Class Notes

Jay Flynn and his wife Teresa live in Birmingham, Alabama where Jay is the university registrar at Samford University.  Daughter Katherine will attend Christendom College in Virginia this fall as a freshman.  Jay reports that life in Alabama is sweet, the people are awesome, and Samford is a great place to work.  After living there for five years, it feels more like home to the Flynns all the time, although Teresa reminds them that they are really just “Virginians living abroad.”  Feel free to contact Jay at jflynn@samford.edu.

In July 2012, Eileen O’Connell returned to the non-profit association world and her first employer out of college when she rejoined the American Academy of Physician Assistants (AAPA) in Alexandria, Virginia, as their AMS Administrator.  She spent the first 16 years after college in non-profits in the DC area before heading to the private sector world of software and consulting to non-profit clients from 1997 to 2012.  She’s also been doing a bit of traveling with her Dad.  They took a river cruise in October 2014 from Paris to Normandy on the Seine River.  It was a wonderful trip with great stops and a very memorable visit to Omaha Beach and the American cemetery nearby.  In June 2015, they traveled from Budapest, Hungary, to Amsterdam, The Netherlands, along the Danube and the Rhine Rivers, with amazing vistas and stops along the way from large cities to small littler river towns.  They managed to dodge all the bicycles in Amsterdam (700,000 population and 900,000 bicycles) and enjoyed all the sites.  They’ve also been on trips to Ireland and Italy with hopefully a few more trips in the future.  Eileen has been a docent at the Smithsonian’s American History museum since 2005 when she first got the docent bug for an exhibit honoring the 50^thanniversary of the polio vaccine –“ Whatever happened to Polio?” As a polio survivor it was a more than an interesting experience for her since so few visitors born after 1955 had any real interaction with the disease due to the vaccine program.  Once on board, she stayed and moved on to two current exhibits – The Price of Freedom (US military history from 1763 to the present) and The American Presidency.  You can find her there two Saturdays a month.  She’s celebrating 15 years of survivorship from pancreatic cancer and seven years from breast cancer so life is good despite some of the medical challenges.  She is still hanging out in Alexandria, VA, where she has resided since graduation.

Stephanie Hamlett was recently awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from Virginia’s Women in Public Finance.  Stephanie currently serves as the Executive Director of the Virginia Resources Authority, Virginia’s infrastructure bond bank.  She was appointed to this position by both Governor McDonnell and Governor McAuliffe.  She is also an appointee of the Governor on the Virginia Freedom of Information Council.  Stephanie’s favorite downtime is anything that includes grandsons, Walker and Charlie.

Elisa Devorshak Harvey has been living in Sandy Spring, Maryland (halfway between DC and Baltimore) for the last 17 years on a small farmette which has just enough room for the dogs, chickens, horses and barn cat.  She has been working as a small animal veterinarian for 25 years while also working at FDA’s human medical device center for many years and now as a consultant.  She loves being able to work at home most of the time given the DC traffic!  Husband Brian is a physician who also worked at FDA and in pharma for many years, and is also now consulting and traveling quite a bit.  Both boys are grown and out of college.  Duncan graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont in 2014; he lives in San Diego where he is working for a health care app startup, and loves sailing there.  Alex graduated this year from Davidson College in North Carolina and is headed to Georgetown for graduate school in biochemistry and molecular biology.  He is active in the very fast and exciting equestrian sport of polocrosse (google it–NOT polo!).  The Harveys have two polocrosse horses and another one on the way!  Elisa has a couple of Norwegian Fjord Horses for her own fun, driving and riding them.  They are building a horse farm in Southern Pines, North Carolina, to accommodate their growing herd!  Since the boys are both grown and out of the house, Elisa has had more time to pursue her passion of international veterinary volunteer work with http://worldvets.org;  she has been on several trips to help horses as well as do spay/neuter work in Nicaragua, and is headed to Cambodia this fall for a spay/neuter trip.  She was also just selected as one of 70 women scientists worldwide to participate in a three week expedition to Antarctica next February with Homeward Bound (https://homewardboundprojects.com.au) as part of a ten year initiative to develop and promote leadership in women scientists to influence policy and decision-making around the world.  She has been so lucky to be able to get together at least yearly with her fellow Willard Second Backers all these years—it is one of the highlights of her year! She had a great time at MWC’s 35^threunion last summer.  Elisa and Brian visited Duncan in San Diego in June, so we enjoyed getting together for dinner.

Cindy Williamson-Hamner left a 25 year career at Gannett/USA TODAY headquartered in McLean, Virginia, on a buyout in 2008.  In hind sight, it was a good decision.  While she greatly enjoyed working there, she began to see the demise of the newspaper business.  About that time, she was reacquainted with a college beau, James Hamner, who had attended Washington and Lee.  A few years after college, they went their separate ways; she started a career and never married, and he went to graduate school, had a career as a priest and headmaster, married, and had three daughters.  Years later, Cindy learned that James’ wife had passed away from cancer.  She sent him a sympathy card, which began another long distance courtship, as he lived in Atlanta.  After two years of flying back and forth between Virginia and Atlanta, he proposed at the top of the National Cathedral in DC.   She left corporate America, got married, moved (leaving family, friends, church community, dance community, etc.), and acquired three teen age girls and a dog.  She courted companies to work, but realized she had a HUGE adjustment in life.  As fate would have it, she too had breast cancer, yet she was lucky; she had a mastectomy, no chemo or radiation, and she is flourishing.  But it was a hardship on the family.  She is now writing a story about this experience; she found a woman in the San Fransisco Bay area who is a writer, author, and therapist who had married a man with a small child who had lost his Mom at an early age.  She read Cindy’s story, became interested, and she has edited it.  Cindy also finds art very therapeutic.  She did a charcoal sketch of a panda and would like to try and package it into note cards to sell to the Atlanta Zoo. Now that Cindy and James are empty nesters, James is retiring from his school and they hope to get back to the mid Atlantic area, or better yet Virginia in the next year or so.