barcelona. We were awed by Santiago de Compostela with its many pilgrims, as well as La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. In the fall we traveled to Croatia and Slovenia with their beautiful scenery. We look forward to three graduations this spring: two grandchildren from college and the third one from high school.
Hedy St. Denis Glenn and Wayne also traveled to Slovenia to visit her cousins and went to the beach in Croatia with them. They also visited friends in Hawaii where Hedy had lived while in graduate school. In the fall they attended the 50 year reunion of the Great Gull Island Project, an ornithological research project at which Hedy had spent several summers. She continues with several French and Italian language discussion groups while Wayne spends time building mobiles and stabiles and participating in some shows.
Christine McHale O’Connell and husband Vincent live permanently in rural Waimanalo on the windward side of Oahu. They spend summers in Boulder, CO, close to one of his children. She is looking forward to our 55 year reunion next year.
Margaret Hammann Way still lives in the same house in Wichita, KS, but is in the midst of getting a new kitchen and adjacent family room. Christopher and his family are still in Coeur d’ Alene, ID. An older granddaughter is a sophomore at Boise State University and is a STEM girl and is on the E-Sports team – not a thing like her grandparents. Their younger granddaughter is in eighth grade and is a competitive, champion swimmer. Son Matthew has moved to Louisville, KY, so now they have a new place to visit.
Jane Raymond Smith also mentioned looking forward to reunion. She and Joe got back into their rebuilt home in July about a year after Hurricane Harvey did its damage. They are enjoying their new, improved surroundings and hope to stay there for the foreseeable future. Jane keeps busy with exercise, book clubs and academic classes.
Emmy Portuondo Eaton is sporting two new hips and a new car. The latter is due to a rear-ender in which her car was totaled, without serious injury to Emmy. She is grateful for good health and being more mobile after the surgery.
Martha Moon Pavlick and Tom are enjoying excellent health and a “quiet close-to-home” lifestyle. Their eldest son will be ordained a transitional deacon in June and their first daughter has found a new vocation in nursing. Another daughter is expecting their twenty-first grandchild this summer and the youngest has a cooking series on You Tube called Anne’s Family Recipe. Martha and Tom enjoy CD and DVD courses, gardening and a Latin Mass community.
Marian Patrizio is still teaching refugees in NZ and is very active in a Buddhist Sangha. She feels equally engaged in New Zealand and the US, keeping up via the internet and her annual family visit to the States. She recommends Jill Lepore’s “These Truths” as a highly readable history of the United States which made clear to her that “the current conversations taking place have been going on since the beginning of the country. These are conversations about civil rights, social justice and the willingness to change, in the face of our fears about wealth and the accumulation of power to protect wealth. We are so focused on individualism at times, we forget the need for community.”
Leila Gonzalez Sullivan completed work on a NSF grant in May and was able to have a summer of leisure at the beach with family and doing some travel. She took a river cruise on the Nile with some friends from church which she found amazing. This winter she visited Vieques Island off Puerto Rico and afterwards visited some cousins in San Juan. She continues to study Italian in hopes of returning soon to Italy. She has also been growing her photography skills.
Ruth Chojnacki continues teaching part-time for DePaul University’s Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies Program which she describes as a wonderful way to keep learning and staying in touch with the rising generation. She also teaches in the Archdiocese of Chicago’s deaconate and lay leader formation program for Spanish speakers. She and Cary spent two weeks in As, Norway with family where her niece and husband studied goats and cheese at the Norwegian Life Sciences University, followed by a stay in a renovated nineteenth century farm building on an island near Bergen. She recommends this “model social democracy” and its natural beauty as a vacation destination.
Lee Rogers Matyola occasionally looks up the achievements of the Millburn Township Science Research students where she was Science Supervisor. They had 15 Intel Semifinalists and two finalists in the course we designed to support student interest in science while she was at Millburn. She still volunteers occasionally at Students to Science, an organization that provides laboratory experiences to students that do not have lab activities in their inner city schools. This year a second location in downtown Newark, NJ, was added. Students work in a professional chemistry lab with about four million dollars’ worth of equipment. She and Dan enjoy a yearly getaway to Maui.
Maribeth Flynn is still teaching art history, Art and Architecture of the Catholic World and the basic Western survey, at Caldwell University in New Jersey. She and Tom took a quick trip to Madrid in January and will be taking a brief sabbatical this fall to spend time in Paris. She notes that 2020 will be a big year for all of us, and not just Reunion. I do hope to see many of you on that occasion.
Jane Fee Baker Apollony had the happy news of her marriage in Williamsburg last December to Paul Apollony. After working for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and its predecessors for almost 40 years, she retired in 2014. Her husband Paul Baker had passed away in 2012 after 43 years of marriage. While attending some classes after retirement, she ran into Paul Apollony with whom she had worked with in the late 1960s. Life for her is very, very good right now.
Robin Spence Costa
203 Foulkeways
Gwynedd, PA 19436
robinc416@comcast.net