Class Notes

Greetings from your new class agent! I hope you will keep emailing your news. Those of us at our 35th reunion in June had a great time, thanks to Carolyn Roberts and Cathy Colbert, who chaired the reunion committee and did a great job! We hope to see a lot more of you at the 40th reunion, which Daphne Johnston Elliott and Jean Ellis Crabtree have volunteered to chair. Check out our Facebook group, “Mary Washington College Class of 1976.” Cathy has done the work on that.

Our daughter, Ellen, received her master’s degree in teaching from U.Va. and was to begin teaching second grade this fall with Fairfax County Public Schools. Sue Sendlein Luscomb came from Memphis to attend the reunion with me. One of the highlights of our trip was visiting Wegmans for the first time, and we had dinner there Saturday night with Betty Anne Gupton Teter and Jane Reese-Coulbourne.

Cathy helped Lucy Dee Kinsey get ready for daughter Kate’s wedding the week after the reunion. Kate is a vision therapist and new husband Philippe works in IT for Accenture. Lucy’s other daughter, Monica, is a senior art major at VCU. Lucy’s niece attends UMW and plays lacrosse. Lucy and husband Carroll planned to vacation out West this summer. She had a wonderful time catching up with classmates at the reunion picnic.

Carolyn Roberts married Jim Everett in February. The wedding was elegant and fun, and Judy Sledge Joyce and Jan Biermann celebrated with them. Jan said that anyone who wants to buy a 1903 Victorian cottage in Yonkers, N.Y., should write to her. Becky Adams Mauck is still married to Newby and they have children Lawrence and Cabell Layne, who both are married, and Andrew, who attends Hampden-Sydney College. Becky has taught preschool for more than 20 years and is now director of the school.

Gail Pullan, who has been in real estate for the past few years, moved to Atlanta in 1989 and loves it. Mary Ruth Burton married Rich McLain, lives in Richmond, and runs Burton- Fuller Management, which provides corporate training, executive coaching, and team development to organizations nationwide. Clients this year included VCU basketball coach Shaka Smart and athletic director Norwood Teague, who made a historic run to the Final Four! Her son works for Deloitte and lives in New York, and her daughter works for the Software Association of Oregon and lives in Portland.

Yolande Long does communications and coordinates the annual statewide conference for VOCAL, a non-profit statewide mental health consumer organization in Richmond. She received a master’s of social work from VCU in 1978. Her eldest daughter graduated from VCU, where her older son is enrolled, and her younger son is at U.Va. She has one granddaughter. She and her husband went to Hawaii in February and stopped in San Diego. Yolande regularly sees her son’s godmother, Melissa Baisch Face ’78. Myra McCord Lovelace missed the reunion due to the high school graduation of husband Jim’s daughter. She is the last one out of the nest and planned to attend Abilene Christian University. Myra continues to work in the chemical industry but hoped to retire at the end of the year, then possibly do part-time project work, giving her more time for volunteer work and art classes. Husband Jim works for a technology company in the oil field services market. He just returned from Russia and found Internet cafés in Red Square, which is quite different from when Myra visited 30 years ago behind the Iron Curtain. Daughter Leslie died in an auto accident nearly three years ago, but they celebrate her life every day. She loved butterflies and there is no shortage of reminders everywhere. Daughter Alex lives in Houston, so they see her quite often. They survived the relentless heat and drought in Texas this summer and were looking forward to fall.

Robin Rimmer Hurst was beginning her third year as an adjunct instructor at the UMW College of Business, teaching human resource management, organizational behavior, and organizational development and change. She is glad to be back on campus interacting with the talented Mary Washington students. Cathy Kroohs has been a paramedic with the Alexandria (Virginia) Fire Department for 25 years. Her big summer project was riding a bike for seven days and 454 miles across Iowa as a fundraiser for another AFD medic as part of RAGBRAI. It isn’t a race, just a ride, with lots of stops to eat Iowa corn and barbecue.