Class Notes

Hi everyone, and happy 2012! Don’t forget to drop me a line as soon as you read this so I can get you in the next newsletter. Be sure to put “Class Notes” in the subject line so I don’t miss it! And please urge everyone to send updated email addresses either to me or to the UMW Alumni Relations office. So many addresses are outdated!

My husband and I celebrated 23 years of marriage – and living in Connecticut – last August. We have had more unusual weather events in the past 18 months than in the first 21 years. Luckily, none of them caused any real damage. We weren’t as affected by last October’s snowstorm as were those in northern Connecticut, but we bought a generator and it provided some relief during the 48 hours we were without power.

Bill Leighty retired in 2007 after serving the state government of Virginia in many capacities, including director of the Virginia Retirement System and chief of staff to Governors Warner and Kaine. In retirement, he joined DecideSmart, a small Richmond consulting firm, and recently conducted training for the newly elected governors of Nigeria. He also has done work for the United Nations and the Scottish national government. Bill’s hobby is bird watching and he serves on the American Bird Conservancy Board, helping protect critical habitat for endangered species. Marti Kearns Leighty ’75 (Bill and Marti attended prom together at Denbigh High School in Newport News, Va.) is a literature professor, chair of the religion and philosophy department, and assistant dean at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College. She will complete her second term on the UMW Board of Visitors in June 2012.

Doug Dolton of Mill Valley, north of San Francisco, is married, and, between them, they have four children. His eldest runs a Mill Valley tutoring business, and his son was to go to Paris for a year before starting college. The two youngest boys are 16 and 13. Doug was asked to participate in a planning retreat for UMW’s new College of Business in January, saw many people he remembered, and said UMW seems to be doing great. He started two businesses in the past year, after many years as CEO of financial institutions in the Washington, D.C., area and in California. He doesn’t plan to retire. He loves being busy and being around renewable energy and exotic cars.

Kaaren Reckmeyer Dunn and Robert have been married 25 years. He retired from the Army in December ’99, and they moved to Huntsville, Ala., where Robert is part owner of an engineering firm. Kaaren is a stay-at-home mom, and they have three children. Sarah, 22, graduated from Mount Holyoke College; Elizabeth, 21, is a senior at Virginia Tech; and, Andrew, 17, is a high school senior. They keep in touch with Regan Mulreany Plunkett, Cindy Nightingale Leigh, and Karen Bast Aigen. Huntsville is less congested than Northern Virginia and is a great place to raise children, but they hope to move to the East Coast eventually and live on the beach.

Kathy Pritchard Napier was promoted in January to divisional director of business development for the clinical diagnostics division of Thermo Fisher Scientific, where she still uses her Mary Washington biology degree. Her division has facilities in Middletown, Va., where she is based; Fremont, Calif.; Helsinki, Finland; Hennigsdorf, Germany; and Nimes, France, and she traveled recently to all of them. Husband

Ron Napier ’77 is a juvenile and domestic relations court judge and sits in four different jurisdictions in Virginia’s northern Shenandoah Valley. He traveled with Kathy to Ireland last fall. They also traveled to northern Finland to visit friends they met through Rotary, with which they both are actively involved. Their youngest, Mary Katherine, graduated cum laude in May, and their older son, Andrew, graduated in 2007, both from UMW, so Kathy and Ron have kept up with our alma mater and Fredericksburg. Their younger son, Will, graduated from Goucher College in Towson, Md., in 2010. Both sons are on their own and work full time, and Mary Katherine is student teaching at River Bend High School in Fredericksburg, pursuing her certification to teach secondary history and social studies.

Anne Leckie retired as executive director of the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyak Dun in Mayo, Yukon, in September. She expects to continue to consult but hopes to be done with the 10-hour days of a high-pressure job. She planned to travel for six months with partner Marc Johnston and pick up some consulting work in the spring. Sharon Atkins Robinson teaches at Lake Ridge Middle School in Woodbridge, Va., but was thinking of retiring soon. Daughter Anna graduated from Longwood University. Sharon and I graduated from Woodbridge High School, although, as a military brat, I was only there my senior year.

Jane Roth Baugh and husband Tom have been in Roanoke, Va., for 25 years, and, for 21 of them, Jane has been the librarian at Woods Rogers PLC, one of Virginia’s largest law firms. Jane’s job has expanded to include records management, and she recently finished a one-year term as chair of the private law libraries subsection of the American Association of Law Libraries. As a law firm librarian in Newport Beach, Calif., Lynn Connor Merring is active with some of the same groups, and she and Jane keep in touch. Jane and Tom have a collie and Siamese cat but no children. Tom is director of music at their church, and Jane is in the choir, helps with the children’s choir, and is a member of the Roanoke Symphony Chorus. Jane runs into Vicki Nichols Sheretz in the grocery store.

Demetria Smith Laird and husband Doug celebrated their 30th anniversary in April. Their two children threw them a surprise May anniversary party, and they all took a summer Caribbean cruise, snorkeled, and swam with sea turtles in Barbados. Patricia Ringle Vandever, who has taught high school English for 32 years, traveled to Italy with the high school orchestra in June. Her first grandchild, Ethan, was born in February to son Jason.

Cindy Nightingale Leigh is a dentist in Charlotte, N.C., and has three children. Beth Doggett Atkinson and husband Dwight traveled to New Zealand in April after the giant quake there and stayed with friends on the South and the North islands. They survived their own quake in Virginia in August. Daughter Virginia Atkinson ’03 of Northern Virginia has attended and spoken at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and Brussels, as well as the United Nations in NYC. Beth’s husband, son, and daughter all work in Washington, D.C. Beth, a volunteer docent at Gunston Hall in Lorton, Va., was pictured giving a tour to schoolchildren in the September 2011 issue of Southern Living. She and Dwight celebrated their 33rd wedding anniversary and newly empty nest this summer.

Sharon Doggett retired in July 2009 after 30 years with the Coast Guard Reserve. She had lunch in July in Williamsburg with Sallie Washington Braxton ’77 of Spotsylvania, Va., Yita Gomez ’79 of Petersburg, Va., Marilyn Delone Hopkins ’78 of Montgomery, Ala., and Thelma Washington Turner of Williamsburg. Beverly Wood-Holt works with directors and cameramen at Deluxe Entertainment in Los Angeles. Bev and husband Brian look forward to retiring to their Virginia property and travel there at least twice a year. Bev’s mom passed away five years ago, and her dad, who is 86 and active, came to live with them. She keeps in touch with Roseanne Galzerano-Wyatt, who lives in the Middle East with husband Jeff, a Chevron consultant.

Karen Bourgeois works for Lockheed Martin and does volunteer work. She is speech director of the company’s high school speech contest, editor of the local International Council on Systems Engineering newsletter, and became a certified manager through James Madison University last year. She works in her garden, plays Sudoku, and spends time with her cat, Spunky. She and her high school son visited her parents in South Carolina; her mother is a ’53 Mary Washington alumna.

Virginia P. Thompson teaches kindergarten through fifth-grade art in a Kingsport, Tenn., private school. Her students have won international awards eight of the nine years she’s been there. She plans a second retirement soon; her first was from pharmaceuticals in 1998. Virginia and her husband have three children and seven grandchildren. Ann Plough Shaw lives in the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh with husband Daniel and her children. She works part time as a psychologist at The Watson Institute, evaluating children with autism-spectrum diagnoses and their parents. Daniel is a professor of clinical psychology and chair of the psychology department at the University of Pittsburgh. Daughter Alyssa, a junior studying psychology and Italian at Smith College in Massachusetts, planned to begin a year abroad in Florence, Italy, in September. Son Zachary, a high school senior, hopes to play college volleyball. Her youngest, Joshua, is in eighth grade. Ann spends time in Cape Cod every summer with both sides of the extended family and recently returned from trips to Barcelona, Spain, and to volleyball nationals in Minneapolis. “I can’t believe any of our class is old enough to have grandkids or be retiring. I am still running carpools and washing sports jerseys!”

Martha “Happy” Clark Scala has connected with many alumni via Facebook. She has a part-time private psychotherapy practice near her Palo Alto, Calif., home. She recently was published in Cooking Comfort: Stories with Recipes, Poetry Now, and an anthology called Fault Zone: Words from the Edge. Martha publishes the monthly “e-zine” newsletter Out on a Limb. Karen Vogen Gayle has worked for 11 years for the country’s largest charter school organization, Imagine Schools, and recently became national education and achievement coordinator. Karen’s sons graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design. Matthew teaches art at Imagine Schools, and Sean works at a printing company, creating designs for shirts and other items. Daughter Heather is a freshman social work major at Florida State University.

Gail Story Upton and husband Mike are empty-nesters who have been in the same Oklahoma home for 15 years, where they live with their three large dogs. Their oldest child, Dan, has been a vagabond, traveling in Central America, Europe, and the U.S. for seven years. He does odd work, including fire dancing, to support himself. His 3-year-old son, Chaim, lives in NYC with his mother. Katie, the Uptons’ middle child, a CPA at Ernst & Young, bought a house with her husband near Gail. Lisa, their youngest, in her second year with Teach for America, taught first grade in rural Alabama last year and teaches fifth grade in Tuscaloosa this year. Mike is deputy director at Enterprise Services Center for the FAA, and Gail directs an accreditation program for the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, working with people around the country from her desk at home. Carrie Wagner Connick and Jo-Anne Smith Burlew get together each year. Jo-Anne lives in Reston, Va., loves her new job, and was looking forward to her younger daughter’s wedding. Carrie, who lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and two teenage sons, works in the biochemical field for Johnson & Johnson.