August 21, 2024
Class Notes
Find out what your Beloit friends have been doing.
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Submit your news and photos to classnotes@beloit.edu. Submissions will appear in Beloit College Magazine’s printed and online editions and are accepted on a rolling basis.
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1960-1969
Credit: Flora Wong
- Laurie Mantzaris’63, Betty Phelan’63, and Judy Kaselow’63 gathered together for tea at the Drake Hotel in Chicago in April.
- John Owen’66 turned 80 in February. He and Ginny “Bonnie” Owen’68, have been married 57 years. They have a home in Fort Collins, Colorado, and a cabin in southwest Montana, and are aging reluctantly with many of the usual maladies. John, a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant, is challenged with polyneuropathy, the result of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam. John and Ginny try to keep up with two daughters, Jen’92 and Shelly’95, a son, Dave, all hard working and successful, their spouses, six grandchildren, and two great grandchildren. Not bad, eh? Thank you, Beloit!
- Kekoa Enomoto’68 (nee Catherine Kekoa), longtime Hawaiian homelands leader and advocate, received the Namahana Award of Excellence at the Ritz-Carlton Kapalua resort in Maui in March as part of the three-day 2025 Celebration of the Arts on Maui. The award recognizes “kupuna (elders) who have served the culture with a zest for life.” Enomoto serves as a charter director of two nonprofits: Pa’upena Community Development Inc., which advocates for Hawaiian homesteaders, and the disaster-relief organization, Na Kia’i O Maui, founded in the wake of the 2023 Maui wildfires. Enomoto, a Waiohuli native Hawaiian homesteader, is a kahuna kakalaleo, or chanter of prayer. A career journalist, she retired as a staff writer, copy editor, and columnist for two daily newspapers, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and The Maui News. She is a cultural practitioner of hula and outrigger-canoe paddling, and has medaled at outrigger World Sprints in Australia in 2016 and England in 2022. Her daughter, Lehua Enomoto’93, is the head volleyball coach at Beloit College.
1970-1979
- Jim Long’72 and Cameron Dieter’16, with Wendy Gordon’76 and Zak Gordon’73, co-hosted an event for Pacific Northwest alumni in April at the Steeplejack Brewery in Portland, Oregon. Cameron, president of the Alumni Association, provided updates on alumni issues and Zak read from his new novel, Alley Pond Park, which is partly set at the college circa 1969-1973.
- Four alums from the class of 1973 had a mini reunion in February at the Denver home of Joshua Barnum’73 and his wife, Kathy, when Sherry Mills Moore’73, Warren Yanoff’73, and David Stricker’73 flew in for the weekend. Warren and David, who get together weekly on the squash court in the Boston area, had not seen Joshua since the early 1990s, and Sherry since shortly after graduation when she and fellow classmate, Charity Dasenbrock’73, came to visit David in Cincinnati on a cross country trip out west. The four found much to talk about over the weekend, memories of Beloit, and catching up on the past 50 years that, as Sherry calculated, collectively comprises 200 years of experiences. One night they dug deep to exercise their aging partying muscles at Joshua and Kathy’s cabin in the mountains of Colorado.
- Bill Stackhouse’74 and his husband Dean have been together since 1998. They were married when it first became legal to do so in Connecticut in 2008, the year that the New York State Supreme Court recognized gay marriages legally performed elsewhere.
- Jonathan Eldredge’76 published a peer-reviewed, open access online book this year, Evidence Based Practice: A Decision-Making Guide for Health Information Professionals, that was selected by the National Institutes of Health for its National Library of Medicine (NLM) Bookshelf.
- Betsey Eltonhead’77 of Concord, Massachusetts, recently retired from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. She received the 2023 Health Sector Management Distinguished Alumni Award for significant contributions and achievements in the health sector.
- Gail McCulloch’78, associate dean of Development & Alumni Affairs at the Yale School of Nursing, recently raised $11.1M for student scholarships, the largest gift in school history.
- Celia Rabinowitz’79 received an Outstanding Woman of New Hampshire award in March 2024 from Keene State College, where she is assistant vice president of academic engagement and director of Mason Library. The college presents awards each March to a student, a faculty or staff member, and women from the local area, the Monadnock region, and the state. This year’s awards recognized work in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
1980-1989
- Michael Tarabulski’81 reports that many years of research — which he began at Beloit in 1980 — on the 1925 Franco-American Logan Saharan Expedition has contributed to a full-length biography of Byron Khun de Prorok (1896-1954). Michael assisted the author, Jorge Garcia Sanchez, and is mentioned in a dedication and in the acknowledgements in his book, Byron Khun de Prorok: Arqueólogo y explorador de civilizaciones perdidas. As an archivist, Michael has around 10 acknowledgments. This is his first dedication. Khun de Prorok propelled the Logan Museum and the college into newspaper headlines in late 1925 and 1926 through his involvement in the Logan’s archaeological work in Algeria. Beloit alumni Bradley Tyrrell (1906) and Alonzo Pond (1918) figure prominently in this story, and the chapter on the Sahara trip contains many photographs from the Beloit College Archives.
- Amy Ollendorf’83 has relocated from Southern California to Austin, Texas.
- Paul Manus’85 and his wife, Dr. Deborah Manus, welcomed their first grandchild in April. Paul and Debbie live in Durham, North Carolina, where he is a teacher and coach with the Durham Public School System and Debbie practices family medicine.
- Natasha Yates’85 of Red Wing, Minnesota, earned her Ed.D. with a focus on environmental education from Hamline University in 2023. After a career in secondary science education and a dozen years in higher education teaching integrated STEM to pre-service and in-service teachers, she looks forward to focusing on environmental writing projects. She enjoys hiking with her husband of 25 years on the North Shore of Lake Superior and in the many state parks in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
- Doug Van Beek’86 of Minneapolis joined the leadership team at American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 5 in Minnesota. He reports that his return to mission-driven work and supporting an organization focused on making peoples’ work life better has been hugely rewarding.
- Rick Rose’88 met with two college friends, Stephanie Klett’89 and Vicki Pyzynski’90, for lunch and a “cicada safari” in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Much like people from our Beloit College days, Klett reports, these insects are late to wake up and noisy. Rose had recently announced his bid for Wisconsin state assembly.
1990-1999
- Jeff Stein’90, formerly the vice president for strategic initiatives and partnerships and assistant professor of English at Elon University, was elected as Mary Baldwin University’s 10th president in July 2023.
- Dr. Ross Alexander’96 was named president at Texas A&M University-Texarkana in 2023. He previously served as provost and executive vice president at the University of North Alabama.
- Benjamin Streit’96 was honored at the 2023 UnitedHealthcare Service Hero Awards in Disney World. Since then he has appeared in several promotional videos for the company. He recently accepted a leadership role with the company’s new consumer resolution center, resolving the most complex issues facing members’ healthcare needs and improving the system for everyone. The entrepreneurial skills he learned at Beloit have been invaluable in his career.
- Andrew Jager’98 was awarded a doctorate in bioethics from Loyola University Chicago in May 2023. Andrew also holds a master’s degree in Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Andrew works as Senior Director, Population Health at the American Hospital Association in Chicago.
2000-2009
Credit: Tarren Bailey Photography
- Nick Weisheipl’02, after 21 years as a college baseball coach, including the last 9 as the head coach at Cabrini University, has joined the Miami Marlins as a player development coach.
- Dr. Beatriz Rodriguez-Fransen’02 of Phoenix, Arizona, delivered a TED Talk, “Unlocking Indigenous Knowledge: A New Path for Education,” in February at TED Headquarters in New York City. The talk can be viewed at www.ted.com.
- Erin Carney’05 is working in Uganda this summer with Teachers Across Borders providing teacher professional development for the rural village of Katwadde and the surrounding areas.
- Alex Jacobs’05 of Oakton, Virginia, passed his Dance Vision professional master examination in international ballroom dance with a rating of Honors.
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Heather Rockwell’08 married Nathaniel Kitchel on August 13, 2022 in Danville, Vermont. Beloiters in attendance included Lucy Blackford’07, Lisa Booth’07, Karl Poetzl’96, Daniel Rockwell’01, Debbie Boisvert’72, Dick Boisvert’72, Jerry Friend’08, Robin Burke’07, and Allison “Twickers” Goodman’07.
09 - Erin Gurak’09 and Steve Harrison’07 welcomed their second child, Bonnie Rose Harrison, in June in Austin, Texas.
2010-2019
- Anna Noyes’10 of Fishers Island, New York, published a novel, The Blue Maiden, with Grove Atlantic in May of this year.
- Tyler McGaughey’10 and his wife Sarah Lesser welcomed their second child, Amos Nika McLesser, in July 2023.
- Vivian Mitnick’13 and Germán García Arias welcomed their daughter, Kai Yael García Mitnick, who was born in Nov. 2023.
2020-2024
- Sidney Wallace’21 and Tea Islam’21 met as freshmen, got engaged six months later, and the day before graduation they married. After two cross-country moves, they met their partner, Bill, and settled in Laconia, New Hampshire. Last Dec., they welcomed their son, Owen, into the world, and have been wonderfully supported by their friends, Lydia Wilson’21, Kyle Thompson-Taylor’22, and Luka Crozier’21.
- Nate Johnson’22 recently accepted a position as sports director at the ABC affiliate KLKN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska. He joins the team there after two years as a sports anchor and reporter at WYMT, the CBS affiliate in eastern Kentucky. He will be busy covering all things sports at the Big Ten’s University of Nebraska. Besides Cornhusker sports, Nate looks forward to continuing to cover local colleges and high school athletics.
Losses
Recognizing members of the Beloit College community we have lost.
