Boston College Magazine, Winter 2024

BOSTON COLLEGE WINTER 2024

MAGAZI NE

Downhill Driven

Stephen Kircher’s company owns ten ski resorts, including Big Sky, Sunday River, and Sugarloaf. Despite intense competition and disappearing winters, the BC MBA is betting big on the industry’s future.

Why are so many Americans lonely and socially isolated?

How BC helped to launch a desperately needed new nursing school in Belize.

Contents // Winter 2024

FEATURES

34 Partners in Health Care How tiny St. John’s College and BC’s Connell School joined forces to launch a desperately needed new nursing school in Belize.

By Bill Donahue

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Mikey Hoag Is on a Mission. Alzheimer’s Doesn’t Stand a Chance.

The BC trustee, who lost both her parents to the deadly disease, has become one of the country’s leading fundraisers for a cure. In fact, of the 178 current Alzheimer’s research trials in the world, Hoag’s Part the Cloud movement has funded more than a third.

By Jack Dunn

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Why Are We So Lonely?

Americans are reporting alarming rates of loneliness and social isolation.

By John Wolfson Illustrations by Michael Morgenstern

26 Stephen Kircher’s Wildest Ride A warming climate. Rising costs.

Sophisticated competition. Who’d want to be in the ski business today?

Meet Stephen Kircher, MBA’88.

His company, Boyne Resorts, owns some of the country’s top ski destinations, and he’s betting big on the industry’s future.

By Daniel McGinn ’93 Photographs by Michael Poehlmann

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A Ghost Story Meet Richie Moriarty ’02, the guy with the arrow stuck in his neck on the hit show Ghosts.

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Campus Digest

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BC Behind Bars An innovative prisoner-education program is helping inmates earn a Boston College degree.

10 The Negotiator Professor David Twomey looks back on a long career of helping to resolve labor strikes.

11 The Long Road Boston College music professor Ralf Gawlick’s journey to find his birth mother resulted in a startling discovery that transformed his work.

12 The Record Keeper Meet Colleen Shogan ’97, the first woman archivist of the United States.

CLASS NOTES 14 Mark Mulvoy ’63 Enshrined

in the Hockey Hall of Fame The legendary Sports Illustrated editor was recognized for journalism that brought hockey into the mainstream.

15 The Family Farm The Rooneys responded to hunger in their Connecticut town by growing food for those in need.

44 Alumni News and Notes 45 Class Notes 70 Advancing Boston College

72 What I’ve Learned Maria Estela Brisk

73 Parting Shot

16 Nobody’s Fool How Chris Hill ’90 created one of the country’s most popular financial advice podcasts.

17 Designing Solutions Assistant Professor Ed-Dee Williams is developing an app to help young Black autistic people better describe their mental health needs.

18 The Authenticity Industries Boston College Associate Professor Michael Serazio’s new book explores how claims of authenticity have come to dominate our culture.

Photograph by Michael Poehlmann

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Conversation

What an impressive article—it was well written by Luke O’Brien and I am so proud of both Lou Manzo and Brendan Downes for their courage to get involved and to do what they could to protect our democracy.

And I am very proud of Boston College for educating them!

David Read, MBA’89 Topsfield, Massachusetts

Breaking the Oathkeepers

Lou Manzo ’06 and Brendan Downes ’07 are deserving of an award. An essential element of our nation’s democratic political system is the peaceful and unhindered transfer of power, especially that of the Presidency. Until 2021, such a quiet transfer was a given. I was not happy with Al Gore’s loss in 2000, thanks to the Electoral College and the Supreme Court, but never did I entertain any thought of raiding the US Capitol or the Supreme Court in a fit of infantile anger. Such was the case with much of the American public.

It was assumed that we all learned how to be good losers in a democracy.

Manzo’s and Downes’s work in breaking the back of the Oath Keepers is nothing less than heroic and angelic. It is through their backbreaking legal work that our fragile democracy is not broken to pieces on the hard floor of authoritarianism. These two gentlemen bring not only pride to the Boston College community but also hope for our nation’s democratic future.

Thomas Alton ’80 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania I want to compliment Luke O’Brien on his excellent story profiling Lou Manzo and Brendan Downes. Every American is indebted to these prosecutors for their hard work, resolve, and ingenuity in prosecuting these dangerous individuals who attempted to impose their will on the American democratic process. Their commitment to our ideals of justice and the integrity of our 2

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elections is inspiring. I can’t tell you how proud I am that they are part of the Boston College community. Thanks to them and everyone else working to protect our fragile democracy.

John Gallant ’79 Hopkinton, Massachusetts

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I am very grateful for the work of these two men. This article was a wonderful read. Thank you, Lou and Brendan, for your commitment and extremely hard work in protecting our democracy. You give us hope and inspiration. May God bless and keep you and your families well.”

Gia T. Schuetz ’92, via Facebook

This article was one of the most outrageously, shamelessly, and blatantly biased pieces I have ever encountered, beginning with the first paragraph alleging that a “mob tried to violently prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election” and claiming that the Oath Keepers is “a far-right militia at the heart of the January 6 insurrection.” These leftist talking points of propaganda are strongly contested and in fact falsifiable, as proved by the hours of deliberately hidden video coverage of what really happened that day, which was hardly an “insurrection.” Rather, there was incitement by agents provocateurs of the notoriously subversive FBI to fabricate the scene of a riot while their henchmen waved crowds of enthusiastic protestors and tourists into opened Capitol doors. Moreover, there is no proof that Joe Biden actually did win the presidency legitimately; indeed, there is plenty of suppressed evidence of massive fraud of all kinds, from rigged machines to stuffed ballot boxes. Your magazine has lost all credibility.

David P. Lang, MA’74, PhD’93

What the Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Ruling Means for BC

BC professors making assumptions about the (in)abilities of minority applicants to deserve entry into BC on their own merits is reprehensible. Assuming that a focus on academic and extracurricular excellence will result in a less diverse student body is no different than assuming the race of a carjacker, or the religion of a terrorist bomber.

I’m embarrassed that my donations are funding the employment of professors who purport to help minorities, but are likely creating a self-fulfilling prophecy for them, insinuating that some wouldn’t get in if it hadn’t been for their race. What a terrible message to send.

Brian King ’92 Scottsdale, Arizona photo: Astrid Riecken

BOSTON COLLEGE

What in the World is Going on with the Weather?

Thank you for the accessible and informative article on climate change and what needs to be done to slow and reverse the emissions of greenhouse gases that are causing it. I applaud BC for investing in efforts to understand and find solutions to this critical issue through the Schiller Institute and other initiatives. However, it is concerning that my alma mater has so far declined to divest from the fossil fuels that are driving this crisis. I encourage BC to join the more than 350 Catholic institutions, including Georgetown and Loyola, that have divested in response to the Vatican’s 2020 call to do so.

Andrew Ireland ’14 Washington, DC

MAGAZINE

VOLUME 84

WINTER 2024

ART DIRECTOR

Keith Ake DEPUTY EDITOR

Lisa Weidenfeld STAFF WRITER

Elizabeth Clemente

What I’ve Learned: Flat Breads Owner John Acampora

This is a beautiful profile. Was just waxing nostalgic with friends about how much I loved this spot. Thank you for sharing this deep view of John.

Jeff Moran ’03, via LinkedIn

Boston College Magazine welcomes letters from readers.

Letters may be edited for length and clarity. Please include your full name and address.

I love Marie Benedict’s books. Even happier to learn that she’s a BC grad writing under a pen name, and that she plans to write about more women!

Josephine Maguire, NC’63, MA’72 Middletown, Rhode Island

//

John Wolfson

I had the privilege of being one of John’s part-time student employees when he opened. He always had positive words of encouragement for the BC students and community. Thank you, John!

Amy Feira ’95, via LinkedIn

The First Ladies

NUMBER 1

EDITOR

I loved my Flat Breads sandwiches as a student, and now I know the most important ingredients that went into them…Thank you, John, for bringing us back to the basics of what business is: service, quality, and kindness. Keep sprinkling all that onto the students now—we all need a lot more of this!

Carmen Maianu ’11, via LinkedIn

I found the subject article quite interesting, in part because there was no mention at all of the massive use of coal-burning power plants in China. No efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will matter without a great reduction in those plants.

Stephen C. Arlinghaus ’66 Norwich, Connecticut

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EMAIL: bcm@bc.edu MAIL: BCM, 140 Commonwealth Ave.

Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 Connect with @BostonCollege

photos: Nikolay Pokrovskiy/Alamy (Weather); Caitlin Cunningham (Acampora)

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Lee Pellegrini SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Caitlin Cunningham

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Postmaster: Send address corrections to: Boston College Magazine Development Information Services Cadigan Alumni Center 140 Commonwealth Ave. Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 Please direct Class Notes queries to: Class Notes editor Cadigan Alumni Center 140 Commonwealth Ave. Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 email: classnotes@bc.edu phone: (617) 552-4700 Copyright © 2024 Trustees of Boston College.

All publications rights reserved.

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Linden Lane

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A Ghost Story

Meet Richie Moriarty ’02, the guy with the arrow stuck in his neck on the hit show Ghosts.

BY LISA WEIDENFELD

The sitcom Ghosts was still in its first season when a Halloween trick-or-treater showed up in 2021 at Richie Moriarty’s house, dressed as the character Moriarty plays on the hit CBS show. “My jaw dropped,” Moriarty ’02 said. The actor had been working as a journeyman performer for years, steadily building a portfolio of voiceover work, guest appearances on TV shows, and commercials. But Ghosts was his first series regular role on a TV show, and given the uncertainty of any show gaining a following, he had no way of knowing if it would ever find a committed audience. But here, after only a few episodes, was proof that people were watching, and even connecting with his character, Pete Martino.

It helps that Pete has a pretty distinctive look. He’s a ghost, of course, and in every episode he’s wearing exactly what he was in the moment of his death: a Boy Scout uniform with the arrow that did him in sticking through his neck. He’s just one of the many spirits on the show who can suddenly be seen and talked to by a young woman after her near-death experience. Ghosts is a comedy, and a bit of a tragedy, and Moriarty’s role is to embody all of that while emoting around the arrow, or because of it. It’s quite the journey for a guy who never thought about becoming an actor until he was in his mid-twenties.

Moriarty didn’t have a noticeable passion for performing while growing up in Maryland, though the seeds were there. “I just remember him always being very funny,” said his sister, Colleen Moriarty Ryan ’99.

But it wasn’t until he had graduated from BC with a degree in communications and was working as a real estate photographer in the Boston area that he began to perform with any regularity. That was after a friend who was taking an improv class suggested he give it a try as a way to meet people. He took a few classes in 2004 and “very quickly, things snowballed from there,” he said. “It ignited something within me that hasn’t gone away since.” Two years later, he joined the Boston sketch comedy troupe Improv Asylum. The experience helped him to develop the important skill of working with an ensemble, and also gave him instant audiphotos: Gabor Jurina (opposite); Richie Moriarty (above)

ence feedback on what was working with his performances and what wasn’t.

By 2010, Moriarty had teamed up with his fellow Improv Asylum performer Matt Catanzano to create comedy videos. Their work gained the attention of producers at the influential New York production studio Broadway Video, which is behind the hit shows Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and Late Night with Seth Meyers. The company started giving them money to make videos, which elevated the production quality, and in 2013, he moved to New York and quickly started booking national television commercials, including one for an NFL playoff game in which his character tries to direct

“

Richie is someone that people gravitate toward. He’s the one you’d see in a show and you’d be like, ‘oh, the show probably runs because he’s there.’”

the actor John Malkovich in a football ad.

He also managed to land guest spots on shows ranging from the acclaimed Netflix comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to the FX vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows.

Then, in February of 2020, came the Ghosts audition. As written, Pete had “a lot of Ned Flanders in him,” Moriarty said. “There’s a lot of super optimistic and cheery—almost to a fault—attitude the character has.”

Moriarty’s take on the character is inspired by his dad, a warm and welcoming pediatrician.

After some pandemic-related shooting delays, the first season premiered in 2021.

After years of making his own projects and stepping into other shows only briefly, Moriarty says he is relieved to be working on such a friendly, collaborative set making something he’s proud of. “It’s just the nicest group of people making this show,” he said.

“I feel exceedingly grateful.”

Moriarty’s costar Rose McIver said she’ll often ask fans which ghost they most relate to. “And there’s a lot of people who do really connect with Pete and really like his optimism,” she said, crediting much of that to his acting ability. “There’s a kind of fragility to his enthusiasm that we can feel we’re on the edge of at any moment that Richie nails,” she explained.

Moriarty’s success may seem impressively rapid, but to his sister, Moriarty Ryan, the only surprise is that it didn’t come sooner.

“We were surprised by how long it took,” she said. “Because we were like, of course this is going to happen.”

Catanzano agreed that making it in the acting business was an inevitability for his comedy video cocreator. “Richie is someone that people gravitate toward,” Catanzano said. “He’s the one you’d see in a show and you’d be like, ‘oh, the show probably runs because he’s there.’”

Ghosts is now filming its third season.

The ten-person cast is unusually large for a sitcom, but that’s part of what Moriarty enjoys about the show. It reminds him of his improv days. “To enter into this show that is such an ensemble comedy in the truest sense…I find it so comfortable,” he said. “I just love that style of comedy.” n w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Linden Lane // Campus Digest

STUDENT CLUB SPOTLIGHT

Hawai’i Club of BC Established: 1991 Current members: 32 What It Is: The club celebrates traditional Hawaiian values and practices, including the hula dance and the haka. The most popular event of the year is the spring Lū‘au, where attendees make their own leis. The entire BC community is welcomed in the club. —Audrey Loyack

“It’s a home away from home for students from Hawai’i and a welcoming community to all who want to learn more about Hawaiian culture.”

—Lilianna McDermott ’24, who is a copresident of the club alongside Brandon Lai ’24

Head coach of women’s hockey Katie Crowley poses with current members of the team at her Hall of Fame Induction ceremony

Women’s hockey coach Katie Crowley inducted into Hall of Fame Katie Crowley, the Boston College Jane Rattigan Head Women’s Hockey Coach, achieved another major career milestone with her induction in December into the United States Hockey Hall of Fame. Crowley has excelled in her sixteen seasons as head coach of the women’s team, leading them to five Hockey East regular season titles, six NCAA Frozen Fours, and one national championship game. She has also been honored twice as AHCA National Coach of the Year, and four times as Hockey East Coach of the Year.

As a player, the New Hampshire native is no less decorated for her achievements. She scored fourteen goals across three Olympic appearances, tied for the most ever as a member of Team USA, and helped the US women’s national team win the gold medal at the 1998 Olympic Games, silver in 2002, and bronze in 2006. She retired after the 2006 Games, having been named the USA Hockey Women’s Player of the Year. “It just really makes you reflect on those years,” Crowley said of the honor in BC’s student newspaper, The Heights. “[It] makes you really think about all the special people that were a part of my life and my hockey life.”

—Elizabeth Clemente 6

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BY THE NUMBERS

Keeping Count The annual Beanpot hockey tournament is a clash of skill and grit and determination—but also of pads and skates and sticks. What does it take to equip the twenty-seven players on the men’s hockey team for this battle? Here’s a snapshot of what’s required for every Beanpot game.

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PAIRS OF SKATES

(replacement skate blades)

30 BENCH TOWELS

photos: Matt Dewkett (Crowley);

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Shutterstock (flowers)

CAMPUS NEWS The Connell School of Nursing placed tenth

CHARACTER SKETCH

Teddy Errico ’91

in the U.S. News annual ranking of the nation’s undergraduate nursing programs, released last fall. The placement is CSON’s highest to date, with the magazine noting both BC’s rigorous undergraduate education and CSON’s ability to connect students with Boston’s world-class hospitals and research.

Father Cristiano Barbosa has been appointed by Pope Francis as the auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Boston. He obtained his licentiate and doctoral degree in sacred theology from the Boston College School of Theology in 2011 and 2019, and is now the first bishop of Brazilian descent in the history of the archdiocese, and one of only two in the US.

Professor of Global Sustainability Hanqin Tian has been named the inaugural director of the new Center for Earth Systems Science and Global Sustainability, or CES3, at BC’s Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society. CES3’s goal is to reduce the impact of climate change and aid in reaching the international goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures.

Chris Watkins has been named as the new head coach of the Boston College Women’s Soccer team. Watkins comes to BC after seven seasons at Gonzaga University, where he transformed the women’s soccer team, guiding it in 2023 to its first West Coast Conference title in program history, and was named conference coach of the year.

In 1996, when New York native Teddy Errico ’91 moved to Telluride, Colorado, for an internship at a ski mountain, he planned to stay for six months. Twenty-seven years later, Errico was elected in fall of 2023 as mayor of the famed ski resort town, a community of 2,500 that uses a gondola as its primary mode of public transportation. He plans to keep his full-time job as a real estate agent.

—Elizabeth Clemente

Telluride is teeny tiny. It’s a historic mining town that sits in a remote box canyon. The town of Mountain Village, which has several hotels, sits on the other side of Telluride Ski Resort, and a gondola connects the two communities. You can use it to go skiing, but its main purpose is to get people from the heart of one town to the other in a fifteenminute ride, which is more environmentally sensitive than driving twenty minutes.

Tourism is the primary economic engine here. During New Year’s week, the population swells to almost fifteen thousand people. When it gets crowded on a powder day and we all want to go skiing or get a restaurant reservation, it can make locals downright angry. But you can’t just be mean to tourists, because we need them. Part of my goal is to help the community retain a spirit of friendliness.

In Telluride, the mayor is the ceremonial leader of the town. I have the same amount of

Jennifer Mack has been named executive director of Boston College Student Services, where she’ll oversee the registrar’s office and the Student Services Information System technology team, and provide consulting support to the University’s nine schools and colleges. Prior to her new job, Mack was BC’s director of student information systems. photos: Gregory L. Tracy/Pilot (Barbosa); Josh Johnson (Errico)

power as members of the town council. I also oversee the town manager and the town attorney and set the agenda for meetings. It’s around twenty hours per week of work, so I can balance it with selling real estate.

It’s important to fight the “us versus them” mentality. Second-home owners here are very affluent, and it creates a divide between the upper class and the dying-off middle class.

We also have a consistently growing year-round Latino and Eastern European population. As mayor, my job is to figure out how to make sure everybody feels like they have a voice and can love it here, because it’s an easy place to fall in love with. w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Linden Lane

BC Behind Bars

An innovative prisoner-education program is helping inmates earn a Boston College degree.

BY ALIX HACKETT

The first time Christian Miranda stepped on the Boston College campus as a student, he was fifty-three years old and had just been released from prison. It was a frigid morning in February 2023, but the Boston native barely noticed as he looked up at the stately tower of Gasson Hall. “It was like I went back to being eighteen years old, fresh out of high school,” he recalled recently.

The moment may have marked Miranda’s first trip to the Heights, but his relationship with the University had begun three years earlier. Miranda, who’d been convicted on drug charges, was serving a twenty-year sentence at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Shirley, Massachusetts, which is known as MCI-Shirley. In 2020, Miranda was one of sixteen MCI-Shirley inmates accepted that year into the Boston College Prison Education Program.

The program, known as the PEP, was launched in 2019 with funding from an anonymous donor. It became a member of the Bard Prison Initiative’s Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison, a national network of prison education programs. Each week, participants in the PEP take roughly ten hours of classes with university faculty, attend office hours and tutoring sessions, complete assignments and group projects, and take part in extracurricular activities.

And with enough credits, they become eligible for a bachelor’s degree in Applied Liberal Arts issued by the university itself.

So far, sixty-three prisoners have entered the PEP, which is free to attend, and the first diplomas will be awarded at a graduation ceremony inside MCI-Shirley this fall. Three students, including Miranda, have been released from prison mid-program and are continuing their education at BC’s Woods College of Advancing Studies.

“When we’re thinking about how to live out our mission at Boston College, part of it is engaging with communities like those at MCI-Shirley,” said Provost and Dean of Faculties David Quigley, who helped to

launch the program and has taught several classes in it. Some of the earliest examples of Jesuit education took place in prisons in the sixteenth century, he noted. “It’s wonderful for me as a historian to think about how Jesuit work over the centuries has connected with the incarcerated and tried to open up possibilities and give hope to those in prison.” within mci-shirley, a medium- and minimum-security men’s prison, interest in the PEP has been high from the start. Nearly one hundred prisoners applied for the inaugural class, submitting a personal statement and academic essay, and sixteen were eventually accepted. Every fall, the admissions team selects a new cohort of similar size.

Nurudeen Alabi was serving a seventeenyear sentence after a manslaughter conviction when he heard about the PEP in 2019.

He asked Isabel Lane, the program’s director at the time, what made it different from other prison education programs he’d been part of.

She told him that, in every way possible, the PEP courses would contain the same material taught to students on campus in Chestnut Hill. “That’s what I wanted, and every professor kept up to that,” Alabi said. “I felt like I was really on a college campus.”

Alabi completed ten classes as part of the program prior to being released from MCIShirley in 2022. Each class took place inside the prison classroom, its beige walls adorned with BC banners and a framed portrait of St. Ignatius. Alabi enrolled last year in Woods College, where he’s majoring in business.

Thanks in part to the forty credits he earned in prison, he expects to graduate in 2025. “It changed the trajectory of my life,” Alabi said.

“Growing up in inner city Boston, education wasn’t a big thing, but being in the PEP showed me that there’s a life outside of your neighborhood, your city, your state, that education can bring you to.”

In four years, the program’s offerings have grown from three classes in introductory philosophy, algebra, and writing to an eight-course catalogue that mirrors the Woods College Applied Liberal Arts curriculum. Students take a mix of liberal arts courses and professional classes designed to familiarize them with the modern work landscape. A course in entrepreneurship taught by former Zipcar executive Brian Harrington ’89 has become one of the program’s most popular classes, with students designing and pitching an original business idea for their final presentation.

clockwise from top left: Doctoral student Babatunde Alford; program director Patrick Conway; instructor Brian Harrington; and doctoral student Marisa Lally

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photos: Massachusetts Department of Correction

clockwise from left: Student Christian Miranda; program director Patrick Conway; professor Julia Devoy; student Nurudeen Alabi; and professor Cherie McGill photographed in Gasson Hall.

Christian Miranda had been asking for college-level courses to be taught at the prison for years, and sitting in classes like Harrington’s with fifteen other students provided the intellectual challenge he’d been craving. “It refocused me,” he said. He also loved the shared sense of purpose felt by everyone inside the MCI classroom. Any rivalries were left at the door, Miranda said, making room for productive class discussions and group projects. “It was like a family,” he said. “The program forced you to be in such close proximity that you realized you had more in common than not.” more than thirty faculty members from all corners of campus have signed up to teach in the PEP, submitting PowerPoint slide deck lesson plans to the Department of Correction for approval and driving an hour photo: Caitlin Cunningham

west to MCI-Shirley every week for classes.

After passing through metal detectors, they teach three-hour sessions before making the return trip to Chestnut Hill.

“I’ve never met a more motivated group in my life,” said BC Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students and Programs Julia Devoy, an applied psychologist who has taught two courses in the PEP. “They don’t have internet or email or Google Slides and yet their projects are just beyond what you could imagine. You can see the desire to learn.”

Quigley signed up to teach in the PEP in spring 2022, juggling his duties as provost with lesson planning and grading.

His course, Politics and Ideas in American History, explored seminal political documents, including Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the Federalist Papers. “If you

went in at 6:15, when class started, and asked one question, the men would carry it to 9:15,” Quigley recalled. “It was one of the greatest teaching experiences of my career.”

Patrick Conway, MA’12, PhD’22, who has worked in prison education for more than a decade and took over as program director in 2021, is excited about the program’s growth. Three BC PhD students now visit the prison once a week to offer academic support, and a new PEP student committee is coming up with ideas of its own, such as a tutoring group that helps fellow prisoners study for the GED or enroll in the community college program. “They really care about the PEP,” Conway said. “We’re putting in a lot of effort to make this happen, but the students play a huge part. They’re super invested in Boston College.” n w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Linden Lane

The Negotiator

Professor David Twomey looks back on a long career of helping to resolve labor strikes.

BY ELIZABETH CLEMENTE

With more than fifty-five years as a Boston College faculty member, Carroll School of Management Professor of Business Law and Society David Twomey ’62, JD’68, is one of the University’s longest-serving employees. That, as you can imagine, has made him pretty wellknown around campus, but there’s one place where he might be an even more familiar figure: the White House.

Twomey is an accomplished labor negotiator and, over the years, he’s developed a specialty involving the country’s railway system. Labor disputes in the railroad industry are a significant enough threat to the national economy that presidents are empowered to call Presidential Emergency Boards to attempt to resolve them. When President Biden appointed Twomey to be an arbitrator on Presidential Emergency Board No. 250 in 2022, it marked the tenth such selection for Twomey, the most ever. Biden, meanwhile, became the sixth president to appoint Twomey to an emergency board.

Twomey has been an arbitrator since 1974, and has helped to resolve more than two thousand American labor disputes in both the public and private sectors. He has also written thirtyfive editions of textbooks on labor, employment, and business law. Drawing upon that experience while serving on Board No. 250, Twomey was able to help successfully forge a deal between the major US railroads and unions representing 115,000 workers.

The agreement was considered a win for the employees and for American unions. For years, however, it would have been reasonable to wonder if the labor movement was a thing of the past. Union membership fell from 20 percent in 1983, the first year with available data, to 10 percent in 2021, according to Business Insider. Last year, however, saw a burst of labor organizing unlike any year in recent memory, with nearly half a million workers across multiple industries walking off the job at one point or another by the end of October. The Wall Street Journal, in fact, named 2023 “the year of the strike.” We sat down with Twomey and asked about this recent spike in labor activity.

On why more workers have gone on strike in recent years: In many industries the profits have been very high, but the workforce has been cut dramatically due to the development of labor-saving devices. In the railroad industry, for instance, certain parts of the train that may have once taken five people to operate now take two, due to technological advancements. With reduced labor costs come even higher profits, and I think union members are looking to share in that prosperity and preserve their jobs as well.

On why a reported two-thirds of Americans support unions today: The union representing the United Parcel Service has 340,000 members, which is an incredible number of employees, and UPS listened to them this summer and agreed to install air conditioning in its new trucks. I think now when people read about the improvements in contracts in the press, they understand that it’s just about basic fairness. The Biden administration is also backing the unions and they’re backing him, and that’s a big mood shift.

On what got him interested in labor: I worked at Continental Baking Company, the makers of Wonder Bread, in the summer during high school, and it was a very good union baking job. I got to know everyone there, and would play in their softball league in the summer.

People were happy, and they lived nearby. I knew what it was like to work, and how wonderful the people there were—the workers and management got along.

On being appointed by President Reagan to his first Presidential Emergency Board, in 1986: It was the summer, and I was teaching and doing research, working every day. I was in New Orleans doing a case when my secretary got a call from the White House. I was thinking, “This is a joke.” I just had no expectation. But they decided that they were going to try some younger people, and we did a good job.

On getting it right as an arbitrator: An arbitrator’s job is to be right. When you’re finished, you want to feel that you’ve found the right answer. Sometimes it’s easier, sometimes it’s harder, but it’s always with the feeling “this is right.” With contracts, there sort of is a right answer, because you’re interpreting the language. The parties give meaning to words over time, and how they handled things in the past gives you insight into what they intended when they used that language. n

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photo: Caitlin Cunningham

The Long Road

Boston College music professor Ralf Gawlick’s journey to find his birth mother resulted in a startling discovery that transformed his work.

BY LISA WEIDENFELD

When Boston College music Professor Ralf Gawlick debuts his deeply personal new composition on campus this spring, the performance will mark the culmination of a fifteen-year journey into his past, one that resulted in a shocking discovery: that one of the most basic things he thought he knew about himself was wrong.

Raised by German parents in both Germany and the US, Gawlick grew up knowing that he’d been adopted, and that his biological mother was Kurdish. In 2009, however, around the time of his fortieth birthday, his wife, Basia, encouraged him to look into his roots more closely. What ensued was a long and complicated journey that crossed from Germany to Turkey, and resulted in him meeting his biological mother, at age forty-nine, for the first time ever. In the process, he learned that she was not Kurdish at all but of Roma descent. The Romani people are a nomadic ethnic group that has faced enormous historic prejudice across Europe.

Hundreds of thousands of Roma were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, and they still face discrimination today.

The revelation changed the trajectory of photo: Lee Pellegrini

Gawlick’s career as a composer. As he began to connect with his biological mother over Skype, he started work on “O Lungo Drom,” a new composition that would celebrate his Roma heritage. The phrase means “the long road,” and the piece is an oratorio, a type of long composition that features voices and instruments but without the scenery and costumes of an opera, and often with a religious topic. Gawlick’s piece pays homage to a people and a culture long excluded from the rarefied environment of classical music by incorporating traditional Roma instruments such as the cimbalom, a stringed instrument that’s similar to a dulcimer, and by including lyrics in Roma languages. The composition is dedicated to Romani Rose, one of the world’s most prominent Roma activists, who is head of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma.

“The important thing about this oratorio is that it’s the first time the Roma speak from within. Their voices are heard directly,” Gawlick said. “What has generally happened from time immemorial to now is that people have written works about the Roma.”

He pointed out examples like Carmen, the famous opera with a beautiful Roma woman

at the center who is eventually murdered by a jealous lover. “It’s of course a brilliant opera, but it’s written by Frenchmen and all the stereotypes around Roma have been used in it,” he said. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with its Roma character Esmerelda, is another prominent example, he said.

“O Lungo Drom,” on the other hand, includes texts from thirteen Roma poets across ten different Romani languages and dialects, and uses them to construct a three-movement piece. Romani Rose was in attendance when the oratorio had its world premiere in Berlin in October 2022, on the tenth anniversary of the inauguration of Germany’s memorial to Roma and Sinti victims of the Holocaust. The production will travel to the US this spring for an American premiere at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Then, on April 6, “O Lungo Drom” will be performed here at BC, in Gasson Hall, with an ensemble of singers and musicians that will include a Roma cimbalom player.

It’s the culmination of a tremendously meaningful journey for Gawlick. Meeting his mother for the first time was “profoundly affecting,” he said. And learning of his true heritage filled him with great joy and pride about being Romani. “It’s flooded my existence,” he said. He is now at work composing the first Roma opera, and learning the Roma language Romanes. “This whole world of discovery opened up to me that I could follow,” he said. n w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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The Record Keeper

Meet Colleen Shogan ’97, the first woman archivist of the United States.

BY LISA WEIDENFELD

The National Archives and Records Administration might bring to mind an image of long, dusty hallways filled with filing cabinets, but the process of storing and categorizing documents and communications that are relevant to the nation’s historical record encompasses a lot more than that. After all, it’s not just the president’s paperwork that ends up in the National Archives. Among the records the agency, known as NARA, stores and maintains are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, plus more everyday documentation such as the service records of veterans, immigration paperwork, maps, videos, and tweets. There are also testaments to the nation’s more painful history, such as slave ship manifests and broken treaties with Native American tribes. And now, all of that falls under the purview of Colleen Shogan ’97, who was confirmed as archivist of the United States last May, during a time when the importance of federal recordkeeping has never loomed so large.

Shogan, who majored in political science at BC, was first nominated to be archivist in August of 2022, but wasn’t confirmed until nine months later because of political squabbles on Capitol Hill. She is the eleventh person to hold the position, and the first woman to be confirmed in the role.

(Several women have previously served as acting archivist.)

Shogan said she is excited to show up to work each day. “This is definitely the place I’m supposed to be,” she said. Her interest in American history dates back to her childhood in Pennsylvania, when her family took vacations to historic spots like Gettysburg.

“That brought the history alive to me in a way that you can’t just get from in a book,” Shogan said.

After graduating from Boston College, Shogan earned a PhD in American politics from Yale University, then worked as a legislative assistant to the Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman before spending seven years at the Congressional Research Service. She was working as senior vice president for the White House Historical Association when she got the call that the 12

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Biden Administration was interested in her for the archivist role.

Mark Falzone ’97, who has been friends with Shogan since their days at BC and worked with her on one of Senator Edward Kennedy’s reelection campaigns, was struck even then by the way she could hold her own with anybody. “She really cared about the philosophy of what she was doing, but also the practical consequences,” Falzone said.

“And politics has both of those things.”

NARA is generally considered to be apolitical, but it’s recently been roiled by accusations of partisanship. After all, it was the agency’s efforts to recover files that former President Donald Trump took with him after leaving office that led to his eventual indictment on thirty-seven charges related to unlawfully retaining government documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Republican suspicions of political motivations in that case certainly contributed to the delay in Shogan’s confirmation, even though she had no role in the effort to retrieve the documents, which began prior to her nomination for the post.

Shogan is far from a political ideologue, said Susan Combs, a Republican who was

“

She really cared about the philosophy of what she was doing, but also the practical consequences.

And politics has both of those things.”

Shogan poses for a picture at a NARA facility in Valmeyer, Illinois, that is located inside a cave. Using a cave as a storage facility can lower costs associated with managing climate control for documents.

appointed to an assistant secretary role in the Department of the Interior during Trump’s presidency. “To this day, I do not know what her politics are,” said Combs, who worked closely with Shogan when they served together on the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission to organize events in 2020 that celebrated the hundred-year anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. “What I really liked then, and do now, is that she is very clear,” Combs said. “Very organized, very objective, very rigorous.”

“She’s just a very good manager,” said Matt Costello, who worked with Shogan during her time as vice president of the nonpartisan White House Historical Association, from 2020 until she left to become archivist in 2023. Costello recalled her having a particular knack for navigating the bureaucracies and differing timelines of government agencies that the association worked with. “She had the tact of being able to keep things moving but not being too pushy,” he said. “She had a very good diplomatic sense about her when it came to partnerships.”

Shogan said she hopes to clear the backlog of requests for service records that surged during the pandemic, and to make records more accessible to the general public. And with 2026 marking the nation’s 250th anniversary, she sees opportunities to further engage people in the records housed at the archive. Putting the Emancipation Proclamation on public display is just one of her ideas.

Most of all, Shogan said she wants to engage Americans in their country’s history, and she’s not particularly snobby about how that occurs. She’s all for it if people want to see the Declaration of Independence only because they’re in search of treasure, like Nicolas Cage in the beloved, if slightly ahistorical, National Treasure film series. “I think National Treasure can be a great entry point for people to get excited about it,” she said.

“Come see us here at the National Archives, be exposed to all kinds of records and history.” Still, she cautioned visitors against getting their hopes up. “People aren’t running around with the Declaration,” she said with a smile. “We’re not rolling it up or passing it off to people.” n photo: John Valceanu for the National Archives

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Linden Lane // Sports

Mark Mulvoy ’63 Enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame

The legendary Sports Illustrated editor was recognized for journalism that brought hockey into the mainstream.

BY ARCHER PARQUETTE ’18

Last November, Mark Mulvoy ’63 capped a storied career in sports journalism with his induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame, where he was presented with the Elmer Ferguson Memorial Award. He was chosen for both honors by the Professional Hockey Writers Association, which selects media honorees for the hall of fame.

Mulvoy, the renowned managing editor of Sports Illustrated from 1984 to 1992, helped the magazine become perhaps the most prestigious publication in sports journalism, breaking major stories and pursuing serious investigations. He was previously a pioneering hockey reporter for the magazine, covering the game with a passion that helped to raise the profile of the sport. The award recognizes hockey writers who have brought honor to the game and to the sport itself.

“Mark evangelized hockey to the masses,” said Professional Hockey Writers Association President Frank Seravalli. “Even when interest in the sport was waning, he kept hockey at the forefront. He made it prominent.

And he pulled no punches.”

“I can’t tell you how proud I am of my career in journalism,” Mulvoy said. “This feels like a culmination.”

Mulvoy’s love of hockey started as a boy. In the ’50s, he and his brother would play stick hockey with a plastic cup on the street outside their Dorchester apartment. As a teenager, he’d sneak into the Boston Garden to catch Bruins games from the nosebleed seats.

His journalism career started soon after enrolling at Boston College, when he covered BC sports part-time for the Boston Globe. He joined the paper fulltime after graduating in 1963.

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Two years later, he headed to New York for a job at SI. He’d been hired to write about baseball, but his editors quickly assigned him to shadow the legendary golfer Jack Nicklaus for a column Mulvoy would ghostwrite. “There I was, a kid who grew up caddying at the

as it expanded in 1967 from six to twelve teams, and three years later, he convinced the government of the Soviet Union to allow him into the country to become the first American writer ever to cover Soviet hockey. What he found was a program on the rise. “Nobody

Mulvoy as photographed in 1994 for this magazine’s cover.

Wollaston Golf Club,” Mulvoy recalled with amazement, “and suddenly, I’m in Florida playing golf with Jack Nicklaus.”

Mulvoy covered every sport he could for the magazine, but hockey was his greatest passion, and the young writer found himself in the right place at the right time to tell the stories of a sport in ascent. He covered the National Hockey League

realized the Russians were as good as they were,” he said.

“They were better than we could have imagined.” Across three trips to the country between 1972 and 1975, he sent home dispatches about the Soviets’ revolutionary style of play, full of fast and intricate passing maneuvers, which contrasted with the more plodding North American style.

In 1981, Mulvoy was named one of three Sports Illustrated assistant managing editors. He was just forty-three when, three years later, he was named as the magazine’s youngest-ever managing editor, leading a publication with more than two hundred editorial staffers and three and a half million subscribers. “I wanted us to be the conscience of sports,” Mulvoy said of his ambitions upon taking editorial control of the magazine. He assigned major investigative stories, including one that revealed rampant cocaine abuse in the NFL and another that broke the Pete Rose gambling scandal, which led to a lifetime baseball ban for one of the game’s alltime greatest players.

Under Mulvoy’s editorship, SI won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the most prestigious prize in the industry, two years in a row.

Mulvoy also made the magazine a success at the newsstand, thanks in part to the swimsuit issue, in which models were photographed in bikinis. Mulvoy expanded the concept from a small yearly feature into an annual special issue that became a cultural phenomenon and sold five million copies a year.

Through all his other triumphs, however, Mulvoy never stopped championing the sport he loved, running abundant hockey coverage up to his retirement in 1996. Some of it, to be sure, was tough love.

“Mark was an angel on the shoulder of the National Hockey League—but he was also a thorn in its side,” said Michael Farber, an SI hockey writer hired by Mulvoy. “He shepherded tough, tough stories.

He was doing what journalists were supposed to.” n photo: Gary Wayne Gilbert

Eagles in Hollywood Parks and Recreation star Amy Poehler ’93 is back in movie theaters this spring with Inside Out 2, a sequel to the 2015 Pixar hit about human emotions. Poehler returns as the embodiment of joy, who lives inside a young girl’s head, along with anger, fear, sadness, and disgust. The first film saw Poehler’s character, Joy, struggle when Sadness becomes a stronger part of the girl’s emotional life as she begins to enter puberty, and the sequel takes the girl deeper into adolescence.

Comedian and writer

Gary Gulman ’93

The Family Farm

The Rooneys responded to hunger in their Connecticut town by growing food for those in need.

Years ago, when Kathy Rooney ’81 was involved in efforts to assist families experiencing food insecurity near her hometown of Wilton, Connecticut, she noticed that much of the food being collected wasn’t of the highest nutritional value, and was often canned.

Around the same time, she was part of an interfaith group that was helping a Syrian refugee family resettle in the area, and she witnessed how hard it was for them to get enough food. When she went searching for solutions to both problems, her son Brian, then in the seventh grade and now a junior at BC, asked a powerful question. “He said, well, why not us?” Rooney recalled. “Why don’t we try to find a way to do this?”

Taking inspiration from a priest in nearby Bridgeport who used parish property for an urban garden, they created one of their own in Wilton with a goal of growing produce to help address the area’s food shortage. They harvested their first crop of vegetables in 2016, distributing the food to families in need, food pantries, and other local organizations. They’ve repeated the process every year since—this year they grew a total of 750 pounds of produce.

The garden is a true family project, with father Kevin, daughter Brigid ’17, and son Brendan all participating. For his part, Brian is majoring in environmental studies and plans to pursue a career that involves farming, conservation, and maintaining biodiversity. “It really got me interested in agriculture and environmental issues,” he said. “Just being able to see a piece of land…transformed into something that can produce food for humans, but it’s still very much a part of that environment, was really interesting.”

—Lisa Weidenfeld illustration: Joel Kimmel photos: Shutterstock (Poehler and Wang); Courtesy of Gary Gulman

ended 2023 strong, with the premiere of his latest comedy special, Born on Third Base. The show, which examines Gulman’s childhood growing up in poverty, is streaming on MAX and was called both “radical” and “technically impeccable” in a rave review by New York magazine, which praised his ability to mine comedy from heavy subject matter. Gulman also recently published a memoir, Misfit, about growing up as an awkward kid in 1980s Boston.

Writer and director Lulu Wang ’05 serves as the showrunner on the new Amazon Prime series Expats, which stars Nicole Kidman and follows the lives of a group of expatriates living in Hong Kong. Wang, who is best known for writing and directing the critically acclaimed film The Farewell, directed every episode of Expats, which is based on a novel by Janice Y. K. Lee about three women leading very disparate lives who find connection and community with each other while living abroad. w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Linden Lane

Nobody’s Fool

How Chris Hill ’90 created one of the country’s most popular financial advice podcasts.

BY ELIZABETH CLEMENTE

In its thirty years of existence, The Motley Fool has been an indispensable source of Wall Street insight for more than half a million amateur investors who subscribe for its monthly stock recommendations and reports. Across the decades, the company has cemented itself as a global authority on the stock market, and been written about in major news outlets such as the New Yorker, NPR, and Bloomberg. But if it weren’t for a clever idea from Chris Hill ’90 a decade and a half ago, the business might have become a casualty of the 2008 financial crisis.

Late that year, The Motley Fool was scrambling as it lost subscribers who were spooked by the recession. At the time, Hill was working as The Motley Fool’s head of media and public relations, and he came up with an innovative way to tap a new audience: starting a podcast. He pitched the idea as a way to generate new buzz. Each episode would feature him interviewing Motley Fool financial analysts, providing a more conversational venue for expert investment advice than what was being featured on other financial podcasts of the time, which tended to be burdened with technical jargon. “We thought, why do people come to The Motley Fool in the first place?” Hill said. “They want to know what our analysts think, because you can get the news anywhere.”

It was an innovative concept, but when the Motley Fool Money podcast launched in 2009 with Hill as host, he could have never

“

We said, we’re going to do this for a month. Let’s just see if anybody listens.”

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predicted the level of its eventual success. Over the next fourteen years, right up until he retired last May, he hosted thousands of episodes, cocreated four spin-off podcasts, and became one of the country’s best-known business podcast hosts.

Demystifying investing for average people was the perfect task for Hill, who arrived at The Motley Fool in 1997 with no background in finance. After majoring in communications at BC and spending his spare time performing in on-campus plays, he earned a master’s in public communication from American University in 1996.

While hunting for jobs after grad school, he came across a posting for The Motley Fool, which appealed to him because the company’s mission was to make investing more accessible. “The message from Wall Street was, investing is very hard, and no one should do it on their own,” Hill recalled.

“Here these guys were starting a company saying, ‘investing isn’t that hard, the math you need is the math you learn in junior high.’”

Before long, Hill was making it a point to get coffee with analysts at the company so he could learn from them, conversations that became the foundation for the podcast. To start out, he recalled, “We said, we’re going

to do this for a month. Let’s just see if anybody listens.”

The show quickly developed a devoted audience, and in January 2010, it was picked up on broadcast radio under the name Motley Fool Money. The podcast has received critical acclaim since it launched, and last year Nasdaq named it one of the “6 Financial Podcasts That Will Help You Master Your Money,” while the personal finance website The Penny Hoarder included it among “The 15 Best Personal Finance Podcasts of 2023.”

Hill may have retired from the Motley Fool, but he hasn’t let that stop him from working. Last year he recorded the audiobook version of his friend Morgan Housel’s 2020 book The Psychology of Money, which helps readers understand the complex ways that people’s personal history with money influences their investing choices.

Looking back on his career, Hill called himself “very fortunate” to have landed where he did, and to have been able to make something so positive out of such a difficult moment in the country’s economy. “When the bad stuff is happening in the market, it always feels bad,” he said. “I’m a big believer that when you don’t get what you want, you get experience.” n

Designing Solutions

Assistant Professor Ed-Dee Williams is developing an app to help young Black autistic people better describe their mental health needs.

BY ELIZABETH CLEMENTE

When he began work in 2015 on a doctorate in social work at the University of Michigan, Ed-Dee Williams wasn’t particularly interested in software development. But sometimes you just have to get creative.

Williams, a newly hired assistant professor in the Boston College School of Social Work,

researches the intersection of race and mental illness.

His work has inspired him to develop an app that he hopes will improve the lives of young people with autism who are experiencing depression but struggling to communicate their symptoms to a mental health professional.

In his academic work, Williams, who is Black, has seen the striking evidence of how a young person’s race can affect their mental health treatment. For instance, while conducting field research at an institution that served as both a traditional juvenile detention center and a boarding school for troubled teens, he noticed a disparity in how the behavior of the children there was being diagnosed. When the tuition-paying boarding school students, most of them white, misbehaved, it tended to be attributed to their mental health diagnoses. “Parents could say ‘my kid is depressed and that’s why they’re acting this way,’” Williams recalled. “But hardly any of the kids on the other side were diagnosed with depression.” They were children of color, for the most part, and they were often labeled as having behavioral issues.

While at the University of Michigan in 2021, Williams met Matthew Smith, the director of a lab at the school that helps young people in underserved groups transition to adulthood.

Smith had created a computer program to help young autistic people practice job interview skills. Williams, who has an autistic older brother, was intrigued. He wondered if

Smith’s technology could be used to help Black autistic people get treatment for depression by aiding them in describing their symptoms more effectively.

“Getting support for depression is about being able to express what you’re feeling,” Williams said. “And unfortunately for autistic youth, there’s often difficulty in symptom expression and communicating what you need.”

Williams realized that a smartphone app inspired by Smith’s program might help.

For the next two years, he interviewed Black autistic youth and their parents, and designed the app. The result was a tool that allows users to role-play a conversation in which they describe their mental health symptoms to an actor playing a teacher. Teachers are a critical link, Williams said, between students and mental health services, because young people often feel comfortable reaching out to them for help.

Williams said he hopes to launch the app this summer.

The tool could not just help Black autistic youth get help for depression and live a happier life, he said, but also bring to light the needs of an often overlooked community. “Black youth have these very specific contextual experiences that we don’t examine,” he said. n

A new app developed by Assistant Professor Ed-Dee Williams helps autistic young people who are experiencing depression learn to better describe their symptoms. Here’s how it works: After logging into the app, users select a symptom associated with depression. They are then asked to describe that symptom to a video recording of an actor playing the part of a special education teacher.

After evaluating a user’s response, the app plays a video in which the “teacher” provides feedback about how they can more effectively communicate how they are feeling. The whole thing takes about ten minutes, and users can redo the conversation as many times as they want to try out different responses.

photos: Austin Morgan (Hill); Shutterstock (jester hat); Caitlin Cunningham (Williams); Courtesy of Ed-Dee Williams (app still)

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Linden Lane // Books

The Authenticity Industries

Boston College Associate Professor Michael Serazio’s new book explores how claims of authenticity have come to dominate our culture.

BY LISA WEIDENFELD

In 2016, the pop star Lady Gaga announced a tour of dive bars to promote her new album, Joanne.

The small and gritty venues were nothing like the arenas and stadiums where a star of her stature usually plays. They were more intimate and more in keeping with what she called the “raw Americana vibe” of the album.

The message was clear: The tour, like the music it supported, represented a return to something real, something authentic.

Never mind that the entire tour consisted of just three performances, after which Gaga went right back to the red carpets and arenas, or that it was sponsored by the mammoth brand Bud Light. An appearance of authenticity was the entire point of the exercise, according to Michael Serazio, an associate professor of communications whose new book, The Authenticity Industries: Keeping it “Real” in Media, Culture, and Politics, examines the ways in which presentations of “authenticity” have been used by celebrities, politicians, and marketers who recognize the concept’s power to connect with consumers at a time when people are desperate for something that feels genuine and true.

These claims to authenticity are pervasive enough in our culture that Merriam-Webster named authenticity its 2023 word of the year. But what exactly do we mean when we call something authentic? While reporting his book, Serazio said, he found that people were using authenticity “in really nebulous ways.” When his sources talked about what made something authentic, the word 18

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could stretch to fit any number of meanings, with uses as disparate as an effort to show that someone wasn’t doing something for the money and a claim that an independent coffee shop is more appealing than a Starbucks. But the term’s elasticity doesn’t hurt its effectiveness among consumers, and a motivated and ambitious advertiser will take note of what’s working, leading to ever more extensive efforts to craft it for us. “The more savvy these industries become,” Serazio said, “the more difficult it is to know what’s being faked for us and what’s real.”

Serazio dedicates a chapter to reality television, a genre that depends on projecting an aura of authenticity—they’re called reality shows for a reason—but that has had an increasingly difficult time capturing it. Contestants on these shows are supposedly presenting their genuine selves to the audience, but Serazio writes that after years of watching such programming, they fully understand the game: Becoming a star involves amping up the drama and playing to the camera, which by definition

means they’re being inauthentic.

This dynamic has forced casting directors to go to greater and greater lengths to find truly “authentic” stars who haven’t already been contaminated by watching reality TV programming. A producer for the Netflix show Queer Eye tells Serazio that her desire for a suitable person to appear on the show led her to send a scout “to the same sad mall in Kansas City” every day for two weeks. “Reality TV folks,” Serazio said, “are constantly chasing this thing that is forever eluding their grasp.”

More fascinating is Serazio’s depiction of the degree to which a craving for authenticity has infected politics. Even the election of 2000 showed rumblings of an interest in authenticity from voters, given their vague desire to have a beer with George W. Bush in a way that Al Gore couldn’t capture, suggesting Bush was “real” in a way Gore wasn’t. But the presidential election of 2016, Serazio said, amounted to “a battle royale around the issue of authenticity.” Donald Trump’s late-night tweeting and offthe-cuff speaking style read as authentic to voters, and Hillary

Clinton’s more polished presentation read as a veneer. This difference in personal style became one of the major animating forces behind voting decisions, despite the fact that tweeting, or not, isn’t representative of much beyond, well, personal style.

“None of this has anything to do with policy or substance, or what they would actually do to govern,” Serazio said.

After reading the book, you start to notice the attempts all around you to package and sell authenticity. “The yearning is real,” Serazio said, for something that feels real, and anyone trying to sell a product is going to respond to it. Your awareness of this can lead to a kind of cynicism about the world, but Serazio cautioned against letting that overshadow your actual feelings about something. Just because a singer or politician is trying to connect with you via claims of authenticity, it doesn’t mean you need to reject the actual policies a politician has in mind, or the music someone is making. “Don’t be cynical about the values that authenticity peddles. Be skeptical about the way that they’re being peddled,” Serazio said. n photo: Lee Pellegrini

Curriculum

by Design

BRIEFLY

What goes into creating a core curriculum? A new book explores Boston College’s process.

In 2012, Boston College was seeking to revamp its Core Curriculum, the group of liberal arts classes all undergrads must take, which had been largely unchanged for more than two decades. There was broad support on campus for the changes, but disagreement about what those changes should be.

To break the logjam, the University made a surprising decision: At the suggestion of Carroll School of Management Powers Family Dean Andrew Boynton, BC turned to Continuum, a consulting firm, to assist with the updates to the Core. The company met with Core Renewal Committee members and key administrators, held interviews with faculty, students, and alumni, and researched best practices at peer institutions to arrive at a vision for the Core.

BC’s journey to a new Core Curriculum and the ways it energized faculty, administrators, and students to view liberal arts education as an ongoing process of innovation form the basis of a new book, Curriculum by Design: Innovation and the Liberal Arts Core. Edited by the cochairs of the Core Renewal Committee—Boynton, Provost and Dean of Faculties David Quigley, and Rattigan Professor of English Mary Crane, who is director of BC’s Institute for the Liberal Arts—the book features essays

by BC faculty about the new courses they’re teaching from the revitalized curriculum.

“A decade into the work of Core renewal, I’m more convinced than ever that the work of curricular revision is the most important work that we are called to do as college faculty and academic administrators,” Quigley said. “It remains very gratifying to see the ways in which hundreds of colleagues have, through their own work and commitment, brought the renewed Core to life. The engagement of University faculty, across fields, generations, and schools, has been perhaps the most inspiring outcome.”

—Phil Gloudemans illustration: Joel Kimmel

The House of Wolves by Mike Lupica ’74 and James Patterson In this thriller by acclaimed sportswriter Lupica and bestselling author Patterson, protagonist Jenny Wolf, a thirty-something former high school teacher, finds herself in charge of a billion-dollar empire following her father’s murder. Suddenly, Wolf is the head of an esteemed San Francisco newspaper and running a professional football team—two leadership roles that land her squarely in the crosshairs of her powerful and cutthroat family.

Your Freedom, Your Power: A Kid’s Guide to the First Amendment

by Clelia Castro-Malaspina ’05 and Allison Matulli Castro-Malaspina and Matulli, who are former attorneys, educate young readers on the significance of their First Amendment rights—including freedom of the press, religion, and speech. In addition to its overview of fundamental legal concepts, the book highlights key legal cases and social movements that have affected children’s lives throughout history to give them a real-world grounding in the amendment’s impact.

The Crucible of Desegregation: The Uncertain Search for Educational Equality by BC Professor R. Shep Melnick Most Americans are familiar with the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine and led to the desegregation of public schools in the country. But ambiguities remain around the legal definition of desegregation, and Melnick chronicles the progression of federal school desegregation law over the last seven decades, as well as the battles still being fought over it today.

Milk and Whiskey On Logan Way by Timothy Burke ’96 Burke, a BC School of Social Work graduate, shares his difficult story of growing up in a South Boston housing project, the son of a firefighter whose alcoholism destroyed his own life and robbed Burke of his childhood. The memoir chronicles Burke’s own alcoholism, his quest for sobriety, and an eventual recovery that inspired his work as a clinical social worker specializing in addiction treatment and counseling.

WHAT I’M READING

Where Good Ideas Come From

by Steven Johnson

Innovation and learning are never-ending life processes, as are change and adaptation. We must identify how to get the best out of learning opportunities if we aim to innovate in life. Where Good Ideas Come From describes the process of innovation, the learning processes intertwined in it, and the social interactions required for it. It’s an excellent read to spark thinking and awareness in search of opportunities to improve in any area of life.

—Alejandro Olayo-Méndez, SJ, Assistant Professor, School of Social Work w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Why Are We So Lonely?

AMERICANS ARE REPORTING ALARMING RATES OF LONELINESS AND SOCIAL ISOLATION

BY JOHN WOLFSON ILLUSTRATIONS BY MICHAEL MORGENSTERN

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AST YEAR, THE US SURGEON GENERAL released a worrying report about the deep sense of loneliness that many Americans are experiencing. The report, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” found that approximately 50 percent of adults in the country are feeling lonely, and that people of all ages are spending significantly less time with others.

The findings have profound implications for the health of the country. Being lonely or socially isolated puts people at heightened risk for a number of serious illnesses—the report estimates it to be the health equivalent of smoking fifteen cigarettes a day—including depression, cardiovascular disease, and dementia.

So what’s going on here? Why are we feeling this way, and how can we turn things around? To find out, we talked with Alyssa Goldman, a Boston College assistant professor of sociology whose research includes looking at how our social relationships intersect with our health and well-being. Last year, Goldman and Erin York Cornwall of Cornell University coauthored the paper “Stand by Me: Social Ties and Health in Real Time,” which explored the moment-by-moment physical and emotional benefits for older Americans of spending time with other people.

The following conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for space.

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the societal problems of loneliness and social isolation. It turns out that these are not the same thing. How are they different?

When we’re talking about social isolation versus loneliness, we’re talking about an objective measure of someone’s social connections versus their perceptions of their social connections. So social isolation is referring to the objective lack of social ties or social connections, whereas loneliness is kind of this mismatch or perceived deficit in one’s social relationships. Loneliness is someone’s subjective assessment or evaluation of their social life. One way to think about this is that someone can have few social connections but feel very satisfied with those social ties and not feel that 22

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they’re lonely. At the same time, someone can have lots of social connections but still feel quite lonely; this kind of an “alone in the crowd” phenomenon. There are lots of indicators and studies coming out suggesting that social isolation and loneliness are problematic and pervasive in society across age groups. These are critical issues, and they’re being highlighted at a national level right now.

So you agree that we are feeling more lonely as a culture? That loneliness is more pervasive than it has been?

That’s what a big US Surgeon General’s report that came out in 2023 reported. It was based on the collection of a lot of research from sociologists and psychologists and epidemiologists, and their research is suggesting that people are reporting higher levels of loneliness.

That seems so counterintuitive in this age. We’re more connected than we’ve ever been. I can pick up my phone and FaceTime a friend. I can get on social media. Why are we feeling so lonely?

There’s a lot of research looking at the effects of the pandemic on both social isolation and loneliness, and how lockdown periods may have disrupted social ties and exacerbated feelings of loneliness that may have existed prior.

Most of my research work involves studies of older adults, but there’s also a lot of attention right now on adolescents and young adults and the effects of social media on things like self-esteem and loneliness. While social media does provide us with connections, it’s more than that. There are lots of comparisons people make, and kind of this feeling of needing to keep up and of missing out.

Right, the fear of missing out—FOMO. On social media, many people are presenting a glamorized image of the amazing life they’re living. Social media can leave many of us wondering why our own lives don’t feel more fulfilling. Maybe it can leave us feeling even lonelier?

There have been suggestions that social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook are contributing to harming young people’s mental health, and that they should be treated the same way that public health treated nicotine, for example. I’m not sure about that but, certainly, there are a lot of questions about whether this is potentially damaging people by leading them to believe that their life is not as glamorous or great as everybody else’s.

Is there any connection between loneliness and social isolation?

If someone has a group of friends and family but feels lonely, can that lead them to turn away from their contacts and become socially isolated?

There’s a lot more attention right now to how these processes play out over time. Social ties can be sources of stress and strain, but sometimes it’s not that easy to break

to work every day, going to the office, seeing people, and then that isn’t there anymore, it can contribute to social isolation. Widowhood is another contributor to social isolation, especially if someone shared a lot of social ties with their deceased spouse. Sometimes the spouse who passed away was the connector, the glue in the larger circle of friends.

So you lose your network of friends in addition to your spouse.

That can happen. Health is a huge factor as well. As mobility declines, it becomes harder to do things like get together with friends, engage in activities or religious services, or volunteer.

Why did you choose to focus on later-life adults in your research?

Later life is this part of the life course where there’s so much happening. There are these transitions, like I mentioned earlier: the loss of loved ones, retirement, becoming a grandparent, changes in health. All of these changes that alter the rhythm of everyday activity and can affect social connections. You kind of see the culmination of all of these things that happened from infancy through childhood and adulthood—and to still be able to observe changes in people’s well-being at that later point in the life course is really fascinating.

a connection or withdraw from a social tie—family, for example, or caretaking obligations. The stress of those obligations can cause people to withdraw or pull back from the social relationships. If so, do they have other social connections? Do they form new ones? Or do they become socially isolated?

What else explains the increase in social isolation?

It could be that we are more socially isolated because, as research shows, we’re spending less time with friends, we’re spending less time with family, we’re not volunteering as much as people were decades ago. But there are also these broader demographic trends that contribute to social isolation. So for example, people are living farther from their families than they did in the past. People are having fewer children. Marriage rates are down. When we look at trends in social connections and social isolation, if we’re looking at something like How many kids do you have? How many family members do you have? then yeah, that’s declining. All of these factors contribute.

Your research also looks at the ways that major life transitions as we age can affect our social connections.

Yes, retirement, for example, is a big shift in someone’s life that can disrupt their social network. If they’re going photo: Lee Pellegrini

You seem to be describing a situation in which our social connections can actually influence our physical health. Is that true?

Absolutely. There’s a lot of evidence that social ties can actually have as significant an effect on health as things like smoking and physical activity. And in some of my work, I’ve found that older adults who increase their social network over a five-year period have better sensory functioning. We might not initially think of sensory health as being as important as, say, cardiovascular health, but we’re talking about the ability to see and hear and smell. These are things that affect the quality of everyday life in really important ways.

Do we know why improved social connections provide these benefits?

I’m not a medical doctor, but there’s the idea that our sensory systems may have these kind of features of plasticity, and that our social life is potentially a source of stimulation and enrichment. We see this with cognition, for example. There’s this “use-it-or-lose-it” thesis that if you’re using your cognitive abilities you can maintain them. People often think of things like doing crossword puzzles. But there are also things like going out and socializing with people, maintaining a large social network, and engaging in different social activities that can also contribute to cognitive health. w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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What were some of the highlights from the research you conducted for the 2023 paper you coauthored, “Stand by Me: Social Ties and Health in Real Time”?

This was a fun study. We used data that we gathered from older adults who were living in Chicago, but we gathered the data a little differently than other studies on social life and health. Typically, surveys of older adults are done via an interview, or by having participants write their responses on paper. And these surveys are conducted once, or maybe every year or every five years. We did all of that but then we also asked older adults to carry around a smartphone for a period of a week. And five times throughout the day, they were pinged on the phone and asked to respond to a bunch of questions about what they were doing at that very moment—who they were with, where they were, how stressed they were, how tired, how happy, how energetic.

And so in this paper, we asked the question Does being with other people in a given moment affect the way that people feel in terms of their health?

And what were the results?

We found that being in the company of somebody else at a given moment leads to older adults feeling less fatigued and feeling less stressed in that given moment. This certainly mirrors a lot of findings that we already have in the literature, but the contribution here is looking at this moment by moment, as opposed to asking more general questions about how socially connected someone is. This is suggesting that being socially connected is not just some kind of chronic, static thing.

It’s not that we’re either socially connected all the time or we’re not socially connected at all. Being socially connected can change and unfold in what we call real time, or on a momentary basis.

It sounds like we may actually draw energy from being around people. Presumably people we like?

That’s a good question. We don’t know if these are people they like but we did find that these effects are especially strong when older adults report being with a friend or with a neighbor.

They’re more likely to engage in recreational activities like socializing, going out to eat, doing something fun together. Whereas with family, older adults are more likely to do things like grocery shopping, going to appointments, things like that.

Did anything you found surprise you?

One surprise was that we didn’t see significant differences in how often people are with others 24

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based on their network size. So, someone who says they only have one close social tie in their network was just as likely to be with somebody during the day as someone who reported that they had five very close social ties. This really drives home that our social lives are dynamic and fluid, and to understand the effects on health, we have to look at these different levels and layers.

Are there things we can do as a society to promote and facilitate these beneficial social connections?

There’s been a lot of attention lately to the broader social environment—so not just someone’s interpersonal connections, but the social infrastructure of where they live. So things like libraries, parks, senior centers, and other community spaces that are conducive to supporting the formation and maintenance of social ties. In fact, after our paper was published, we heard from Middlesex (Massachusetts) District Attorney Marian Ryan’s office.

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There’s a lot of attention right now on adolescents and young adults and the effects of social media on things like self-esteem and loneliness. While social media does provide us with connections, there’s also this feeling of needing to keep up.”

It was really interesting to hear about this program she’s doing throughout Middlesex County called the “Let’s Connect Initiative.” Part of the project is placing benches in certain areas, the idea being that the benches will kind of facilitate conversation and connection across generations. Then, in the Netherlands, there’s apparently a grocery store chain with a checkout line for people who want to chitchat with the cashier for a little bit. Time will tell if these kinds of initiatives have lasting effects in our increasingly socially isolated and lonely society. In chatting with a cashier at a grocery store, does somebody feel less lonely in the moment? Possibly. Does it build a lasting social connection that can be a reliable source of social support? I’m not sure. But our work does suggest that these momentary things still matter for well-being even if it’s a fleeting, momentary interaction. And when we think of health outcomes and premature mortality, our society typically focuses on things like changing someone’s physical activity or diet or prescribing a medication. I think social ties have been absent from that conversation. So it’s really exciting and important to start seeing more attention being seriously given to social connections.

You also have an NIH grant that’s looking at social connections and cognition.

It’s looking at interpersonal ties and close social networks but then also looking at the broader social environment.

So aspects of the built environment, social infrastructure, socioeconomic measures of neighborhoods and surrounding areas, and thinking about how those factors shape cognitive function, cognitive decline, and the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

And social isolation is a contributor, we think?

Yes, it is. But it’s not just the presence or absence of social ties. That is important—someone who’s socially isolated is at higher risk of cognitive decline—but it’s also the question of what about the social networks that people do have can be protective against cognitive decline?

What have we learned about protecting ourselves against cognitive decline? Have we identified any defenses in our social networks?

I think that’s the big question that’s hopefully going to come out of a lot of the research that’s being done in this area. When somebody is sixty-five or seventy-five, can there be some sort of intervention, or is there something that can be done at that point to slow cognitive decline?

What about our social network’s ability to positively affect our physical health?

Our social connections can be sources of stress, and it’s well established that stress can negatively affect health. But having supportive social ties can also buffer the effects of stress on health. So if you have a stressful experience in your life, a really supportive set of social ties to call on can maybe dampen the harm that event would’ve otherwise caused. We also find that social ties can be really important in the way people manage their health and well-being, like taking medication, getting to appointments, and adhering to a prescribed health regimen.

And if someone doesn’t have a robust social network?

Someone who’s socially isolated, or who lives alone, can be at much higher risk of not managing their health in those ways.

And if someone is feeling very lonely?

Loneliness itself can be a source of stress. Feeling lonely and being socially isolated can lead someone to engage in harmful health behaviors, such as smoking, or not engage in health-enhancing behaviors, like exercise. These effects can be exacerbated when someone who is lonely withdraws from social ties, and therefore does not receive support and resources that they otherwise might. Loneliness and social isolation can also activate the body’s stress response and related biological processes, which are implicated in various disease processes, and can manifest in blood pressure, immune function, and various markers for cardiovascular risk and other health risk factors. So there are various pathways through which our social relationships affect our health in significant ways, including physiological, psychological, and behavioral, in addition to being critical social resources and sources of influence that collectively shape our well-being. n w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Stephen Kircher’s Wildest Ride 26

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A warming climate. Rising costs. Sophisticated competition. Who’d want to be in the ski business today? Meet Stephen Kircher, MBA’88.

His company, Boyne Resorts, owns some of the country’s top ski destinations, and he’s betting big on the industry’s future.

BY DANIEL MCGINN ’93

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL POEHLMANN w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Stephen Kircher was in a celebratory mood.

It was the middle of December and Kircher had flown into Big Sky Resort in Montana, one of ten North American ski destinations that his company, Boyne Resorts, owns and operates. Kircher, MBA’88, was there to cut the ribbon to open Big Sky’s newest attraction: the Lone Peak Tram. The state-of-the-art lift—the first tram built by a North American ski resort in fifteen years—can carry seventy-five people at a time to some of the most challenging ski terrain in Big Sky’s 5,850 acres.

Even as Kircher, Boyne’s chief executive, accepted congratulations on his company’s grand new investment in skiing’s future, his phone was buzzing with news of how a similar big-ticket upgrade in Maine was off to a disastrous start. The previous night, Sunday River had received more than seven inches of rain. The deluge washed away the snow at Boyne’s largest East Coast resort just days before the start of the crucial Christmas ski week. Key roadways and bridges had been destroyed. Guests in a Boyne-owned hotel were trapped. (Rescuers used a raft for an evacuation.) Sunday River’s new lift, which cost more than $15 million and had opened just days earlier, lay buried in mud. Early guesses at the damage and lost business approached $10 million.

At Big Sky, however, Kircher did his best to keep smiling. “It was really difficult,” Kircher said. “I had to be upbeat and positive because the opening of the new tram is one of the most important moments in Big Sky’s history, [but] we had this craziness going on in Maine at the same time…. It was tough mental gymnastics.”

It won’t be the last difficult day for Kircher, fifty-nine.

Skiing has boomed since the Covid-19 pandemic.

During the 2022–23 season, skiers made sixty-five million visits to US mountains, an all-time record. Boyne Resorts, with eleven thousand employees and $650 million in annual revenue, appears poised to profit from that. But the industry faces significant challenges. Real estate shortages in ski towns have made it difficult to house seasonal workers. Rising lift ticket prices, which are approaching $300 for a one-day pass at top resorts, are creating affordability concerns.

Then there’s a more existential challenge: the weather. In a Zoom interview just after Christmas, Kircher was glum.

Ordinarily the temperatures at Boyne’s corporate offices in northern Michigan hover in the twenties in late December, but it was in the fifties and rainy. “It’s almost like living in 28

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Seattle,” he complained. It was so warm that Kircher had played golf on Christmas Day, and there was so little snow that his team was considering closing Boyne Mountain, the company’s original resort, during the holiday week.

With ski areas stretching from Maine and New Hampshire through Michigan, Utah, Montana, Washington State, and British Columbia, Boyne benefits from superb geographical diversification. When the weather is poor in one spot, it’s usually cold and snowy at a different resort.

But as the New Year approached this year, the weather seemed warm and rainy everywhere. That was partly due to the El Niño weather pattern, but Kircher believes global climate change is also to blame. “This is the most challenging winter probably since 1966,” he said.

For Boyne Resorts, it comes at a critical time. Kircher is investing extraordinary sums in new lifts and snowmaking equipment, hoping the technology will put Boyne ahead of competitors. But the only way to make a return on those investments is to sell more lift tickets—and to do that, it needs to be colder. It’s enough to make you wonder what an MBA class like the ones Kircher took at BC would make of a company facing these kinds of challenges.

Would someone reasonably ask: Isn’t there an easier way to make a living?

“If you’re in it for the money, probably,” he said. “We’re snow farmers. Sometimes the crops come in and you do well, sometimes they don’t.” It’s possible, he said, that due to the lousy weather, Boyne’s revenue will drop from last year. But he insisted that the company’s investments in lifts and snowmaking will pay off in the long term. “We’ve seen these ups and downs for seventy-five years,” he said.

above: Stephen Kircher rides the new Disciples 8 chairlift at Boyne Mountain, one of his company’s ten ski resorts. below: Kircher celebrates the opening of Big Sky Resort’s state-of-the-art Lone Peak Tram, which can carry seventy-five people.

When Kircher and his three siblings were growing

up in Michigan in the 1970s, they didn’t waste time wondering what career they’d pursue. It was already decided: They were going into the family ski business.

Stephen’s father, Everett Kircher, had owned a Studebaker dealership in Detroit before he and two other photo: Kirby Grubaugh (Big Sky Tram Opening)

men paid $1 for an unfarmable hill three and a half hours north of the Motor City. They carved out trails, installed a recycled chairlift, and opened their new ski facility as Boyne Mountain— named for its location in the town of Boyne Falls—in 1948. Everett soon bought out his partners.

Though he died in 2002, he is recalled as a visionary who’s credited with three innovations during the 1960s: His team at Boyne patented a breakthrough snowmaking gun; he installed the industry’s first three- and fourperson chairlifts; and he was the first operator to build a golf course adjacent to a ski resort to create a year-round destination.

Everett went to unusual lengths to ground his young children in the family business. In 1973, when he was first considering expanding beyond Michigan, he brought Stephen, age nine, to inspect Telluride, the Colorado resort that was for sale. The patriarch later convened the family around the dinner table and asked the children—all younger than fifteen—to debate the acquisition. Stephen voted against the deal, in part because his father, a smoker, had needed an oxygen tank at Telluride’s high altitudes. “How are you going to run it when you can’t even breathe?” Stephen said. His siblings also voted it down.

The company also passed on buying Jackson Hole before agreeing in 1976 to acquire Big Sky, now the secondlargest US ski area by acreage.

Being pushed into a company focused on skiing isn’t exactly hardship duty, and Stephen Kircher happily worked for his father during the summer throughout high school and college. But when he graduated from Michigan State University in 1986, he faced a dilemma. His dad was pressuring him to join the company immediately. Kircher resisted. “I don’t think I’ve learned enough,” he told his father. So that fall he enrolled in BC’s MBA program, heading to Vermont and New Hampshire to ski during weekends and breaks. In a statistics class, he did a regression project in which he tried to understand how different variables influenced the number of annual skier visits. w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Making It Snow

A 25 HP fan and 10 HP air compressor allow the guns to cover nearly 3/4 of an acre in snow. They produce three times the snow of the 300 HP older units while using a fraction of the energy.

Boyne Resorts has invested heavily in snowmaking technology, including installing thirty-eight Super PoleCat snow guns since 2020 at Sunday River. The units, which cost about $50,000 each, produce significantly more snow than older models while using far less energy. Here’s a look at what the new guns can do.

A mini weather station monitors temperature and relative humidity, allowing the units to automatically turn on when conditions are right. Older guns must be manually activated.

The nozzle creates smaller and more fully frozen snow particles, which spend more time aloft and better entrain air. The resulting snow is lighter and superior for skiing.

Water travels up the 15-foot pole to reach the gun, which maxes out at 150 gallons per minute, triple the capacity of the older units.

He found that most economic indicators, such as unemployment and the stock market, didn’t have much impact on skier traffic. The overwhelming driver, the numbers showed, was the weather.

After graduation, Kircher did join the family company.

By the early 2000s, Kircher and his three siblings were all working at Boyne Resorts, just as their father had dreamed.

For a long period, Kircher oversaw the company’s operations in Michigan and Montana. At headquarters, he worked to professionalize what had been run as a mom-and-pop business, replacing bookkeepers with accountants, investing in technology, and expanding the leadership team. Then, in 2007, Boyne purchased the Maine ski resorts Sugarloaf and Sunday River, along with Loon Mountain in New Hampshire, and his empire grew to include the East Coast.

In 2017, Kircher took over as president and CEO. He admits it’s a great lifestyle business: He skied forty-eight days last season and has played scratch golf most of his adult life.

Today, just one of Kircher’s siblings works for Boyne, but 30

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the company remains family-owned, with the assets already placed in trusts for the next generation of Kircher children.

To get a sense of how Kircher is leading the fam-

ily business—and the generational bets he’s placing right now—the best place to visit is Sunday River.

Just after Christmas, Dana Bullen, the resort’s president since 2002, walked through the South Ridge Lodge, pointing to changes that Kircher made soon after purchasing it in 2007. Unimpressed by the lodge cafeteria food, Kircher added separate counters for sushi and burritos, and a highend restaurant. Then there was the “Chondola”—a chairliftgondola hybrid that’s common in Europe but rarely seen in the States. Kircher recognized that the Chondola—which Bullen had never heard of before—could help increase revenues by making Sunday River’s mid-mountain lodge accessible to non-skiers for weddings and functions. Driving his Yukon around the mammoth property, Bullen pointed to the dozens of multimillion-dollar homes set in areas no photo: Brandon Pullen

one thought to develop until Kircher pressed for a plan that would allow Boyne to sell the lots the houses were built on—another profit center.

In Bullen’s office, a bookshelf contains titles about management. Kircher is constantly sending such books to his executives. Employees describe him as someone who talks about “servant leadership” and remembers the names of their children, but also as someone who watches the numbers carefully. When the presidents of Boyne’s ten ski resorts present to the company’s board each spring, whoever had the worst year goes first, and the leader who had the best year goes last. “You don’t want to be in that first spot a couple of years in a row,” Bullen said.

Kircher has pushed his team to find ways to overcome the industry’s historic pattern of booms and busts. Some of the changes reflect industry-wide trends. To minimize the effects of bad weather in any particular region, for example, the ski industry has consolidated, with a handful of companies now controlling multiple mountains in different geographies. (The industry giant Vail Resorts owns fortyone locations in North America, Europe, and Australia.)

As these companies have scooped up more mountains, they began offering multi-location season passes—the two biggest are Epic and Ikon—that are sold at discounts before the season begins. (Boyne is part of the Ikon program.)

These early sales help to provide insurance against lost ticket sales resulting from bad weather.

Another innovation is dynamic pricing. Instead of having fixed lift ticket prices for weekdays, weekends, and holidays, ski resorts have mimicked the airlines, constantly moving prices up and down based on demand, weather,

and other variables. Boyne, which also operates fourteen golf courses, first used the technique about a decade ago to price tee times. For the past five years, its ski resorts have depended on algorithms to set prices for lift tickets. Say you want to ski a certain resort on a Thursday in February.

If you buy the ticket in August, you might pay $35; wait until the week of the trip, however, and you could pay $95.

“You can maximize revenue and also push demand to offpeak times,” Kircher said. “Dynamic pricing is probably the biggest thing the industry has done.”

Collectively, Kircher said, these developments should help Boyne grow revenue consistently—which is key to funding the gigantic investments he’s making out on the mountain.

If you visit an average resort, you may encounter lifts dating from the 1970s or 1980s. But Kircher believes in making big investments in the latest lift technology. In 2019, he took twenty employees to ski in Europe, where lifts are far more advanced than in the United States.

European lifts often feature heated seats, automated safety bars, and hard plastic screens (called bubbles) that lower to protect skiers from wind.

It wasn’t long before Kircher imported the technology to Boyne resorts. Sunday River has introduced two new bubble chairs since 2022, the Jordan 8 and the Barker 6 (the numbers refer to how many skiers ride on each chair).

The new lifts move astonishingly fast but are quieter than traditional ones, and they can operate in winds that shut down older lifts. To ease loading, they feature conveyor-like “magic carpets” that allow skiers to step on, avoiding the rushed and awkward shimmy forward to load. Kircher promised that I’d be just as warm riding the Barker 6 as I’d be sitting in the lodge drinking hot cocoa. When I visited in December, that turned out to be an exaggeration, but not much of one. It was surprising how much the wind-blocking bubble adds to comfort.

That coziness comes at a cost, however.

Kircher wouldn’t say what each of the new lifts cost, but people in the industry guess they run more than $15 million apiece. A less advanced two-seat lift might cost $4 million, which explains why US ski resorts have been slow to adopt newer lifts. No one is betting on the high-tech chairs as heavily as Boyne, which is simultaneously building Boyne Resorts CEO Stephen Kircher works at the same desk, in the same office, his father used when the company was founded in 1947.

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Boyne Resorts CEO Stephen Kircher photographed with the line gauge bull wheel of the Disciples 8 chairlift at Boyne Mountain in Michigan. The lift is the first in the Midwest that accommodates eight people per chair.

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new gondolas and trams at other mountains. “Stephen is crazy for lifts,” said Kelly Pawlak, head of the National Ski Areas Association, on whose board Kircher sits. Kircher says the costs are justified. Instead of trying to grow by acquiring more ski resorts, Kircher believes it’s better to grow organically by upgrading the experience at his existing mountains to attract more customers. The high-tech lifts may last fifty years—far longer than cheaper ones. The lifts also better distribute people around the mountain, reducing bottlenecks and lift lines. Advanced lifts are “a differentiator,” Kircher said. “It’s the future of skiing.”

Peter Landsman, who runs the industry publication Lift Blog, confirmed that some skiers flock to resorts with the newest lifts the way other people head to amusement parks with the latest roller coasters. “Boyne has done a good job of making lifts an attraction,” he said.

Of course, lifts don’t make much difference if there’s not enough snow—something Sunday River experienced during Christmas week—which explains Boyne’s major investments in its snowmaking capabilities.

The physics of snowmaking haven’t changed much since the first snow gun was patented in the 1950s. Snowmakers pump water and compressed air through guns, and when the temperature is cold enough and humidity is sufficiently low, grassy hills disappear under white flakes. What has changed is how efficiently this technology can be deployed, the quality of the snow it produces, and the amount of energy it consumes.

Brendan Ryan, a thirty-seven-year-old engineer who oversees snowmaking at all ten Boyne mountains, skied crisply through the mush at mid-mountain, stopping smoothly at two portable snow guns mounted on tripods.

Guns like these require substantial labor. Workers need to move them into position, run water lines, and turn them on and off manually. That takes so much time that resorts only turn such guns on when the weather is expected to stay cold for at least twelve hours.

From there, Ryan schussed over to one of Sunday River’s latest “fan guns.” The $50,000 device sat atop a fifteen-foot tower. Fan guns can make snow at thirty degrees, produce three times as much snow as older technology, and cover nearly three-quarters of an acre. These particular fan guns aren’t portable—they are set permanently into the sides of slopes—but they are highly automated, as they can be turned on remotely from a smartphone app or programmed to begin spraying snow if the temperature hits a threshold.

(Each tower has its own mini weather station.) That saves labor and makes them easier to use. The newer guns “make a higher quality, more uniform [snow],” Ryan said. “They make it faster…and by using less compressed air, they use less energy, so it costs us less.” Sunday River has added thirty-eight full-auto fan guns since 2020.

Ryan estimated that just a few years ago, it took nearly 1,600 hours of snowmaking to get Sunday River’s terrain open. This winter, despite all the rain, it will take fewer than 1,225 hours. The goal, he said, is 750 hours. Faster, more efficient snowmaking is just another investment Boyne is making to stay ahead of the competition by allowing people to keep skiing even as climate change means less natural snow.

In fact, Boyne executives are less concerned about climate change crippling their industry than you might expect. They acknowledge temperatures are rising, but they don’t see it as a near-term existential threat to skiing, particularly in northern, high-altitude resorts such as Boyne’s.

“I’m much less worried about ski resorts than I am about populations along the coastlines, and droughts and hurricanes,” Kircher said.

And as miserable as the conditions were at Sunday River during Christmas week, two nights later, the temperature dropped. Ryan’s team turned the snowmaking equipment to full volume. Within days, the resort’s Instagram was filled with images of snow-filled slopes. A week after that, New England was walloped by a Nor’easter.

Finally, the snow farmers were seeing this year’s crop come in.

Even as Boyne’s ski resorts began looking like

they normally do in winter, the question remained: As the world comes off its hottest year in recorded history, is it really a good idea to bet your family’s fortune on skiing? To put it another way: If Kircher could transport himself back to 1948 and quietly advise his father to instead invest in an industry with better and more consistent margins, wouldn’t that be wise?

Kircher responded by paraphrasing an old joke: The fastest way to become a millionaire is to start out as a billionaire and invest in ski areas. When pressed to reflect seriously on all the other things he might be doing, he seemed slightly mystified. No matter what his spreadsheets show at the end of this winter, he simply can’t imagine being in another industry. “If you’re in it because you love the outdoors and love the sports and the lifestyle of skiing and golf, and everything we do, then it’s fantastic,” he said.

He argues that in an increasingly obese and sedentary society, outdoor recreation has value beyond profits. So does creating meaningful family vacations. In business school, Kircher recalled, professors talked about hypothetical companies that built “widgets,” suggesting the specific product doesn’t really matter. “We don’t make widgets,” he said.

“We make something that people are passionate about.” No one more so than the CEO himself. n

Daniel McGinn ’93 is an executive editor of Harvard Business Review.

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Partners in Health Care How tiny St. John’s College and BC’s Connell School joined forces to launch a desperately needed new nursing school in Belize.

BY BILL DONAHUE

St. John’s College President Mirtha Alicia Peralta, center, has been the driving force behind her school’s new nursing program. Pictured with her are the program’s first four faculty members, Belizean nurses who are all at work on masters degrees at BC’s Connell School of Nursing. From left are Ingrid Asusenia Gomez, Marcia AldanaLennen, Areli Rodriguez, and Brithney Ortega.

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photo: Michael Palacio

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HIS IS THE STORY OF A NEWLY LAUNCHED NURSING SCHOOL IN BELIZE, a tiny English-

speaking nation in Central America that is home to four hundred thousand people. But really the tale reads more like the parable of the loaves and the fishes, and it stars a vigorous and driven Belizean woman, Mirtha Alicia “Alice” Peralta, who has never had many resources at hand, even though she is the president of a small Jesuit college.

St. John’s College sits in a country where the per capita income is about a fifth what it is in the US, and it has just 103 university students (along with 700 high schoolers and 1,305 junior college students). It’s received financial help and scholarly guidance from Boston College in recent years, but its endowment is tiny. But that was no roadblock for Peralta when she began thinking, a couple of years ago, of launching a nursing program at St. John’s. It was just another obstacle to wriggle past.

Peralta yearned to start minting nurses because Belize has a shortage. There are an estimated 1,200 nurses in the entire nation, and the need for more is particularly acute in the poorest and southernmost of Belize’s six districts, Toledo. Most of the residents there are Mayan and they tend to live on dirt roads far from medical help. Diabetes and hypertension are rampant.

Peralta started working toward addressing this need in 2017 when she had her college conduct a survey of high school students to ask whether they’d enroll at a St. John’s nursing school. The results were encouraging, which hardly came as a surprise. At the time, the country had only one nursing school, at the University of Belize, located in its sleepy capital, Belmopan. St. John’s sits a little over an hour away, in Belize City, the country’s only metropolis.

But how was Peralta going to open a nursing school? She had no connections to major donors—philanthropy is minimal in her country—and she knew very little about nursing. She did, however, have two things going for her: a long history of making the improbable happen, and a connection to BC, which has an internationally respected nursing program of its own.

Connell School Professors Colleen Simonelli (left) and Donna Cullinan (center) have led BC’s partnership with St. John’s College as the small Jesuit school has launched its new nursing program in Belize. The professors traveled to the college last year, along with BC nursing students (from left) Vidisha Pandey `23, Aoife Goggin `23, Sinead Dunn `23, and Megan Borchick `23 (not pictured).

photo: Lee Pellegrini

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From left are Belizean Ministry of Health official Lizett Bell; BC student Megan Borchick ’23; St. John’s College Junior College Dean Solangel Alvarado; BC Professor Donna Cullinan; St. John’s College President Mirtha Alicia Peralta; Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital CEO Chandra Nisbet Cansino ’91; BC student Aoife Goggin ’23; BC student Sinead Dunn ’23; BC student Vidisha Pandey ’23; and BC Professor Colleen Simonelli.

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N 2003, PERALTA ARRIVED for a high school teaching position at St. John’s College equipped with nothing but a junior college degree in accounting. She soon became the head of the college’s business department. After that, she was named a dean and then, finally, in 2015, the first-ever female president of St. John’s, which was founded in 1887

by Jesuits. As president, she launched departments of music and civil engineering and also helped develop a software program that brought St. John’s paper-based documentation system into the digital age. Always, she said, she was driven by her deep Catholic faith. “I’m not the kind of person who goes to church five times a week to pray the rosary,” she explained. “I have too much energy for that. I like to serve people.”

In 2020, Peralta was able to gain St. John’s admittance to the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, a network whose twenty-seven other schools are all situated in the US. That same year, at a gathering of the association’s presidents, she found herself eating lunch with BC President William P. Leahy, SJ, whom she said she admires for “living the mission of the Society of Jesus. He creates opportunities for people who need it.”

But even if Peralta was starstruck, she was also shrewd.

Here she was, sitting next to the president of the university that’s home to the vaunted Connell School of Nursing.

This was her moment, and in bright tones she told Fr. Leahy about her ambitions to launch a nursing school at St. John’s. “Whenever you’re ready,” Fr. Leahy told Peralta, “I’m ready to help you.”

By that time, Peralta had already had similar discussions with two professors at the Connell School, Colleen

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Simonelli, whom she’d met a year earlier, and Donna Cullinan. She knew that the professors had led nursing students on work trips to Haiti, Jamaica, and Chile. Now, with Fr. Leahy’s commitment of support, she sensed—correctly, it turned out—that they would be enthusiastic partners in her quest to launch a nursing program.

“It’s about living out the Jesuit mission of being men and women for and with others,” Simonelli said. “It’s about engaging where we see inequity or injustice.”

“We want to put ourselves out of a job,” Cullinan added.

“We want to teach the people of the country we’re serving to take care of themselves.”

Peralta had long conversations with Simonelli and Cullinan about what a nursing college needs. Then, emboldened by her new liaisons at BC and working with Solangel Alvarado, dean of the St. John’s College Junior College, and Lydia McCoy, the school’s assistant dean of academic affairs, she dug into St. John’s minimal coffers and added a nursing lab—a mini hospital room with six beds—to a $5.2 million STEM building that was already under construction on the college’s campus.

Early in 2022, BC paid for Simonelli and Cullinan to travel to Belize for five days. With Peralta, they visited a leading private hospital, Belize Healthcare Partners, in Belize City, and convinced administrators to hire nurses who would eventually come out of St. John’s new program.

The hospital was expanding, and after years of depending on Nicaraguan and Guatemalan nurses, who often aren’t proficient in English, there was an eagerness for homegrown professionals. “It didn’t hurt,” Peralta added, “that I know the CEO of the hospital personally.” photo: Courtesy of Chandra Cansino

When Simonelli and Cullinan returned to Belize in January 2023, they brought with them four BC nursing students, Megan Borchick, Vidisha Pandey, Aoife Goggin, and Sinead Dunn (who all graduated last year).

Dunn, now an oncology nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, came to understand why Belize was suffering a health care shortage. “Nursing students were getting their degrees and then leaving the country for better-paying jobs overseas,” she said. Peralta was intent on resolving the problem immediately, Dunn continued.

“The second we got off the plane, she said, ‘We can open this nursing school next week.’ She was the most ambitious person I’ve ever met.”

It fell to Simonelli and Cullinan to rein Peralta in, to bring a dash of pragmatism to the project—everything from a more realistic time frame for opening the school to the sort of supplies that St. John’s new nursing lab would need. The BC nursing students spent long days on the trip making lists of those supplies, which included stethoscopes, rubber gloves, and surgical masks. Peralta and the BC professors, meanwhile, considered a weightier question: In a country direly lacking high-level nurses, who was St. John’s going to get to teach at its nursing school?

They hit upon a plan: They’d select four talented nurses within Belize and arrange for them to pursue master’s degrees in nursing at BC remotely, via Zoom. These students, whom BC agreed to enroll free of charge, would then become the first faculty members in the St. John’s program and key players in a crucial cultural shift. “Here in Belize,” Peralta explained, “our nurses function more like family doctors in the US. They have to do everything, so it’s important our students learn from nurses who’ve worked in Belize and know all the conditions the health care system faces here.”

Connell School of Nursing Dean Katherine E. Gregory said it is part of the school’s mission to help grow the capacity for nursing education around the world. “We are delighted that our partnership with St. John’s will lead to increasing access to nursing education in Belize and Central America,” Gregory said. “I am grateful to Boston College and especially to our Connell School Faculty and Staff for making this education possible.”

The four Belizean students who will become the new program’s first faculty members—Marcia Aldana-Lennen, Brithney Ortega, Ingrid Asusenia Gomez, and Areli Rodriguez—began taking classes in August 2022, and are expected to graduate in May. Rodriguez is currently a nurse supervisor at Belize Healthcare Partners. Working a recent shift, she talked about how her classes at BC have led her to a broader understanding of medical afflictions.

“You can’t just treat the symptoms,” she said, summarizing.

“Maybe there are psychological reasons why they’re having

those symptoms. I want the students I teach at St. John’s to think about cultural factors. I want them to get practical experience with patients early on, so they can apply theory as they’re learning.”

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T. JOHN’S NURSING SCHOOL opened in October 2023 with an inaugural class of sixty-three students.

Its four nursing faculty members were still at work on their master’s degrees from BC, but they weren’t quite needed yet—the Belizean students were starting out by taking prerequisites: biology, chemistry, and psychology.

Simonelli and Cullinan said they urged Peralta to take a more cautious tack and open the school with just twenty students in 2024, after the nursing faculty was in situ, but Peralta is never inclined to take baby steps. The classes began the moment the new STEM building opened.

Six of the nursing students now at St. John’s are from the impoverished Toledo district, and one of them, Dorla Kal, is an eighteen-year-old Mayan woman who hails from a tiny village, Corazon Creek, that does not have electricity, running water, or internet. There’s one lightly trained medical worker in Corazon Creek, population three hundred, but if a resident requires stitches, he or she needs to travel two hours over bumpy roads to the district capital, Punta Gorda. Pregnant women often deliver children in the backs of chartered cars as they make their way to the city.

Kal said that, in traveling to Belize City to study nursing, she is bucking Mayan gender norms. “Most girls stop their education after elementary school,” she said. “There aren’t enough finances, and people just say, ‘Girls should stay home and do household chores.’ My parents don’t think like that, though, and since I was small, I’ve been really interested in science. When I graduated from high school, I decided to just follow my dream of being a nurse.” She received a full scholarship at St. John’s, as did two of the other Toledo district students. In exchange, when this trio graduates, they will be required to spend five years working in their district.

Peralta is hopeful that, as time passess, St. John’s will train more nurses to serve Toledo—and that, within five years, the college will have two hundred nursing students matriculating each year, with both two- and four-year degree programs. “We are going to have them serve communities that have never had good health care before,” she said. “We are feeding a real need. Nurses are in demand in Belize, and soon we’re going to have more of them in our hospitals, both public and private. This nursing program will impact Belize in ways that last beyond our lifetime.” n Bill Donahue is a writer living in New Hampshire.

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photo: Anastasia Blackman

Mikey Hoag Is on a Mission.

Alzheimer’s Doesn’t Stand a Chance.

The BC trustee, who lost both her parents to the deadly disease, has become one of the country’s leading fundraisers for a cure. In fact, of the 178 current Alzheimer’s research trials in the world, Hoag’s Part the Cloud movement has funded more than a third. by jack dunn

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LZHEIMER’S DISEASE, which affects 6.7 million Americans, is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States and the fifth leading cause of death among adults sixty-five or over. And yet it remains a disease that cannot be prevented or cured. BC Trustee Michaela “Mikey” Hoag ’86, P’14, who lost both of her parents to Alzheimer’s, has made it her mission to change that—and in the process has become one of the nation’s most successful and prominent fundraisers for the cause. She’s the force behind the Part the Cloud movement, which on behalf of the Alzheimer’s Association has raised $68 million for Alzheimer’s research, and she even managed to convince Bill Gates to write a (suitably massive) check. BC Magazine sat down with the award-winning Alzheimer’s fundraiser to learn more about her quest for a cure.

You were living in California with your husband, Jay, when your father was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 1994. What was it like when you first received the news?

It was devastating. I felt blindsided. I am one of six, and all of my siblings lived near my parents in New Jersey. Everyone was helping out physically and emotionally. I felt lost, and so I asked myself, “What is my role in all of this?” So, Jay and I decided we were going to invest in Alzheimer’s research. We contacted the Alzheimer’s Association and made a gift because when we started looking for answers, there was absolutely nothing.

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While you were dealing with your father’s illness, your mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

When my mom received her diagnosis in 2011, I decided I needed to go public. I needed to speak about this disease that no one wanted to talk about. I needed to let people know that it was okay to talk about it, because if we do not talk about it, we are never going to find a cure.

You grew up on a farm in New Jersey where you fed chickens and baled hay. That’s not the most obvious background for someone who’s playing a lead role in the fundraising for a cure to a deadly disease.

At BC, you are taught to roll up your sleeves, get involved, and try to make an impact. Alzheimer’s was not something I wanted to get involved with, but our Jesuit education taught us that when you need to jump in, you jump in.

And for me, Alzheimer’s is something that just needs to be fixed, and I do believe that it is within our reach to do so.

To jump in, you launched the Part the Cloud Gala, on behalf of the Alzheimer’s Association, in 2012.

What was your expectation for the inaugural event?

A friend of mine came to me and said, “There are so many of us who have been touched by Alzheimer’s disease. You need to do a fundraising event.” I told her, nobody is going to show up on a Saturday night for an event for Alzheimer’s. No one even wants to talk about it.

Nonetheless, I pulled together a committee of people who I knew were affected by Alzheimer’s to plan a fundraiser.

Up until two months before the event, I still was not sure it was going to happen. We did not have any money and we

research. There are 178 ongoing Alzheimer’s trials, and we have funded sixty-five of them, in nine countries, and follow-on funding from these trials has reached $1.43 billion. Prior to Part the Cloud, the Alzheimer’s Association didn’t have a dedicated funding stream for late-stage drug development. So, we’re focused on getting human trials started in the hopes that other funding sources like the federal government or venture capital investors will fund them.

In 2019, Bill Gates made a personal gift of $10 million to the Alzheimer’s Association that funded a matching-gift challenge and spurred an additional $20 million in private funding for Part the Cloud’s global research programs.

Bill Gates was huge to our efforts. I read in the paper that his father had Alzheimer’s, so I made a PowerPoint and I asked a friend who knew him to send it to him. Months went by and nothing happened. So we redid the PowerPoint and my friend forwarded it on to him. A year went by. My husband said to me, “It has been a year now. You have to let go.” Two hours later, an email came in from Bill Gates that said, “You and I need to talk. You are doing exactly what my team is looking for.” So, I do believe that there are angels out there, my parents among them.

The CDC says that approximately 6.7 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease, and that that number is expected to triple by 2060. Is the country prepared for this pending health crisis?

Not at all. And those numbers really do not show all the people that have Alzheimer’s. For instance, when my father

I am not doing this for the honors. I am doing it to find a drug to stop this disease. That is what I get excited about, not the awards. needed a singer, and no performers would associate themselves with Alzheimer’s because they felt that if they did, people would assume they had the disease. Then, through a friend, we got Tony Bennett to agree to perform pro bono.

The event sold out immediately, and we raised $2 million out of the gate. It was beyond shocking, but it made me realize that there was a willingness to help fight this disease that none of us had imagined.

That low-expectation gala has become a regular event that’s raised more than $68 million.

The momentum has continued every year through the biennial Part the Cloud Gala and Part the Cloud Luncheon. We are now one of the world’s largest drivers of Alzheimer’s 42

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passed, he died of pneumonia, and that is how his cause of death was recorded, even though he had Alzheimer’s for twelve years. As we live longer, the numbers are just going to keep doubling so quickly. So, it is something we absolutely need to get ahead of.

Despite all the money you have raised and the research it has funded, there are still no effective interventions that delay or stop the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. How do you remain hopeful?

Because I see a light at the end of the tunnel. In 2023 the FDA approved Leqembi, the first treatment that targets the disease’s underlying biology, and in 2024 we hope to have a blood test available that will determine where people are

drug to stop this disease. A researcher from Canada who applied three different times for a Part the Cloud grant, and was twice denied, told me, “I was at the point of giving up on my research, but after each rejection, I was given a peer review from the Alzheimer’s Association of what to change. When I finally got the Part the Cloud grant, I was awarded a million dollars, then my research was awarded $13 million in follow-on funding. Now we have a really promising drug that is going to Phase 3.” So, that is what I get excited about, not the awards.

What are some of the current research initiatives and clinical trials that bring you hope?

The repurposed drugs are the ones that are getting me most excited. For example, there is a drug out of Colorado for bone marrow transplant that we funded that also reduces the inflammation in the brain and reboots the cells.

There are just so many possibilities. They all give me hope for the future.

with the disease and an eye scan that could enable people to see if Alzheimer’s is in their future. These breakthroughs will allow the trial costs to come down and more people will want to be a part of them. The government is aware that Alzheimer’s is a tsunami that is going to bankrupt Medicare and Medicaid, so they are increasingly investing in research. And there are a lot more drug companies that are starting to come into the fold. All of that gives me hope.

Age is the best-known risk factor for the disease but family history is also a risk factor. Your grandmother and both of your parents died from Alzheimer’s.

How concerned are you and your siblings that it may be hereditary?

It is on my mind all the time. But for me, I need to go on offense as opposed to defense. I often say to people, “If I am diagnosed, you know that I will go down swinging.”

Alzheimer’s is not something I can live in fear of, because that is not going to be helpful.

You have won multiple awards, including the Anthem Award for the nation’s best health fundraising event, and the Alzheimer Association’s Jerome H. Stone Philanthropy Award for Alzheimer’s Research. What do these honors mean for you?

I am not doing it for the honors. I am doing it to find a photo: Spencer Brown

What advice would you give to those whose loved ones have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s?

The stats will tell you that the person taking care of someone with Alzheimer’s will break before the person with Alzheimer’s does. So, give yourself permission to get help. Give yourself a couple hours of break during the day, because when that person you love starts to revert into a child who is incapable of retaining the lessons you are teaching them, it can quickly become emotionally and physically exhausting for the caretaker.

Where can people turn to get a better understanding of how to deal with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis?

The Alzheimer’s Association is a vital resource for advice on everything from financial and legal planning to daily care options. It also has local chapters that are very helpful because they offer counseling and information sessions that help clarify what life with Alzheimer’s entails. Each person reacts to the diagnosis differently, whether it is through anger or despondency. It just hits everyone differently. So, I would recommend contacting the Association’s 24/7 hotline (800-272-3900) and visiting alz.org for information on what to do after a diagnosis.

How can people help in the fight against Alzheimer’s?

You know it comes down to funding. It comes down to the fact that we need more trials. Right now, there are 141 unique drugs in the pipeline, many that have been funded by Part the Cloud. The pipeline is growing, but to use a sports analogy, we need more shots on goal. Cancer has five thousand trials. We need more funding for researchers so that the studies that are in the labs can then go to help people. n w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Class Notes // Alumni News & Notes

The BC Alumni app: the Heights at your wing tips!

With a streamlined interface and plenty of fresh content, the new Boston College Alumni app is your best resource for all things BC. Reunion details, University news, Class Notes, bookstore orders, and more: all in one place! Download the BC Alumni app today!

Enjoy discounted gear and alumni benefits Join your local alumni chapter for socials, networking, service, and spiritual events, and more Test your BC knowledge with weekly trivia Find out what’s happening at the Heights Network with alums and mentor current students through Eagle Exchange

Scan QR code to download the app

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Alumni Class Notes STAY CONNECTED Submit your news and updates for inclusion in Class Notes at bc.edu/classnotes Follow us on social media at bc.edu/socialmedia View upcoming chapter, class, and affinity group events at bc.edu/alumni To get the latest info on programming and to stay in touch with your BC family, update your profile in our alumni directory at bc.edu/update Some alumni notes have been edited for length and clarity. To view the full notes, visit bc.edu/bcmnotes or scan this code

1955

John “Jack” Ryan received his BS from Boston College. In January 1956, the Army sent him to California. He had five children by 1967 and was ordained deacon in 1981. He is now enjoying 16 grandchildren, with eight “greats” to photograph. His main occupation is suffering with the Red Sox daily via MLB.com. // Gerard “Jeff” Hayden has passed away. Four of his children, two sons-in-law, and two granddaughters are Eagles. // Norby Timmins died in October. He lived on the Cape.

1956

Ed Carroll is living in Marshfield and is still in contact with teammates Frank Quinn and Chick Entremont.

1957

Richard “Dick” B. O’Brien was fortunate enough to attend the Holy Cross game this fall with his family. He was happy that BC was able to pull off a win. He attended the game with his daughters, Kristen O’Brien Holland ’89 and Carolyn O’Brien McCann ’90, his two granddaughters Maeve Holland ’25 and Catherine McCann ’27, and his grandson Conor McCann. Class correspondent: Frank Higgins // higgs92@comcast.net

1959

65th Reunion, May–June 2024 Joan Belliveau Moran, MEd’59, of Waltham married Thomas Moran of Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1960.

Thomas received his PhD at Notre Dame in 1962. Joan and Thomas had four children and seven grandchildren. Joan taught elementary school for 24 years, and Thomas was a chemistry professor at Georgia Tech. After retiring from academics, Joan and Thomas became “The Moran Team” at BHHS GA Real Estate and enjoyed working together for 13 years.

Thomas Moran died on July 17, 2023. Class correspondent: William Appleyard // bill.appleyard@verizon.net

NC 1959

65th Reunion, May–June 2024 Ellen Egan Stone has passed away. She graduated from Gloucester High School and Newton College of the Sacred Heart.

1958 1952

Charles McCarthy has passed away. He was Dorchester born and raised and a proud Navy veteran. He spent most of his adult life in New Jersey.

1953

Barbara Gould Henry presented the Barbara Henry Courage in Teaching Award to Boston Public School Teacher Connell Cloyd for his extraordinary work over many years as math instructor at The Henderson School. The award is designed to recognize a teacher’s work to further, for their students, aspects of social justice.

A native of Memphis, Mr. Cloyd’s story is one of America’s iconic, inspirational success stories.

Billy Monahan had the pleasure of attending the 65th Reunion last June.

There was so much to see. He believes only two members of the class attended, but Fr. Leahy gave them a shoutout at Mass. Come back; it’s a wonderful experience. It was great to meet the boys from ’63, ’68, and ’88. // Moira Feeney Lyons thanks donors to the scholarship fund in memory of Paul Lyons, who passed away in 2022. Paul was captain of the BC basketball team in 1957–58 when the BC basketball venue was the Quonset Hut. Paul led BC to the NIT Tournament. A member of Massachusetts Basketball Association’s Hall of Fame, Paul cofounded the Belmont Youth Basketball Association, which introduced thousands of boys and girls to basketball. The court at Belmont’s Wenner Field House is named “Coach Lyons Court.”

COURTESY OF LEO SHEA ’60

1960

Thomas “Tom” Cunnally celebrated the 70th anniversary of his USMC enlistment on November 10, 1953. He enlisted after dropping out of classes at BC, but returned after military service to graduate with the class of 1960. // John Walgreen is back in Tampa for the winter. He is able to see his daughter and granddaughter who now live there. // Leo Shea ’60, H’17, joined Boston College alumni and friends in January to spend a week at Sophie’s w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Class Notes

Place, an orphanage for children with special needs in Kingston, Jamaica. This is his second trip. He was also a chaplain for four years at Blessed Assurance Orphanage, Montego Bay, Jamaica, which is a part of Mustard Seed Communities. // Pauline Fogge Leonard lost the love of her life, Bob Fricker, at 91 years of age, after 19-plus years of marriage. He passed away after more than two months of being ill on October 26, 2023. He had a Mass of Christian Burial at St. Luke Church in Barrington, Rhode Island. She will miss him every day of her life. // Fred O’Neill and his wife, Ann Marie, recently moved back to Duxbury from their ski house of 50 years. The best part of the move is that they live next door to their son, Bill. Their children wanted Fred and Ann Marie to be closer to them and to their doctors.

They have settled in and have been enjoying watching two of their grandsons play football, one at Brown and one at Avon Old Farms in Connecticut. Five of the seven grandchildren have begun their careers, and the other two are 14 and 16.

Class correspondent: John R. McNealy // jmcnealy@juno.com

NC 1960

Mary Egan Boland, Pat McCarthy Dorsey, Carole Ward McNamara, and Pat Winkler Browne attended the Putnam Conference Room dedication on November 9. Fran de La Chapelle, R.S.C.J., wrote the blessing, which Pat read. // Betsy De Lone Balas and husband Bernie built a home in North Carolina 29 years ago, played golf, and traveled. Now they enjoy their granddaughter at Princeton, grandson at the University of Rochester, and two grandsons in high school. Class correspondent: Patricia Winkler Browne // enworb1@verizon.net

NC 1961

Judy Vollbrecht has moved to Avila, a retirement community in Albany, New York. It’s a great place, and she’s with 11 other R.S.C.J.s. If you are coming to Albany sometime, do get in touch; Judy hopes to see you! // Sandy Irwin Heiler has been getting together regularly with Mary Sue Flanagan for lunch/dinner. A few months ago, Mary Sue hosted Mickey McQueeny, Judy Thompson, Maryann 46

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Morrissey, and Sandy for a terrific evening of dinner, catching up, and remembering our years at Newton. On her retirement from Verizon Labs, Sandy got an MA in history from Boston University and has been giving talks on various history topics. She and her husband live in a historic house in Brookeville, Maryland.

Class correspondent: Missy Rudman // newtonmiz@aol.com

1961

Tom Jones reports, for the many alums who served with the Army in Germany, that the former Keyes Building, Harrisburg, which was the office of the USAREUR CG, is now the Mark Twain Center for Transatlantic Relations, continuing to further international relations through events and displays.

Tom and a small group of Americans previously connected with the Army HQ and have contributed displays and provided oral history presentations.

Admission is free. // John McLaughlin’s grandson graduates from BC in 2024, joining John’s two granddaughters and five children as BC grads. // John Hehir is living in Skillman, New Jersey, just outside of Princeton. He enjoys periodic visits from his two grown children: John, who resides in Delaware, and Angelique, who lives in Florida. He just celebrated the marriage of his second grandchild, Nicholas. His other grandchild, Jennifer, already has two children, Lilly and Broudy.

Two surgeries last year have limited John’s ability to play golf, so he is addicted to TV streaming.

COURTESY OF WILLIAM SHAW ’63

Susan Ramsey is now living happily in gorgeous Sonoma, California. She retired from UCSD Medical Center, where she was a neurophysiologist, working at the Shiley Eye Center/NICU with appointments to the UCSD Departments of Ophthalmology and Pediatrics. For 25 years, she lived in La Jolla. Her 21-year-old twin granddaughters are juniors at separate colleges. She misses dear Wendy Paddock and Jane Lande, both passed.

granddaughter, Alexis Apholt, was named Teacher of the Month in central Florida, after only three years of teaching! // William Lundregan arranged for a group of classmates to meet at the McMullen Museum of Art on Brighton Campus to view some of the paintings recently donated by Peter Lynch ’65, H’95, P’01.

The artwork comes from the Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, and all are considered masterpieces by some of the world’s most acclaimed artists. // Jack MacKinnon’s plans of going to Lourdes were reported in Class Notes in the Summer 2023 Boston College Magazine.

He was a man of deep faith. He died in August. As long as his classmates remember, Jack was the “president” of the class. He loved planning events, entertaining his friends, and very generously giving of his time, talent, and treasure to so many who needed his help.

Jack had many loves, but at the top of his list was his Rosemary! He will be missed by his six children and their spouses and his 21 grandchildren. // Ronald Dyer is very active in veteran affairs. It’s a guess, but he thinks it’s likely his class has many who entered the service after graduation.

Let’s find out. Please message him. He has been searching for Richard V. Mc Devitt, another classmate. His last known address was Somerville. Ron is also looking for Ronald W. Reilly. Class correspondent: Eileen Faggiano // efaggiano5@gmail.com

1962

1963

PMC 1961

Kathleen Cashman Beaton’s “work dues” have been paid! // Paul Apholt’s

Mary Anne True passed away. She was an accomplished student, Lynch School

of Education junior class vice president, Dramatic Society actress, and so much more. In later years, she was a mother, grandmother, and devoted wife of George Yezukevich ’63, MA’66, and a volunteer to many civic and parish agencies. A beloved friend and family member.

Words fail us. Mary Anne surpassed all expectations of all who knew her.

Que Dios la bendiga en la eternidad. // Diana Newman attended the KING International Nursing Theory Conference in San Antonio, Texas, in November 2023.

It was co-sponsored with the University of Incarnate Word Ila Faye Miller School of Nursing in San Antonio. Diana is president of the KING International Nursing Group. // Bill Shaw’s recent novel, On the Run, tells the story of a rural Irish family’s struggles after husband and father Terence Connolly is arrested as a terrorist during the Troubles. Kirkus Reviews describes it as, “An absorbing work of historical fiction that satisfyingly educates, illuminates, and entertains. Based on historical events, Shaw’s novel presents an absorbing and unique narrative that explores familial struggles against a backdrop of violent political unrest.” // Sister Mary Pauline Hogan is celebrating her 60th anniversary as a Sister of Charity of St. Elizabeth. Class correspondent: Ed Rae // raebehan@verizon.net

UWI, Mona, Jamaica. The Journal of West Indian Literature Vol. 31, No. 2 (online) is devoted to her poetry. In April, Amherst College held a conference to honor her contribution to Caribbean literature.

Poetry By Heart (UK) suggested her children’s poem, “Lament of An Arawak Child,” to kick off National Poetry Day 2023. Class correspondent: Colette McCarty // colette.mccarty@gmail.com

1964

60th Reunion, May–June 2024 Daniel Keleher completed another milestone with the Pan-Mass Challenge.

Dan completed the 126-mile bicycle ride in excellent time, but the winner was the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dan’s financial sponsors have pledged over $100,000 during the course of his many rides in support of cancer research. // Arthur J. Doyle completed his threeyear term on the Select Board in Milton this year. Arthur finished his tenure in the role of chairman of the board. He continues to serve as a member of the Milton Conservation Commission. // Bill Mitchelson just retired from SalemFive Bank after 42 years as CEO, then chairman. When he started at the bank, it had less than $300 million in assets, but now SalemFive is one of the largest banks headquartered in Massachusetts. // Judy McClelland Searle has been a “washashore” on Martha’s Vineyard for 46 years. She has three children and four grandchildren. She and her husband, Donald, spend their winters on another island, Isla Mujeres, Mexico. // Louis Lauria retired from aviation.

NC 1964 COURTESY OF PAMELA HITCHINS MORDECAI NC’63

NC 1963

Pamela Hitchins Mordecai launched A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poems and de book of Joseph in February 2023 in an online event hosted by the Department of Literatures in English at

60th Reunion, May–June 2024 Peggy Bogosian retired from Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in 2006. She spent 25 years at the laboratory directing its technology transfer program. Before that she was in the patent law and then general law departments at Hoffmann La Roche, at the Swiss pharmaceutical company’s U.S. headquarters in New Jersey. After living in East Hampton, NY, for 30 years, Peggy and her spouse, Valerie Scorsone, moved to Falmouth, Maine, in 2012.

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

PMC 1964

Betsy Van Orsdel Moulds is retiring after 20 years living in her dream home and growing cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc. It’s time to leave vineyard management to be with family and friends and serve her community. At the 2022 Reunion on the Pine Manor campus, Betsy and her daughter, Hayden Schmidter, hosted a wine tasting of the Moulds Family Vineyard wines. Sally Manning, Diane O’Brien, and Heidi Epstein came and then all went to Sally’s home on the Cape. Heidi visited Betsy in Napa last August.

1965

The seventh mystery/thriller novel by Jack Dobbyn, JD’65 Deadly Depths, was published by Oceanview Publishing on August 1, 2023. The plot draws on events in the lives of people from three centuries—the Aztecs before Spanish conquest, the Caribbean pirates of the golden age of piracy, and the maroons of Jamaica. Class correspondent: Patricia Harte // patriciaharte@me.com

NC 1965

Frances Murray Taylor enjoyed a wonderful train tour of Scotland in September with her sister, Denise Murray Edwards ’66. They had a great time learning about the land of their Murray and MacDonald ancestors and viewing the magnificent scenery. Class correspondent: Linda Crimmins // mason65@me.com

1966

Jane McDonough had a belated 80th birthday party at her brother Jim’s in Chatham last summer. Many family members attended. Her only grandson went off to the University of Cincinnati in August. // Rick Blasser’s granddaughter, Kate Ham ’26 of Hingham, is a member of the Boston College women’s hockey team. // C. Richard Torrisi recently retired as professor emeritus from Suffolk University Sawyer School of Business. Twice a Fulbright Scholar and former dean, he remains active as a member of the Massachusetts Fulbright Board. // Thomas Kelly got a call a couple of weeks ago from w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Class Notes

Charlie Smith, who was at BC. He was talking to Jim Nelson, who Thomas had played basketball with. Charlie passed the phone to Jim so Thomas could verify that he was still alive. Thomas is still kicking but very saddened by the passing of friends, especially Mary and Buzz. He does go back occasionally to visit his brother who lives in the Berkshires. He loves the memories and wishes you all happiness and enjoyment. // Frank Pados finally retired after 20 years with private investment firm Dubin Clark. He has been living in Boston for the past 10 years but is planning to move in 2024. // Stephen Arlinghaus is living in Norwich, Connecticut, and is still a season ticket holder for men’s hockey.

He is in frequent contact with classmates Rich Falco and Rich Batsavage, who are both living in Florida. Sadly, his four-year roommate, Ray Landry, died in February 2020.

1967

Walt Mahoney and David Register took their wives on a southeastern Alaska cruise in July, replete with fjords, glaciers, bears, and spectacular scenery.

They also celebrated their wedding anniversaries. Walt had a TIA, and Dave had back surgery, but both are recovering well and looking forward to future visits and adventures together.

They wish all their classmates good health and continued prosperity. // Bill Concannon and his wife, Mimi, have permanently moved to Cape Cod. Their oldest daughter has a house several streets behind them. Their second daughter bought the house next door.

Their youngest spends a lot of time with them. Life is good. He wishes everyone good health and happiness. // Ernie Jette was reelected to his fourth term as an alderman for the City of Nashua, New Hampshire. He has a law practice specializing in wills, trusts, and probate and is a court-certified mediator. His wife, Cindy Theroux-Jette, practices functional medicine. His daughter and grandson live nearby. Class correspondent: Charles and Mary-Anne Benedict // chasbenedict@aol.com

1968

Jim Hinchey’s daughter received her master’s degree in education from Boston College, magna cum laude. He 48

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has hiked the West Highland Way, the Ring of Kerry, the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, and along the Almalfi Coast during the last year. // Dennis Smith, JD’68, retired from the private practice of law in New Jersey after 52 years. He and his wife of 58 years live close to their children and grandchildren and spend their winters in Sarasota, Florida. He has fond memories of his education at BC Law School. // Helen Reynolds, MEd’68, became a published author with Becoming a Nun in the Age of Aquarius. It has been well received and provides an inside look at the secretive pre-Vatican II experience. // Ann Murphy, MSW’68, and Michael Bellotti, MSW’67, have been married for 55 years and have three children and five grandchildren. Both are retired from close to 50 years working as clinical social workers and administrators of programs. Their home is in Warwick, Rhode Island. // Edward M. Frazer has been named as chairman, in addition to being CEO and founder, of Trinity Group Limited, based in London, England. Class correspondent: Judith M. Day // jnjday@aol.com

NC 1968

Marian “Jo” Motta Going’s book of paintings and poems, Wild Cranes, has been accepted in the permanent collection at Burns Library, Boston College. She has also taken part in the exhibit “Prayers” in Kinvara, Ireland, in 2023 and at the Rossocinabro Gallery in Rome, Italy. To view art, visit jogoing.net. Class correspondent: Jane Sullivan Burke // janeburke17@gmail.com

1969

55th Reunion, May–June 2024 George Niles is semiretired as a selfemployed attorney and CPA. George received his JD in 1980 from Suffolk University Law School. George and wife Mary are living in Enfield, New Hampshire, and are enjoying their four grandchildren.

They keep busy with volunteering, travel, and golf. // Dave Haley and wife, Bonnie, have resided in Scituate since 1983, where they raised their children, Alicia and David Jr. They are the proud grandparents of two granddaughters, Remy and Luca. Dave worked in state and local governments.

In 1995, he joined the national executive search firm, Isaacson Miller, as a partner and remained in that role until his retirement in 2013. // James “Terry” Harrington and wife, Judy, celebrated 53 years of marriage on August 1, 2023. They have three sons: Jay, Matthew, and Adam.

Adam has their only grandchild, Miles, age seven, who is the light of their life. Of their three sons, Jay is a TV actor and stars on the CBS show SWAT. Matthew is Jay’s stand-in and body double on the show.

Adam is in an off-Broadway musical as the first stand-in for three male leads. // Jim Littleton is sad to announce the passing of classmate John Bonica on August 12, 2023.

Sympathies go out to John’s wife, Phyllis, and son Matthew. John worked in public accounting and in industry as a controller and vice president of finance for various Massachusetts companies. John resided in Medfield. // Father Joseph Arsenault is now a retired priest of the Archdiocese of Boston, living at Regina Cleri residence in Boston. He also taught for 35 years before he was ordained a priest. He taught at Curry College in Milton for most of that time. He has had a great life, thanks in part to his BC education. God bless you all. // Richard J. Berman, JD’69, was recently made lead board director of Thoragenix Inc. The company expects to go public in February 2024 and has a revolutionary medical device for open-heart surgery.

Richard is now a board director for six companies. // The third book by Louis Salome, MA’69, Two Hundred Miles from Baghdad—The Joys of Hitchhiking, will be published early in 2024. It’s based on his life on the road, first hitching for two years to and from college and later hitching as a journalist for Cox Newspapers in Iraq, Somalia, Kosovo, Syria, and Turkey.

Told of Salome’s forthcoming book, an old classmate recalled, “Oh, I hitched to JFK’s inauguration in 1961.” // Kenneth Sullivan passed away on March 20, 2023.

Sympathies to Ken’s wife, Anna, and three children, Lea, Kara, and Luke, plus his three grandchildren. Ken received his PhD in psychology from Temple University. Ken worked for many years as a psychologist, primarily at the VA Medical Center in Philadelphia. // Mike Flynn is a partner on a team that represents the worldrenowned Catholic sculptor Timothy Schmalz. Tim created the 3.5-ton bronze sculpture “Angels Unawares” for Pope

Francis, which sits in St. Peter’s Square, Rome, the first sculpture to sit on the Plaza in over 200 years. Mike’s team is representing Tim on his new project, “The 14 Stations of the Cross.” When finished, the Stations will be placed on the grounds of the Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary Queen of Universe, Orlando, Florida.

Class correspondent: James R. Littleton // jim.littleton@gmail.com

PMC 1969

Pam Percy became a documentary film producer after many careers as an event planner, journalist, theater manager, radio producer, and author, with her film, Finding Loren. After earning recognition and many awards, including Best Director–Documentary at the Asti International Film Festival 2021, she is now working on her second documentary, Chicken City, the first film to honor the chicken as a cultural icon.

1970

Charlie Reagan has recently been published in his first attempt at becoming an author. Tales from the Road: My 40 Years as a Traveling Salesman contains interesting true short stories that will take the reader to his encounters with US presidents and first ladies, escaped convicts, Secret Service agents, U.S. Customs and DEA agents, lawyers, and judges, as well as people who have actually seen heaven! // Jack Foley recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of his admission to the Illinois bar and has established his own boutique business litigation firm, Law Office of Jack Foley, P.C. Jack was also conferred the title of distinguished counselor by the Illinois State Bar Association. // Most of the Williams 2 Annex group got together in November at Davio’s in Chestnut Hill. This included members of the Class of 1970 who lived on the second floor of the Williams dorm plus several spouses from the Class of 1971. This group has kept in touch for over five decades through trips to Europe, an occasional cruise, and several Zoom calls, thanks to Kathy ’71 and Mitch Burek and continuing in the present with Kathy and Fred Heimann.

Class correspondent: Dennis Berry // dennisj.berry@gmail.com

1971

Charley “the Chukker” McBride and wife Judy enjoyed a relaxing summer vacation in Kennebunkport, Maine. They have been going there for several years and love the atmosphere. They also have been tailgating at BC football games since 2000 and remain avid fans. // Joe Collins spent a week in July in Denmark with daughter Stacey and grandson Matthew, who was taking a college course there. Sightseeing included old castles, Viking ships, the Little Mermaid, and a side trip to Sweden. // Rob Amen and Claudia, his wife of almost 52 years, had a busy 2023. They are taking steps toward their future, which means downsizing—not a simple or easy move.

They sold the house in New Canaan, Connecticut, and bought a condo. They live in Naples about eight months of the year and in Connecticut for only about three months. The big deal last year was that they went to Africa for a safari for 14 days. Fabulous experience. Now they’re just enjoying friends, the weather, and golf in Naples for the next few months. // James “Rocco” Centorino ’71, MS’75, recently received the Outstanding Educator Award from the University of Chicago and the 2023 Arts Council Distinguished Alumni Award from Boston College; released his 10th music album, Notes on a Triangle; and composed the “Austerlitz Suite” for string trio, “Yeti” for tuba and piano, Jack & Ef for trumpet duet, “Two Garnets” for flute duet, and eight pieces for cello and piano. // Father Jim McCurry, one of the distinguished members of the Williams 2 Annex, retired this year after a career as head of the Conventual Franciscans for half the US, the British (and Irish) Isles, plus some countries in Latin America. Jim concluded his leadership career as celebrant at the remembrance ceremonies of the D-Day landing in Normandy. Among accomplishments too numerous to mention was his helping the State Department in securing the freedom of an American minister imprisoned in Turkey. // Gaffney Feskoe was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Connecticut Port Authority by Governor Ned Lamont. Class correspondent: James R. Macho // jmacho@mac.com

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

1972

Arthur Makar was recently elected co-chair of the Alumni Association’s LGBTQ+ Council, created for BC grads who identify as such. He and his partner, Jon, celebrated their 30th anniversary in January, which they commemorated with a September crossing on the Queen Mary II. // Francis X. Gormley Sr. and his wife, Terry, celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary on August 25, 2023, with their five sons, four daughters-inlaw, and eight grandchildren. // Al Dhembe’s roommate of four years and lifelong friend, Bob Hill, passed away after an illness. Bob was a member of the football team and graduated with a degree in marketing. He enjoyed traveling and had business ventures ranging from gentleman farmer to owning his own RE/MAX company. More importantly, Bob was a great guy, an outstanding roommate, and a loyal friend who will be missed. // Tom Herlehy is happy to share the news of the birth of his sixth grandson! His three daughters-in-law have given Tom and his wife, Mary, six boys. Tom and Mary just returned from an adventure in Italy, including Lake Como, Turin, Genoa, Cinque Terre, Luca, Pisa, Florence, and Milan. They also stayed in Siena for a week, so they could visit Tuscan vineyards and wineries. While there, Tom and Mary also visited Assisi, home of St. Francis, and the cathedral dedicated to him. // Dick Mucci is teaching a course for second-year MBA students in the Carroll School entitled Mergers & Acquisitions. He has taught this course every fall since 2021. Class correspondent: Lawrence G. Edgar // ledgar72@gmail.com

NC 1972

Jane Donovan de Vries and Lloyd de Vries welcomed their third grandchild and second granddaughter, Lana, in July.

Their son, Karl, and his wife, Jane, also have big brother Ari. // Georgia Murray writes: “The party for Mary Catherine Deibel on July 30 was terrific. For those of us who were lucky enough to be there in person, you know you could just feel the warmth and energy that Mary Catherine’s friendship brought to all of us. For those who were able to join by Zoom, I hope that the spirit came w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Class Notes

through. And for those of you who just couldn’t make it, please know you were remembered.” // Shelly Noone Connolly attended Boston College–Holy Cross for years with her dad, a graduate of Holy Cross. This past fall, Shelly and Mike took their six grandchildren to see a really exciting game! When bad weather suspended the game, the clan left to watch the game at their daughter’s home. Class correspondent: Nancy B. McKenzie // mckenzie20817@comcast.net

1973

Bob “Rah” Connor and Joe Capalbo are president and vice president of the BC Club of Cape Cod, consisting of 2,800 members. The club ran over 15 social, educational, and athletic events. They ran the first annual BC vs. Holy Cross Ryder Cup with classmates John Kelliher, Bill Riley, and Bill Toye, destroying their HC opponents. The annual charity golf tournament benefiting the Veterans Outreach of Cape Cod was won by classmates Bob Wickham, Tony Manfredi, and Joe Winn. // Christine Kessel was a delegate to the biennial convention for Sigma Theta Tau, the international honor society of nursing.

She represented Chi Rho, her local chapter in Illinois. Class correspondent: Patricia DiPillo // perseus813@aol.com

1974

50th Reunion, May–June 2024 Len DeLuca has been named the 2023 adjunct faculty teacher of the year for the entire Seton Hall University and the Stillman School of Business. He also teaches at NYU Stern School of Business and the Tisch Institute of Global Sports.

He has kept close ties with the BC community by serving as one of six board members of The Heights and as an advisor for the BC Sports Administration program in the Woods College. Len and Geri reside in Manhattan and look forward to seeing classmates at the Reunion next spring! // Michael Canavan has four grandchildren: three boys and one girl. // Mary Grant shared the sad news that School of Nursing grad Jane Flatley passed away in October. Mary described Jane as “funny with a brilliant mind.” Jane was an NP working for most of her career in Texas before returning to 50

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her home in Seekonk 15 years ago. She leaves behind a loving family and many friends. // Rosina Bierbaum was one of 33 people elected to the American Philosophical Society. Benjamin Franklin founded this society promoting scholarly research and interdisciplinary dialogue in science, humanities, and social sciences.

Rosina was honored for her career focusing on climate change and sustainable development in academia and government. She is a professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and is the Westin Chair in Natural Economics at the University of Maryland. // Patricia McNabb Evans hopes to see many classmates at the 50th(!) Reunion. The Class of 1974 has always had great attendance at Reunion; it will be wonderful to get together again! Class correspondent: Patricia McNabb Evans // patricia.mcnabb.evans@gmail.com

in Colorado and New Mexico; she is the long-distance grandmother of one. // Matt Fissinger ’75, MA’86, is retired and living in LA with his wife Rose Healy ’80, MS’89. They are proud parents of three children, including Mary Rose ’15, and enjoy their three grandchildren. // Liz Fay McMahon worked in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps East from 1975 to 1977.

She is a retired administrator from St. Peter’s University and Ignatian Volunteer Corps. Liz and her husband, Vincent McMahon, reside in New Jersey and have two children, Kate ’03 and Luke, and thoroughly enjoy spending time with their four grandchildren. // Mark Pierman retired from a lifelong career in nonprofit management. He has two adult children and two grandsons and resides in Charlotte, North Carolina. Class correspondent: Hellas M. Assad // hellasdamas@hotmail.com

1975

Donna Stimpson and her partner, Anita, celebrated their 70th birthdays in Australia visiting Melbourne and Sydney and went on a cruise on the east side of the country. They enjoyed the sights, attended the World Pride parade in Sydney, and saw small penguins, kangaroos, koalas, and other animals native to Australia. It was a thrill to snorkel at the Great Barrier Reef and see beautiful coral. They are both retired and live in Connecticut and visit Maine each summer. // Carol Finigan Wilson had lots of good news to share from 2023.

She welcomed her 12th grandchild, Sage Finigan Ward, born to her daughter Courtney and Matt Ward, in April. On April 1, Carol sold her insurance business and retired after a rewarding career of 45+ years. The youngest of her five daughters, Kelly, married Billy Donovan in September in Boston. It was a wonderful chance to see Karen Foley Freeman, who is Kelly’s godmother, and celebrate the couple among family and friends. In a small-world connection, Karen knows Billy’s parents in Florida.

Next up was her stepson’s wedding in October when Chris’s son, Cameron Wilson, married Amanda Zamora in Austin, Texas. Carol got together with Julie Ryan Parker and Mary Ferris for dinners in the fall—it was so great

Robert Casey became a first-time participant in the Pan-Mass Challenge on August 5, his 70th birthday. At 5:30 a.m., he left Sturbridge with thousands of new friends on the ride to Provincetown. Quite the adventure to raise money for the Jimmy Fund and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. // Maureen Quinn McKenzie, Joan Kenny Bardsley, and Andrea Tremaglio Coyle made their annual roommates trip to NYC. They saw a Broadway show, got stand-by tickets to The Tonight Show, and saw a red carpet debut for Gutenberg!

They had a blast! // Tom Kelley ’75, MS’78, retired to Sunriver, Oregon, in 2013 after 40 years of high school chemistry teaching, mostly at the American School of The Hague in the Netherlands. Tom and his wife of 41 years, Ann, have two children and four grandchildren they proudly spoil at any opportunity. In September 2023, a group of ’75 friends and classmates including Pat Casey, Matt Fissinger, Ann Houston, Liz Fay, and Mark Pierman gathered on Sunriver to enjoy a great time biking, chatting, dining, and stargazing. // Pat Casey lives in Newton with husband Paul Hennessy. She is happily retired after a long career in higher education. Her adult children live

NC 1975

catching up! As 2023 neared an end, Carol and Chris got away for a wonderful Hawaiian vacation before the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays arrived! Class correspondent: Karen Foley Freeman // karenfoleyfreeman@gmail.com

COURTESY OF KATHLEEN REGAN ’76

1976

Mark “the Torch” Ryan hosted the third annual BC Class of 1976 Golf Reunion on September 6 at the Quidnessett Country Club in Rhode Island, and 15 classmates were in attendance. After golf, they were hosted by Tony Thomas for a night of food and a few adult beverages. In attendance were Bill Murphy, John Gildea, Brian Hennessey, George Murphy, Joe Clair, Mike Rooney, Mike Williams, Tom Buckley, John Casale, John Carroccia, Ray Doremus, Steve Goodwin, Tom Pilkington, Mark Ryan, and Tony Thomas. // Stephen LeClair ’73 reports the passing of his brother, Robert LeClair. // Kathleen Regan’s debut young adult novel, St. Damon’s Hall, was published in December of 2022.

It follows a nonfiction book, Opening Our Arms: Helping Troubled Kids Do Well, and a memoir, Unintended Consequences: A Mother’s Memoir. // Kathy Walunas retired in 2017 after teaching for 41 years.

She spent 29 years as a special education teacher in Framingham, Northampton, Dedham, and Medfield and the last 12 as a fifth-grade classroom teacher. Since retirement, she has been on 11 trips:

North Carolina, Italy, twice to England, New Year’s Eve in Paris, and nine trips to Ireland. In Ireland she was able to find the house (now derelict) where her ancestors lived from the late 1700s through the Great Hunger. // Al Kearney, MEd’70, PhD’76, and Anne Graham Kearney, MEd’72, PhD’77, just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. They wish Alumni Hall was still there on Comm. Ave. so they could revisit the site of their reception. // Robert Angel is down to working very part-time for the entertainment firm he owns with his brother. He mostly lives in his beach house in Rehoboth and plays national tennis tournaments. He told his wife to think of him as a tennis player now, not a lawyer; the only difference being he’ll never make money as a tennis player, so it’s a good thing he did well as a lawyer. // Thomas Chasse completed 42 years of academic (MEEI/Harvard Med), community (Portsmouth, New Hampshire), and rural (Malawi, New Zealand) otolaryngology/ENT Surgery practice and traditional patient care on September 1, 2023. He is now providing telehealth/virtual ENT consultations to patients and to PCPs worldwide. He moved to Gorham, Maine: his home state. Class correspondent: Gerald B. Shea // gerbs54@hotmail.com

1977

Mary Margaret Morrisett graduated magna cum laude from the Connell School of Nursing and has attended Reunion every fifth year with her closest college friends. She worked as a pediatric nurse for several years, starting her career first in New Orleans, then in Boston at Tufts Medical Center Floating Hospital for Children and the Lahey Clinic. // Amy Shapiro, MEd’77, helps people reduce carbon emissions while improving their health with home-grown produce, using an affordable, state-of-the-art hydro-aeroponic system. // Robert Tillman, S.J., MDiv’77, continues to serve as a school counselor at Creighton Preparatory School in Omaha, Nebraska. He has also served as the school cross country coach for the past 23 years. This year his team won the Nebraska state cross country championship. It was his third time coaching a state championship team. //

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

The BC women’s ice hockey team held “Doxie McCoy & Alumni Day” on October 13 to mark the 50th anniversary of BC women’s ice hockey. McCoy, an original player in 1973, is widely believed to be BC’s first Black female athlete. She had never played ice hockey but became the goalie for the ’70s club team. McCoy dropped the ceremonial puck at the team’s home game at Kelley Rink. “I thank Coach Katie Crowley, team founder Reenie Baker, and my other teammates,” she said in an ESPN interview at the game. // Mark J. Bly, MA’77, was inducted in the spring of 2023 into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center for his distinguished lifetime achievement in theater. Past inductees have included theater legends Edward Albee, Zelda Fichandler, Ming Cho Lee, and Lloyd Richards. Class correspondent: Nicholas Kydes // nicholaskydes@yahoo.com

1978

Julie Butler attended the 45th Reunion in October. For those who were there, how great was it to see classmates again?

Still crazy, after all these years. Kudos to the Reunion Committee: Sharon Bazarian, Bill McKiernan, Jack Stapleton, Maureen Tichenor, Barb Grady, Ed “Eddie O” O’Sullivan, Kevin McLaughlin, Terry Belton, Jack Foley, Jack Hanwell, Kathleen Driscoll, Kevin Malone, Dan Dart, Nancy German, Bruce Fador, Eileen Carney, and Rich Scheller. // John “Wheatie” McGuire has passed away. He played varsity hockey. Class correspondent: Julie Butler // julesbutler33@gmail.com

1979

45th Reunion, May–June 2024 Catherine Birtwell, MEd’79, is pleased to announce that she finished her debut novel, a mesmerizing tale of a psychologically haunted family rooted in unforgettable love, abandonment, and extraordinary transformation, this past March and is actively looking for a book agent: birtwell@comcast.net. // Donna Ferullo, director of the Purdue University Copyright Office and professor in the Libraries and School of Information Studies, coauthored and coedited the w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Class Notes

book Copyright: Best Practices for Academic Libraries, published by Rowman & Littlefield in September 2023. She was granted a sabbatical to work on the book and was lucky enough to travel extensively through Europe and the UK while working on the project. // Bruce Chalupka is a new grandfather. His son had a baby boy in April, and his daughter had a baby boy in September. Those are his first grandchildren. Everyone is doing well. // Deborah Foss Cox retired in May, and she lives in Rochester, New York. Deb recently enjoyed a day on the North Shore (Gloucester) with classmates M. Margret Hanley and Margaret Kienzle. (MK left BC when her mother died in ’77.) Class correspondent: Peter J. Bagley // peter@peterbagley.com

1981

Jamie Dahill is still living the dream in NYC and traveling to exotic destinations on a regular basis. He hopes everyone is doing well in life! // Bob Dutile retired on July 1 after 18 years building UST Global. While he is consulting a little, he is primarily managing his investments and enjoying taking the time to travel for fun with his wife, Ellen ’94; taking a course or two; and spending more time with family, including getting on whitewater for the first time in 40 years. // Rose-Marie Cervone earned a master’s in public administration from Suffolk University. She has a daughter living in LA pursuing an acting career.

Simone started a new job this summer working as a case manager for Beth Israel Lahey’s Hospital at Home program. // Linda Vecchione Mason recently retired after 40 years working in the field of special education. Her husband, Peter, recently retired from his position as deputy commissioner for DDS/State of Connecticut. They have three adult children (their middle daughter, Colleen ’10, is a BC grad) and welcomed their sixth grandchild this year. // John McLaughlin, Esq., recently retired from a 30-year career in state and federal law enforcement. John was appointed to the 61st class of the Massachusetts State Police. He holds diplomas and certificates from the Massachusetts State Police Academy, the United States Customs Service, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. John is now president 52

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and CEO of McLaughlin Investigations & Security Services, LLC. // Kevin McLoughlin cofounded MTech Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in startup companies bringing technology to the insurance industry, after a career in investment banking. Kevin, his wife, and two sons are all in London. He has two nieces currently at BC. Class correspondent: Alison Mitchell McKee // classnotes@bc.edu

1982

James “Jay” Leach just retired after 26 years of teaching biology, physics, and biotechnology at Burrillville HS, Burrillville, Rhode Island. He is enjoying the relaxed hours and travel to Scotland and Ireland. He lives in Smithfield, Rhode Island, with his wife, Liz. // Dena Romero, MSW’82, has written her family story, which will be available May 7, 2024. Titled All for You: A World War II Family Memoir of Love, Separation, and Loss, the book is about the loss of homeland, commitment, and the will to survive despite overwhelming obstacles. // Pat Rocco, a thoracic and general surgeon, has joined the staff of Holyoke Medical Center. His identical twin sons were recruited to play lacrosse at Yale and won a Division I lacrosse championship in 2018. // James Pruss is helping classmates with solutions for corporate, mission, and leisure travel insurance. // Sue Macomber Dunphy has been retired for seven years and is living in Lake Nona, Florida! Class correspondent: Mary O’Brien // maryobrien14@comcast.net

recent Fordham University graduate. // Antoinette Mongiardo Carchedi had a perfect day for the Reunion Weekend BC vs. UConn football game. She felt compelled to be on campus as a way of expressing gratitude to BC for preparing her for a 40-year career in nursing that she could never have envisioned.

Antoinette retired in January 2024 after 35 years of service at McLean Hospital.

She plans on spending her time, along with her husband, guiding their son through college visits, applications, and deadlines. // Tim Haskins was among the 2023 inductees to the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association Hall of Fame, honored for 40 years of varsity coaching across multiple sports, including softball, girls’ soccer, and girls’ basketball, primarily at Groveton High School in northern New Hampshire, where his teams have won seven state titles, along with seven more runner-up finishes. He retired from teaching English at Groveton in 2021 but continues to coach the girls’ basketball team. Class correspondent: Cynthia J. Bocko // cindybocko@hotmail.com

1983

Lois Marr Fruhwirth was elected to the City Council of Prescott, Arizona, for a four-year term beginning November 28, 2023. Lois and her husband, Gary, retired to Prescott in 2018, where she has been an active volunteer in politics, education, and community service. // Brian Johnson and his wife, Laurie, split their time between their homes on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, and New York City. Brian has led global people and culture for the International Rescue Committee in New York City for the past seven years, after spending 21 years at Fidelity Investments in Boston. Their daughter, Meghan, is a

COURTESY OF BRIAN MCCANN ’84

1984

40th Reunion, May–June 2024 Brian McCann retired from Swansea Public Schools after serving as high school principal for 18 years and being in the district for more than 35 years. He went on to coauthor a book with two nationally recognized school leaders that pays tribute through storytelling to the lifelong impact that schools have. HATS:

Heartfelt Acts for Teachers, Students & Staff celebrates educators and the power of relationships. It’s available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible. Class correspondent: Carol A. McConnell // classnotes@bc.edu

1985

Pam Finn Magahiz retired in August.

She and her husband moved to Delaware so they could live closer to her family. // Richard DeBona, MA’85, completed an MA in psychology at BC, and then God nudged him into teaching religion. He went on to obtain an MA in theology and went into campus ministry at Jesuit Le Moyne College, followed by a focus on Catholic social teaching and work in parishes/dioceses as director of social justice ministries including a Holy Land ministry—focused on Palestinian Christians. His four-week Advent program “O Little Town of Occupied Bethlehem” is available! If your parish could use it, contact him at RichardDB42@hotmail.com. Class correspondent: Barbara Ward Wilson // bww415@gmail.com

1986

Lisa Hartunian Campbell hosted us Hillsides C-56 roommates in the mountains of South Carolina recently for a mini-reunion: Eileen Goerss Thornberry, Mary Tyrrell Coughlin, Shelly Barillo MacGillivray (and husband Dan MacGillivray ’85), Pam Risio Ferraro, and their spouses had a wonderful long weekend together. They missed Rachel O’Hara Kurtyka terribly, who was unable to join them. BC greetings to all our Class of 1985 friends! // Paul McDermott transitioned from the US Embassy in Nigeria to the US Embassy in Sierra Leone and also serves as the USAID Health Officer. From 2019–2023, Paul advised the Embassy leadership in Nigeria on a variety of global health issues and programs, including malaria and Covid-19 response. // Mike Hickey, MDiv’86, has received word that his seventh book, Rising Light: The Promise of Resurrection of the Body, will soon be published by Hamilton Books. // Fred Damon is in his 33rd year of teaching and serving as dean of students at Rockland High School. He

COURTESY OF MIKE HICKEY, MDIV’86

recently celebrated his 25th wedding anniversary with his beautiful wife, Lynda. They have three great children.

Freddy is a graduate of the University of Southern California and presently works for BNY Mellon in California. Patrick is a senior at Bentley and the starting tight end for the football team. Olivia is graduating from high school this year, and her number one choice is Boston College. // Daughter of Rubens, the debut film of Gloria Monaghan, MA’86, was featured in the Provincetown Film Festival’s 25th anniversary in June. The film was made possible by a generous Bistline Grant from Wentworth Institute of Technology, where Professor Monaghan teaches in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities. The short documentary focuses on the life and work of the brilliant but marginalized Truro painter Nancy Ellen Craig (1927–2015). Craig’s work has been compared to Sargent and Thomas Eakins.

Class correspondent: Leenie Kelley // leeniekelley@hotmail.com

1987

Franklin Sarra accepted a position working for the U.S. Navy in Naples, Italy, in November 2023, after eight years living and working in Florida in federal government civil service. He and his wife, Michelle, took a fabulous 30th wedding anniversary trip in June 2023 on a Viking Rhine River cruise. They had so much fun, he decided to work and live in Europe some more now that they are empty nesters. // Octavio Almeida,

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

MBA’87, is now global business development director at SwissDrones, a maker of large unmanned helicopters. // John Lynch took a position as the first HR manager at DePaul College Prep HS in Chicago after 29 years as a lawyer.

John and his wife, Julia, celebrated their 25th anniversary last summer. They live in Chicago and have three sons. The oldest graduated from the University of Illinois last spring. Their middle son is a freshman at Purdue, and their youngest is a sixth grader at St. Benedict Prep. // Paul Backalenick, MBA’87, published his third suspense novel, Empty Luck. Kirkus Reviews says, “Each character’s inner sense of right and wrong, balanced against their actions in the moment, keeps the novel barreling toward its inexorable showdown.” A great read, available at Amazon. // Stephen Yoch was joined by Stephen Courtney, Scott Hayward, Greg Yoch ’89, Andrea Yoch ’89, and Ben Yoch ’22 for the release of Steve’s second book, Becoming Benedict Arnold. // Marjorie Campbell will be exploring a run for Massachusetts U.S. Senate in the 2024 election as an independent. Please feel free to follow her on Facebook (Margie Campbell) or contact her by email if you would like to discuss her campaign platform.

COURTESY OF OCTAVIO ALMEIDA ’87

1988

Kim Johnston Brooks advocates for veterans as a board member of Stronghold Freedom Foundation. Her husband, LTC Timothy P. Brooks, succumbed to his toxic exposures at K2, Karshi-Khanabad, Uzbekistan, in 2004.

Her congressional testimony in February 2020 led to widespread congressional support for veterans of K2, and her SFF team helped to ensure the passage of the Honoring our PACT Act of 2022. Her team sued the Pentagon in April to release documents pertaining to K2 toxic exposures. // Maureen Palmer Ronan is w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Class Notes

the parent of Maeve Ronan ’21, who was a Fulbright Scholar in Spain in 2023, and Brendan Ronan ’19 (follow Low Echo music from VT!). Maureen had such a fun BC 35th Reunion weekend on the Heights with the Class of 1988! Keyes North, Walsh Hall, Hillsides, and SON! Great friends and happy memories! Class correspondent: Robert K. Murray Jr. // murrman@aol.com

1989

35th Reunion, May–June 2024 John Taylor visited Washington, DC, in October 2022 from his home in Boston and shared a Lebanese meal with classmate Karen Ficorilli at the Pentagon City Mall! // Sandra Higgins Meiggs lives on the Cape with her husband, Robert. Sandra cofounded Kedamé, a custom gift box company celebrating all things Cape Cod, in Osterville. Kedamé boxes are perfect for corporate gifting, wedding welcome amenities, or for personal gifting needs. Sandra’s other business is OROPA, a gift shop in Duxbury. South Shore Home, Life & Style Magazine named OROPA “Best Gift Shop” in the 2023 Best of the South Shore Awards. // Suzanne Suppelsa Zilvetti earned her EdS in education administration and public policy from Seton Hall University in May 2023 and is in her 35th year teaching science in New Jersey public schools, currently in Ridgewood, New Jersey. // John Sheehan, Becky Raucci, Tom Olivier, Jen Byron Grady and John Grady, Carolann and John Delmonico, Jennifer and Pat Fay, Corinne Teschmacher Thygeson, Karen Colley MacKinnon and John MacKinnon, Tim Pisinski, John Sulick, Kendal Karm Egan, Gabby Mazzucca, Sheila Royston Murphy, Ellen Grealish, Pat Barbera, Pete Cotter, and Pat McManus attended the BC vs. Virginia Tech game, along with many other ’89ers who came to tailgate, visit their kids, or just return to campus to celebrate. Class correspondent: Andrea McGrath // andrea.e.mcgrath@gmail.com

1990

A group of Eagles flew into Washington in September to celebrate “I Can’t Drive or Believe I Am 55!” Thank you Paul Joseph and Karen Chieco for helping to 54

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make this happen! They gathered for rooftop bar fun Friday, followed by a party at the home of Karen and Paul Joseph. Missy Reid, Paul Joseph, Karen Chieco, Greg Gonser, Mike Joyce, Mike Johnson, John Liesching, Lenny Enos, AJ Johnson, Wendy Willman, Deb Sprindzunas, Rita Rodin, Susie and Rick Iovanne, Donna Carver, Jen Sullivan, Amy Tamayo, Mary Doherty, Ellen McGuinn, and Anju Olson had laughs as memories of The House of Pain, ball games, original ’80s parties, and Chieco MF surfaced! We were treated to an Irish band that played the BC fight song and had photobooth shenanigans where “there were no pillows.” // John H. Harrington ’90, MBA’99, MFS’03, joined Taika Capital as Head of Investor Relations in July 2023. Taika Capital is a long/short equity hedge fund based in Florida. John continues to live in Rhode Island. Taika Capital recently was awarded the 2023 With Intelligence HFM US Equity ”Newcomer” performance award. Class correspondent: Missy Reid // missycreid1@comcast.net

1991

Gene Redd was promoted to managing director of sales for FedEx Services Inc. His span of coverage includes Northern and Southern California regions. He recently relocated to the West Coast from New York, along with his wife, Marsha, and three daughters: Alexandria (20), Ashley (16), and Alyssa (15). Gene also received a law degree from St. John’s University School of Law while working for FedEx Services in New York. // Cara DeNuccio earned her MSW back in 2000 but just this past year took and passed her licensure exam, completed three classes to get her school social work certification, and took a new job as a school social worker. She and her family have been living (too long) in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and plan to move “south” after her youngest finishes high school next May. // John Kaczynski, MBA’91, spent more than 40 years working in the consumer products industry for various companies including Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, and Ocean Spray. He has now launched his own company and brand, Red Queen, which is a superfruit blend of cranberry, pomegranate, cherry, and other red

COURTESY OF GRAHAM GUEST, MA’93

fruits in a “ready-to-mix” stick pack.

Class correspondent: Peggy Morin Bruno // pegmb@comcast.net

1992

Andrew Watson has joined eXp Realty serving the Greater Boston area. // Dina Strada moved back to the Jersey Shore after 21 years in Los Angeles. She is working as a senior strategic events manager for a software company. Her passion is still her own business, working as an intuitive life coach and writer. She published her first book, If I’m Honest…

A No BS Guide to Loving Yourself, Navigating Relationships and Trusting the Journey, and she’s so excited and proud!

Her daughter, Kaia (10), is a dancer and cheerleader, and her son, Logan (13), keeps busy with soccer and wrestling. // Heide Fulton sends greetings from Montevideo, Uruguay, where she began her service as US Ambassador in February 2023. She and her team are working hard to strengthen bilateral economic ties, while improving educational standards and citizen security. Heide proudly facilitated Uruguayan President Lacalle Pou’s June visit to the White House and Uruguay’s participation in the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity summit in November. She and her family enjoy exploring Uruguay and the region. // Catherine Del Buono will be returning to get a PhD in mind, gender, and language at the University of Naples Federico II after being in Naples, Italy, on a Fulbright. She is very excited for this new

adventure! // Ann Fralick Fuell and Tony Fuell moved to Seoul, Korea, in 2022.

Tony continues with PWC in Seoul and Ann joined the board of governors at Seoul Foreign School. // Deborah Zirpolo Federico, MBA’92, is happy to report that she is working at the BC Career Center as a part-time career coach. She’s been here since the beginning of September and absolutely loves working with BC students. She has worked at several colleges, but there’s something unique about the BC students and campus. You can really feel the presence of the Jesuit mission being played out.

She is reminded daily of why she chose to get her MBA at Boston College!

Class correspondent: Katie Boulos Gildea // kbgildea@yahoo.com.

COURTESY OF MATT CHAPURAN ’95

COURTESY OF SARAH IRIZARRY ’93

1993

Laura Bete had a great time being back on campus for Reunion and was so glad to be able to spend time with roommates, classmates, and spouses of friends. She felt BC and the ’93 Reunion committee did such a great job—from the communications leading up to the event to the music at Friday’s class party, it felt seamless. She wishes there had been a few more days together. Laura has returned to Cape Cod full-time and would love to catch up with classmates there. If you’re on the Cape, please look her up! // Sarah Irizarry established her growth consulting practice. Sarah works with B2C or B2B brands that need a

turnaround or to find new ways to grow with their audiences, from evaluating the landscape to determining growth strategies through refreshed positioning, audience research, new product concepts or adjacencies, and go-tomarket strategies. You can reach Sarah at sarah@thriv3company.com. // Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook, PhD’93, currently serves as professor of practical theology and Christian histories at Claremont School of Theology. She just published Injustice and the Care of Souls: Taking Oppression Seriously in Pastoral Care (Fortress, 2023). She is also working on a history of the Sisterhood of the Holy Nativity (Episcopal) for publication in 2024. // Graham Guest, MA’93, is promoting Henry’s Chapel (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2022). Henry’s Chapel is an ambitious philosophical novel that blends philosophy, film, Faulkner, and David Foster Wallace. It was very favorably reviewed in 2022 by Jacob Appel in 3AM Magazine. It is a book that can be read for fun or for class. It would be at home in English, writing, humanities, and philosophy syllabi. Class correspondent: Laura Beck // laurabeckcahoon@gmail.com

1994

30th Reunion, May–June 2024 Chris Accardo continues to write and produce music for film, television, and

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

movie trailers at his home in Los Angeles and a studio in Stockholm, Sweden.

Chris, also a member of the men’s swimming team during his time at BC, connected with Coach Joe Brinkman and toured the new aquatics center. Good times! // Dave Martin and his wife, Maria, have recently opened their second medical aesthetics spa. Their new Forever Slender MedSpa is located in Norton, with the original in Wayland.

Class correspondent: Nancy E. Drane // nancydrane@aol.com

1995

Matt Chapuran has become the executive director of the Conservatory Lab Foundation, which raises awareness and money for the Conservatory Lab Charter School. A K–8 school with two buildings in Dorchester, Conservatory Lab provides daily musical instruction to all 450 of its students. Through this joyful activity, students are empowered to become scholars, artists, and leaders of their own learning. // Ann Dolan Flanagan published her first novel, Irish Catholic, under the pseudonym Arlen O’Connor. It’s the fictional story of a young BC grad coming to terms with her Catholic roots while grappling with career ambitions, love, and betrayal.

Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books. // David R. Sanabria, MEd’95, has been named the new head w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Class Notes // Weddings

Sandra Higgins Meiggs ’89 to Robert Meiggs, 12/27/21 Jacqueline Rutkowski-Murgia Uretsky ’04 to Jacob Uretsky, 10/6/23 Bonnie Burgett ’05 to Luke Holding, 1/7/23 // Eagles in attendance: Shea Winters ’04 Gaby Mier ’07 to Victor Herrera, 10/7/23 // Eagles in attendance: Mary Strockbine ’07, Rebecca Kraus Izzo ’07, Erland Modesto ’07, and Ian Read ’07 Megan McCarthy ’07 to Tim Shearer, 7/29/23 // Eagles in attendance: Alison Boyle Sullivan ’07, Liz Stender Cheron ’07, Meghan Wetherbee Ball ’07, Lindsey Warren Mazza ’07, Dan Bagley ’07, Amanda Ruddick Barone ’07, Brendan Boyce ’07, Eric Campion ’07, Ryan Elman ’07, Stacy Kaczmarek Elman ’07, Kristina Lang ’07, Ben Litchfield ’07, Kristen McCann ’07, Lauren Seghezzi Meaney ’07, John O’Donnell ’07, and Brendan Waters ’07 Jessica Langella ’08 to Todd McGuire ’01, 10/14/23 // Eagles in attendance: Michael Wald ’01 Laura Travers ’12 to Kevin Collins, 10/7/23 // Eagles in attendance: Maryanne Auld ’12, Kristin Gambardella ’12, Bianca Gandarias ’12, Tom Holek ’12, Maggie Lawrence ’12, Caroline Malizia ’12, Kristen Mount ’12, and Margaret Nieto ’12

COURTESY OF BLAKE YOHO ’18

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MK Adams ’12 to Taylor Ashlock, 7/8/23 Jocelyn Collen, MDiv’12, to Alan Caldwell, 9/23/23 // Eagles in attendance: Jane and Jess Collen ’79, Susanna and Kevin Maher ’81, Bennett Collen ’11, and Abigail Collen ’15 Sarah Taddei ’13, MSW’17, to Brandon Sumpio, 6/18/23 // Eagles in attendance: Cate O’Connor Sullivan ’13, Patrick Nevins ’11, Natalia Peña Tisdale ’13, Gavin Tisdale ’13, Jennie Hardin Nevins ’13, Rosie Chandler Wells ’13, Elizabeth Jones Starr ’13, Kate Hoffman McLaughlin ’12, Caroline McEnery ’12, Michael Bryant ’14, and Lila Abboud Bryant ’13 Chelsea Chin’13 to Anthony Santacrose ’13, 6/3/23

Varsha Ramesh ’16 to Matt Walsh ’16, 9/3/23 Hannah Osborne ‘16 to George Dennis ’16, 8/19/23 // Eagles in attendance: Eugene Taylor, MEd’68, PhD’82 Sarah Pongrace ’16 to Sebastián Sandoval ’17, 9/23/23 Alexandra Vernice, MA’17, to Tom Cassese, 7/8/23 // Eagles in attendance: Jennifer Sachs, MSW’17, and Jeannie Huynh, MSW’17, Isabella Loosbrock ’19 to Thomas Devlin ’17, 9/8/23 Laura Galligan Sonego ’18 to Bernado Sonego ’18, 7/22/23 Lauren Vassar to Blake Yoho ’18, 7/15/23 // Eagles in attendance: Sam Mbugua ’18, Caroline Moran ’18, Nick Nelson ’18, Jacob Ordos ’18, and Hanna Um ’18

Brennan Carley ’13 to Nolan Feeney, 9/21/23 // Eagles in attendance: Maggie Burdge ’14 (officiant), Taylor CavalloSiering ’13, Daniel Siering ’13, Adriana Mariella ’14, Therese Tully-Jacob ’14, Mary Rose Fissinger ’15, Christina Quinn ’13, and John Master ’14

Courtney Foley, JD’20, to Benjamin Slade ’15, 8/19/23

Megan Johnson ’14 to Brian Jost ’14, 11/13/21

Monica Heil ’20 to Zach Walker ’20, 6/24/23

Sally Collins ’15 to Coleman Younger ’14, 10/14/23

John Hardars to Chris “Topher” Sundaram ’21, 11/2/23

Lauren Daly ’19 to Jacob “Bear” Stevens ’21, 10/22/23

Chrissy Raymond ’15 to Michael Allen ’15, 9/9/23

COURTESY OF MICHAEL ALLEN ’15

COURTESY OF COURTNEY FOLEY, JD’20

COURTESY OF ALEXANDRA VERNICE, MA’17

COURTESY OF BERNADO SONEGO ’18

COURTESY OF SARAH TADDEI ’13, MSW’17

COURTESY OF ISABELLA LOOSBROCK ’19

COURTESY OF MEGAN MCCARTHY ’07

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

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Class Notes

COURTESY OF ANN DOLAN FLANAGAN ’95

of school for The Palmas Academy in Palmas Del Mar (Humacao), Puerto Rico.

Mr. Sanabria began his tenure in July after over a decade of successfully leading Saint John’s School (San Juan, Puerto Rico) as upper school principal, where he helped the institution reach unprecedented enrollment numbers, significantly expanded top academic offerings and achieved numerous prestigious accolades in academics, and helped assert the athletics program as a powerhouse. // Daniel McGee has recently gone back into private practice with the law firm Keller & Heckman, LLP, based in Washington, DC, after many years of in-house practice. His legal practice is focused on assisting clients in the tobacco, e-vapor, and cannabis industries with state and federal regulatory, tax, and compliance matters before the FDA, FTC, TTB, ATF, FCC, and other state regulatory agencies. In addition, he continues to assist clients on transactional and commercial matters.

Class correspondent: Kevin McKeon // kmckeon@gmail.com

1996

Erin M. Dunston has been named to the 2024 edition of The Best Lawyers in America®, one of the legal profession’s oldest and most respected peer-review publications. She was recognized for her excellence in the practice areas of patent litigation and patent law. Best Lawyers lists are compiled based on detailed peer-review evaluations and have become widely regarded as respected reference guides to legal excellence. //

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Rehan H. Ali, MD, and his wife, Zainab, made it onto the cover of Society Life Magazine. Rehan practices emergency medicine in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, and his wife is the provider at an urgent care center that they own in Keller, Texas. They were recognized for their service in the field of medicine. They reside in the town of Westlake with their four boys. // Danielle Culp McElveen, who currently resides with her husband, Sean, and three young boys in Greenville, South Carolina, competed in the World Championship Ironman in Kona, Hawaii, on October 14, 2023. She finished the grueling course (2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, and 26.2-mile run) in 13 hours and 41 minutes. This was her fourth fulldistance Ironman race. // Stephen Scully’s company, Thaddeus Medical Systems, Inc., is finally taking off!

Thaddeus protects cell and gene therapies in transit. We enable better patient outcomes, especially in remote areas during the last mile. Looking for great C-level folks to assist as advisors and team members! // Ivan Illan, Forbes thought leader and #1 Amazon bestselling Dummies author, has been recognized in this year’s inaugural issue of the InvestmentNews Hot List, which celebrates professionals with outstanding accomplishments in and for the investment management industry. // Kevin Willer was featured in the Midwest Province Jesuits Magazine fall 2023 edition along with other Jesuit school alums who are investors/ executives in professional sports.

1997

A group of our Class of 1997 friends got together to start The 5A5B Foundation with the goal of paying for a full fouryear scholarship to one deserving student every year. Meet Andrea Vences, the first scholarship winner at Cristo Rey High School in Chicago. Her story is inspiring—she is the first person in her family to go to high school and she commutes over an hour every day to get to Cristo Rey. // Chris Duncan was elected mayor of the City of San Clemente, California, the surfing capital of the United States. // Paul Newnham (former BC swimmer), his wife, Kristin, and their two sons, Kyle (16) and Braydon (14), have spent the past two

summers traveling and exploring Europe.

Besides a bit of an eventful parasailing experience, they had an amazing time.

On the home front, Paul returned to a new position as the director of technical product solutions at Businessolver, where he runs the technical sales and proposal teams. // Julie Tucker Rollauer has started her own company called Antidote Professional Development after 16 years at Google. Julie continues to serve as VP on the board of directors at She Runs It, a nonprofit committed to paving the way for women to lead at every career level in media, marketing, and ad tech. // Kayte Christopher Bellusci is happy to share that she has accepted a position with Gartner in their state and local government (SLG) consulting practice. She will be focusing on the Northeast but is excited to bring her vendor and government side experience to the table in support of agency partners anywhere! Class correspondent: Margo Gillespie // margogillespie@gmail.com

COURTESY OF JANICE KELLY SAVAGE ’98

1998

JonMarc Buffa was appointed an alternate secretary on the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee. EEMAC is focused on the transition to electrification, batteries, and renewable/cleaner energy sources as well as issues that affect the competitiveness of US markets. He will lead the metals subcommittee, which focuses on the role of metals as

A Perfect Match FORMER GAMING EXECUTIVE BERNARD KIM ’98 BRINGS HIS LOVE FOR ALL THINGS DIGITAL TO HIS ROLE AS CEO OF MATCH GROUP, THE ONLINE DATING JUGGERNAUT. An avid gamer and industry executive, Bernard Kim ’98 knows how to win. He helped launch the mobile publishing arm of Electronic Arts—creators of the megahit SimCity and the omnipresent EA Sports brand. As president of social gaming giant Zynga, Kim drove the firm’s expansion into new markets and platforms such as blockchain, Snapchat, and smart home devices. Now, he’s turned his sights to a new kind of online connection as chief executive officer of Match Group, a global leader in online dating that is home to Tinder, Hinge, Match, The League, BLK, and a host of other apps.

The move was a natural evolution for Kim, who says gaming was always more about connection than competition for him. “My sister and I played video games together growing up, and it helped bring us close to one another,” he recalls. “It was something we had in common, that we had a shared passion about.”

In fact, he says the gaming and dating industries have much in common—online engagement, market penetration, and a shared emphasis on using technology to spark real-time connections. There are a few key differences, he notes: “Match Group is responsible for five marriages per minute, so the stakes are so much higher!”

Kim began his tenure at Match with a worldwide listening tour and was moved to see that each office displayed hundreds of wedding invitations and announcements sent by satisfied customers. “I love that our teams take such pride

in being part of every step of the dating journey,” he says.

Over the course of his career, Kim has presented at SXSW and other major tech conferences, been interviewed on multiple major news networks, spoken at the U.S. Senate’s AI Insights Forum, mentored aspiring tech entrepreneurs and leaders, and helped advance Asian representation at the top of the industry.

His BC Experience Surprisingly, Kim says he was actually “a bit reserved” when he first arrived at BC, having grown up in a strict Korean household, but his time at the Heights gave him new confidence.

“I feel like I discovered my voice at Boston College—who I was and what was important to me, and that was driven not only by the excellent classes but also the fantastic people and opportunities I encountered there.”

Kim double majored in economics and communications with an eye toward a career in mobile technology and entertainment. In his spare time, he organized massive dorm vs. dorm video game tournaments that helped him realize gaming’s potential for building real, meaningful communities.

One of his favorite classes was statistics, taught by Richard McGowan, S.J., associate professor of the practice in finance at the Carroll School of Management, who also served as resident advisor in Kim’s residence hall. For one assignment, Kim and his roommate, Patrick

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

Yin ’98, argued that video games would soon become a multibillion-dollar industry. Rather than simply presenting slide decks loaded with charts and data, Kim and Yin brought in a third friend to play live in the lecture hall during the presentation. “It was an absolute hit,” Kim says with a laugh. “People were literally cheering on a statistical analysis of this industry.”

Later, Kim and Yin worked together at both Electronic Arts and Zynga, and they remain close to this day. Kim also talks regularly with Fr. McGowan, along with a host of other friends and faculty members he met at the Heights.

“I have this great community of like-minded friends and confidants from Boston College,” says Kim. “I look to my friends for support and mentorship, and I love to give back to BC as well.”

Even with a busy schedule, Kim regularly makes time for his alma mater, hosting students for the West Coast Tech Trek and visiting campus as a guest lecturer. “I’m so inspired by how smart these students are; they are light years ahead of where I was at BC,” Kim says with a chuckle. “Between 245 Beacon and the investments in science and technology, I am so proud of how our school has evolved. It’s one of many reasons I hope my two teenagers will consider BC when it’s their turn.”

“

I feel like I discovered my voice at Boston College—who I was and what was important to me.”

Kim also hopes to build more ties between BC and the West Coast, and he encourages both current students and alumni to invest time in networking, particularly those interested in apps and technology. For him, it all comes back to connection—from his first days playing video games with his sister to his time at the Heights, all of which helped fuel his rise to the upper echelon of his industry.

“Software can connect the world,” says Kim. “I’m at Match Group because our work is centered on getting people together, which I think is the ultimate source of happiness.”

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Class Notes

COURTESY OF KRISTEN GUSTAVSON FERRIS ’99

components in transitional energy sources and the metal market’s impacts on financial markets. // Janice Kelly Savage was appointed the new assistant dean of research for the Columbia Climate School in September 2023. As the nation’s first climate school, its mission is to develop and inspire knowledge-based solutions and educate future leaders for just and prosperous societies on a healthy planet. As assistant dean, Janice leads the Office of Research, which nurtures and supports the innovative and interdisciplinary research of the school. // Jeff Johnson, PhD’98, has retired after 30 years of teaching philosophy at BC and Suffolk University. He is now finishing work on a book of philosophical reflections. // Erez C. Miller, PhD’98, and Prof. Emerita Efrat Kass coauthored a book titled Self-Efficacy and Success: Narratives of Adults with Disabilities, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in March. The authors wrote the book based on a two-year study of 18 adults with varied childhood disabilities who developed successful careers in a variety of fields. Class correspondent: Mistie Lucht // hohudson@yahoo.com

1999

25th Reunion, May–June 2024 Paul Giovanniello and Stephanie Anastasia launched a peanut butter company featuring the world’s first drinkable peanut butter. Their product

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has no added sugar and 50% less carbs than most other products. It’s available on Amazon and was recently selected by Spartan to be the on-course athlete race fuel at the Spartan North American Championships in Killington, Vermont, this year. // Mark Winters was called to be the new settled pastor of the Federated Church of Martha’s Vineyard this past year. He and his family moved from Illinois to Edgartown in February. // Maria Cleary’s nonprofit, Readeezy Literacy, a digital library for disabled/ struggling adolescent and teen readers, is growing: 14 books by the end of 2023, a grant from the Birck Family Foundation, and finalists in the FETC (Future of Education Technology) Pitchfest in January! Fellow alums who are parents or educators should please check them out. // Kristen Gustavson Ferris, a director in the corporate group at Goulston & Storrs in Boston, has been named to the 2023 “Top Women of Law”

by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly for her exceptional accomplishments in the legal profession. Ferris was recognized for building an impressive middle-market M&A practice and being a leader, mentor, and role model for women lawyers in the M&A field. Class correspondent: Matt Colleran // colleran. matt@gmail.com

2000

Kathleen M. Kearney is honored to serve as president of the American Association of Nurse Attorneys Foundation and continues to represent individuals who have been severely injured in Texas. // Heather M. Ross, MS’00, PhD, DNP, FAAN, FAANP, was inducted as a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing in 2023. Dr. Ross is a clinical associate professor of health policy and technology policy, jointly appointed in the Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation and College of Global Futures at Arizona State University. Class correspondent: Kate Pescatore // katepescatore@hotmail.com

COURTESY OF TIM MCMANUS ’01

the general crimes unit at the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey. Prior to the promotion, he completed a detail with the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia in the Capitol siege section, where he prosecuted individuals who participated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. // Tim McManus recently relocated to Dallas, Texas, with his wife and three young children. Tim will continue there in his role as a senior organizer with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the nation’s oldest and largest community organizing network.

Tim was recently part of a small delegation of IAF organizers who met with Pope Francis to discuss the work of organizing and its connection to Pope Francis’s vision for the Catholic Church. // Jennifer Cerami became a mom of

2001

Joe Spataro has been named associate deputy attorney general over the Florida Attorney General’s victim services and criminal justice programs. // Christopher Amore was recently promoted to chief of

COURTESY OF KATHLEEN M. KEARNEY ’00

as a mental health specialist with the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools. He will be providing counseling to their elementary school children and families as well as developing and engaging in prevention interventions to provide awareness and wellness to the community at large. Class correspondent: Suzanne Harte // suzanneharte@yahoo. com

2003 COURTESY OF BERNARD DUFRESNE ’03

five-month-old baby Lorenzo Michael on November 23, 2021, in Bogota, Colombia.

Jennifer adopted her son from the very same orphanage she was adopted from 42 years prior. Both she and her son return to Colombia often, most recently for the 50th anniversary of FANA, the orphanage they were both adopted from.

They completed “Project Lorenzo” in 2023, which was a fund established to rebuild rooms at the orphanage and provide uniforms for the children. // Annelice Morales started a new client events position at Paul Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. Class correspondent: Sandi Kanne // bc01classnotes@gmail.com

2002

Chris Murphy, Kevin Burke, John Cagney, Omar Kazimi, Steven LeBlanc, Dave McGowan, Kevin McSherry, Dave Mikullitz, Ryan Mulderrig, and Kevin Walsh gathered in NYC to reunite and celebrate the 21st year of their Rubenstein D63/64 fantasy football league. They shared great BC memories and talked about their collective 22 children (and no divorces!). They also enjoyed roasting accomplished sports marketing executive Kevin McSherry for his last-place finish the previous season.

Whatever it takes! // Amanda UdisKessler ’96, PhD’02, is pleased to report the upcoming publication of her latest book, Abundant Lives: A Progressive Christian Ethic of Flourishing (Pilgrim Press, May 1, 2024). // Ricardo Bianco, MA’02, moved with his family from Chestnut Hill to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He recently started a new job

Bernard Dufresne was named by the Business Council of Westchester as a 2023 Rising Stars-40 Under 40 Award recipient. The Business Council of Westchester is the county’s largest and most prestigious business membership organization, representing more than 1,000 members. Bernard currently serves as the assistant vice president in the Office of Institutional Equity/Title IX Compliance at Pace University. // Lance Neff, MTS’03, was appointed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to Florida’s Second Judicial Circuit as circuit judge. // Jim Coogan, managing partner of the law firm Coogan Gallagher (Park Ridge, Illinois), has launched a podcast. Coogan Knows the Law features legal knowledge and explanations of legal procedures and client interactions in plain English, as well as interviews with professionals about their intersection with the law.

Look for the show anywhere you listen to podcasts! // Dr. Diane T. Lambert, MA’03, graduated from Nova Southeastern University in 2023 with a doctor of education degree in organizational leadership. She completed her coursework with a 4.0 GPA, and her dissertation explored long-term volunteer motivations of the Air Force Auxiliary, in which she serves as a Major.

She looks forward to continuing her career as a college administrator and instructor.

2004

20th Reunion, May–June 2024 Jacqueline Rutkowski-Murgia Uretsky and Jacob Uretsky, childhood classmates, were married in a private ceremony at the Barnstable Town Hall on Cape Cod and later held a reception on Lake Massapoag in their home town of Sharon. // John H. Goggins is a licensed

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

GC in Massachusetts. John enjoys working in the field of residential construction and renovation for his company, JHG Builders LLC, located in Milford. John was excited to see BC beat Syracuse—Go Eagles! // Javier Herrera was elected as the American Association for Justice minority caucus chair in July 2023, and in January 2024, he will become the president of the San Antonio Trial Lawyers Association. // Sarah F. Kozik, director of reverse engineering at SkySafe, has been recognized as a recipient of the prestigious 2023 Women in Emerging Aviation Technologies Women to Watch Award. The award is designed to acknowledge and motivate women who are driving change and leading the industry closer to gender parity. // Lauren McEnteggart Robinette was promoted to principal counsel for Apple TV+, where she oversees the legal team producing series and films for Apple’s streaming platform. Lauren lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Chris Robinette, and their French bulldog. // Terence Tirella and his wife, Alyssa Loring Tirella, MBA’15, of Woburn, welcomed their third child, Emma, in May 2023. She joins big brother Robert “Bobby,” age three, and big sister Eleanor, age six, and a family of proud BC graduates, including grandmother Linda Grey Tirella ‘74, aunts Brittany Loring, JD/MBA’13, and Alexis Tirella Van Der Beek ’06, and uncles Charles Tirella ’13, Ryan O’Sullivan ’06, and Adam Van Der Beek ’08. Class correspondent: Allie Weiskopf // allieweiskopf@gmail.com

2005

Bill Klements, MEd’05, was named the assistant superintendent of Catholic schools for the Diocese of Providence, a system of 36 schools ranging from grades PK to 12, in July 2023. // Lauren Hemenetz Laing, Emily Dendinger, and Kevin Lichtenberg (joined by David Cotter ’03) celebrated Lauren’s and her spouse Bryan Laing’s 40th birthdays together with family and many friends in Boonton, New Jersey—a good time was had by all! // Dana Vartabedian Nentin, Sarosh Nentin, David Swanson, John Castiglione, and Hung Lam ’06 are opening up three more fast-casual healthy food restaurants called Playa Bowls in Canton, Wellesley, and Hanover w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Class Notes

in fall/winter 2023–24. This will bring them to 10 locations in the greater Boston area, after opening their first location right outside of their alma mater in 2019. // Paul Suk-Hyun Yoon’s small business, CQ Strategies, was awarded the US Small Business Administration’s 2023 Vermont Minority-Owned Business of the Year award! This annual award recognizes the achievements of SBAassisted small businesses in Vermont.

Also, Paul recently joined the board of the King Street Center, a nonprofit community organization in Burlington, Vermont, which provides children and families the core life-building skills necessary for a healthy and productive future. // Bonnie Burgett married Luke Holding on January 7, 2023, at her parents’ home in Dallas, Texas. She tells the story: “My dad started home hospice care on Christmas Eve, and, while Luke had already told my dad he planned to propose in the spring, he realized my dad would not make it until then. He proposed on New Year’s Eve, and we planned a wedding in less than a week.

My dad passed away four weeks later.

Courtney Shea Winters ’04 was an honorary matron of honor via FaceTime from Boston.” // Eric F. Stein received a 2023 Meritorious Presidential Rank Award, considered the most prestigious award for career civil servants, in recognition of sustained accomplishments as a federal employee.

Eric is the deputy assistant secretary for global information services at the US Department of State responsible for the agency’s federal records and information

COURTESY OF JOHN N. SHEVELAND, PHD’06

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COURTESY OF ANKIT B. SHAH ’06 , MD, MPH

access programs. He was a political science major with a minor in ancient civilizations (classics). // Michael Culhane Harper joined K&L Gates’s white-collar defense and investigations group in DC after seven years at the DOJ. At the DOJ, Michael spearheaded high-profile international criminal matters against public and private companies, board members, executives, and foreign officials for bribery, money laundering, and fraud—resulting in over 20 criminal convictions and $1 billion in criminal penalties and forfeiture funds returned to the American taxpayer and the countries victimized by the corruption. Class correspondents: Joe Bowden // joe.bowden@gmail.com; Justin Barrasso // jbarrasso@gmail.com

2006

Meghan Smith is the inaugural dean of teaching and learning at Miss Hall’s School in Pittsfield. Meghan provides direction for academic life, convening department chairs and faculty to spearhead a transformative academic program that develops vision, voice, interpersonal efficacy, and gumption in MHS students. She also models and implements best practices in girlcentered pedagogy, oversees hiring, retention, and evaluation of faculty, and serves on the senior leadership team. // John N. Sheveland, PhD’06, edited a book titled Theology in a Post-Traumatic Church (Orbis Books, 2023), featuring victim-centric and constructive theological approaches to the

phenomena of abuse in the Catholic Church. He serves on the review board of the Diocese of Spokane and began a second term on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops National Review Board.

The foreword is written by Hans Zollner, S.J., a leading safeguarding expert. // Ankit B. Shah, MD, MPH, started his own sports cardiology practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, after being the founding director of the sports and performance cardiology program for MedStar Health for nearly six years. He works with active patients and competitive athletes with cardiovascular concerns or disease and is the team cardiologist for USA Swimming. Class correspondent: Cristina Conciatori // cristina.conciatori@gmail.com

2008

Kate Cafferky Giancatarino, MA/ MSW’08, is the inaugural director of the Villanova University Center for the Common Good. Kate has been at Villanova overseeing service and social justice activities for nine years. The Center for the Common Good is an initiative out of the University’s strategic plan to coordinate service initiatives and increase campus and community collaboration. // Anne Marie S. Mahoney, MA’08, is thrilled to announce the publication of her creative bereavement program, A New Parish Guide to Grief Ministry, by Twenty-Third Publications. Her book provides facilitators with background in grief and

COURTESY OF KATE CAFFERKY GIANCATARINO, MA/MSW’08

COURTESY OF CHRISTA BEAUCHAMP, MA’10

bereavement groups with all the tools necessary to offer a bereavement program that utilizes the arts in learning to cope with grief and loss. // Jessica Langella ’08 had a big year in 2023: She got married to Todd McGuire ’01, started an endodontic practice in Rhode Island called Narrow River Endodontics, and became board certified as a diplomate of the American Board of Endodontics. Class correspondent: Maura Tierney Murphy // mauraktierney@gmail.com

2009

15th Reunion, May–June 2024 Gabrielle and Ryan Sherman are excited to announce the birth of their baby boy, Owen! As a former Boston College soccer player, Ryan is eager to come watch the BC Eagles play next season. // Mark Woodall has completed his PhD in physics at the University of California, Merced. He transitions into active research in quantum sensing and technologies in the San Diego area this spring. Class correspondent: Timothy Bates // tbates86@gmail.com

Beauchamp, MA’10, has published her debut novel with Thomas & Mercer, The Daughters of Block Island, under the pseudonym Christa Carmen. The Daughters of Block Island is a subversive twist on the classic gothic novel, in which the mysterious past of an island mansion lures two sisters into a spiderweb of scandal, secrets, and murder. The book was chosen as an Amazon First Reads pick for the month of November and was officially released on December 1, 2023. // Katherine Marr ’10, MEd’14, has been promoted to director of marketing at The Marr Companies in South Boston. Katherine is a sixth-generation member of her family to work for the business, a construction equipment and labor service provider that has operated in New England for 125 years. In her role, Katherine combines her love for writing and photography to create content that inspires new business opportunities. She works with her brother, Jeff Marr ’08, president of Marr Scaffolding Company. // Charlie McQuillan and Emily Wilson keep in daily contact via their group chat with Daniel Fitzgerald ’15, cousin/friend to Charlie and friend to Emily, despite being distributed across the country in Denver, New York City, and Chicago. Grateful to have solidified lifelong friendships at the Heights!

2011

Maggie Mansfield has completed a PhD a year after returning from Amsterdam,

2010

Michael A. Brown, JD’10, currently serves as the vice president, assistant general counsel, and corporate secretary at the New York Times. He has been recognized by the Minority Corporate Counsel Association (MCCA) as a 2023 MCCA Rising Star! // Christa

COURTESY OF KATHERINE MARR ‘10, MED’14

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

where she spent two years as the Kress Institutional Fellow in art history. Her doctorate was in the history of art and architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. • Marlena Papavaritis continues to live in the DC area and works at the National Endowment for Democracy, where she is a program officer in the grantmaking department for Latin America. • Jean Luc Enyegue, STL’11, completed a PhD in church history and hermeneutics at Boston University in 2018. He has since been working at Hekima University College in Nairobi as a senior lecturer in church history and as the director of the Jesuit Historical Institute in Africa (since 2020), publishing Competing Catholicisms: The Jesuits, the Vatican and the Making of Postcolonial French Africa (2022) and The Jesuit Ethos: A Social and Spiritual History (2023). He is a proud Eagle. // Renato DePaolis, JD’11, recently finished 21 years of government service after progressive leadership and advisory roles at the White House and as a Navy fighter pilot, most recently serving the past two administrations as a military aide and advisor to the vice president. Renato is now the chief operating officer of a government solutions firm. He is married to Celia DePaolis, JD’12, an attorney for the federal government. They reside with their six children on a mango farm in Naples, Florida. // Hon. Grace E. Lee has been appointed as adjunct professor of law for Fordham University School of Law and Rutgers Law School. She teaches social justice and advocacy and implements an experiential curriculum based on practical and real-life professional skills and social impact. In this teaching role, her aim is to help students develop practical legal advocacy skills and equip them to utilize their legal background to promote social justice and make positive change. // Ruth O’Herron joined Gibbons P.C. in Newark, New Jersey, this past October as the John J. Gibbons Fellow in Public Interest & Constitutional Law for the 2023–2025 term. In this role, she is litigating cutting-edge matters including constitutional and civil rights, education, immigration, criminal procedure, prison conditions, and government transparency. w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Class Notes

2012

MK McAdams tied the knot with her Yale Divinity School sweetheart, Taylor Ashlock, at her family farm in Pawling, New York. The wedding was a tea party, and the largest contingent of guests was from Boston College. Both brides teach religion at Bay Area schools. // Samuel A. Rippin, CAES’12, was sworn in as the Massachusetts Association of School Business Officials (MASBO) 67th president for the 2023–2024 year.

MASBO members work hand-in-glove with education professionals at the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) to adhere closely to the laws, regulations, and guidelines necessary to ensure compliance while supporting taxpayer confidence in the district’s administrative management. // Maritane Guillaume ’08, MS’12, has exciting news.

She is now working for the Lexington school district as a substitute teacher and enjoys it very much. She feels that this job is a reward that she received from her Boston College education, from faculty, professors, classmates, and staff as well, and the hard work that made her the individual she is today. Be patient with yourself, and things will work out for you, too. Class correspondent: Riley Sullivan // sullivan.riley.o@gmail.com

2013

Laura DelloStritto (they/any pronouns) completed their three-year term as one of the inaugural co-chairs of the Boston College LGBTQ+ Alumni Council in August 2023. During their term, Laura worked with Matt Putorti ’06, followed

by Martin Casiano ’15, and Arthur Makar ’72, to oversee the creation of programs and initiatives aimed at building an inclusive community of LGBTQ+ alumni and allies. To learn more about the LGBTQ+ Council or sign up for updates, please visit bc.edu/lgbtqalumni. // Victor Churchill was recently appointed assistant professor of mathematics at Trinity College in Hartford, one of 10 new tenure-track faculty this year. Churchill is a computational mathematician working in the areas of scientific machine learning and image reconstruction. At Dartmouth College, his PhD focused on a Bayesian 64

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2014

10th Reunion, May–June 2024 Sarah Gormley Quinn ’93 announces the passing of her husband, Kevin M. Quinn.

He received a bachelor’s degree in 2014 from the Woods College of Advancing Studies and was a former employee of BC.

2015

COURTESY OF ANNA HOUSLEY JUSTER, MSW’18, PHD, LICSW

uncertainty quantification framework for synthetic aperture radar imaging. His post-doctoral work looked at the evolution of unknown dynamical systems using neural networks. // Andrea Kisiel Smith became the director of marketing and communications for Cathedral High School in Boston’s South End. Cathedral High School’s mission is to deliver a rigorous and holistic education that is available for all families, regardless of ability to pay. // Lauren Watt Hodges, MSW’13, completed a doctorate of social work at the University of Southern California this year. Her doctoral work focused on developing a method to prevent child abuse. The culmination of her education and experience as a trained forensic interviewer led to the development of a mobile app. The app, Kula Empowered, assists caregivers in discovering ways to speak with their child about how to stay safe physically and emotionally to prevent abuse. // Rev. Sr. Mary Aloysius Onwuegbuchulam, CAES’13, DDL, was recently appointed the principal of Regina Pacis College, an all girls’ Catholic K–12 institution located in Abuja, Nigeria. She has just arrived at the school from Chicago to resume her new mission. The faculty, staff, students, parents, and the Archdiocese of Abuja were very delighted to have her back. Sr. Aloysius was formerly the vice principal of this same school about 15 years ago.

Class correspondent: Bryanna Mahony Robertson // bryanna.mahony@gmail.com

Mark A. Cloutier ’12, JD’15, has been elevated to partner by the law firm Polsinelli. Cloutier focuses his practice on venture capital and emerging growth companies, private equity, corporate and transactions, and mergers and acquisitions. Class correspondent: Victoria Mariconti // victoria.mariconti@gmail.com

2016

Meredith G. Fierro, JD’16, was named an “Up & Coming Lawyer” by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. This distinction recognizes the rising stars of the local legal community— Massachusetts attorneys who have been members of the bar for 10 years or less but who have already distinguished themselves.

2018

Anna Housley Juster, MSW’18, PhD, LICSW, has written her first children’s book, to be released by Free Spirit Press on February 20, 2024. How to Train Your Amygdala builds on Anna’s clinical work, fostering children’s understanding of brain function with the help of a playful, overzealous, monsterized amygdala who guides young readers through the book and inspires them to practice selfregulation skills. Content at the back of the book is designed for parents, teachers, counselors, and clinicians. // Bronte Kass is thrilled to be joining the US Department of State as a foreign service officer. Her first posting is in Shanghai, China.

2019

5th Reunion, May–June 2024 Eduardo Yespica Mendoza, MSW’19, began a doctorate program in social work at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin.

2020

Mary Ann Christie Burnside, MDiv’20, EdD, joined the leadership team at Care Dimensions as the pediatric palliative care program manager in July 2023. Mary Ann oversees multidisciplinary community-based services for children with life-limiting illness and their families. In 2016–2017, she volunteered there before joining the staff as a hospice and pediatric palliative care chaplain.

Mary Ann is delighted to become the first chaplain promoted to leadership in the organization’s 45-year history. // Grace Kinney Broderick graduated with a master’s degree in palaeobiology from the University of Bristol, UK, in February 2023. She is now a first-year PhD student in the Earth Science Department at the University of Cambridge, UK. // Monica Heil and Zach Walker were married on June 24, 2023. Monica is an emergency room nurse at Glen Falls Hospital, while Zach is playing professional hockey in the New Jersey Devils organization for the Adirondack Thunder while pursuing a master’s degree in business administration. They are enjoying their adopted cats, Gizmo and Ruby, and spend quality time hiking with their dog, Nora. // Danielle Erickson has joined the firm Pullman & Comley, LLC. Ms. Erickson is an associate in the firm’s trusts and estates practice. She graduated summa cum laude from BC.

COURTESY OF SAM HAYES, MA’17, PHD’22

2021

Nish Varma started at Harvard Law School in the Fall of 2022. // Laura Mason is currently pursuing a doctorate of nursing practice at Sacred Heart University while working as a registered nurse. She also wants to congratulate her mother, Anne Brennan Mason ’83, on celebrating her 40th anniversary this fall!

Laura’s sister, Julie Mason, DNP’26, is also pursuing graduate nursing at BC in the direct-entry DNP program. // Joshua Atchue was accepted into George Washington University Law School after he graduated from BC. Joshua would like to express his gratitude to those who supported him during his time at BC, because it is their help that made his admission into GW possible. He also wants to thank Oracle: The History Journal of Boston College for publishing one of his research papers in its January 2023 issue.

2022

Sam Hayes, MA’17, PhD’22, visiting assistant professor at Trinity College, received the 2023 Edward S. Corwin Award for his dissertation project from the American Political Science Association. Hayes researches US federal courts, electoral institutions, and political geography. His dissertation details the role played by US federal courts in drawing legislative district maps since the Supreme Court’s decision in Baker v. Carr in 1962. // John Zulewski is completing his second year of service at Our Lady of Lourdes Elementary School, part of the Red Cloud Indian Schools located on the Pine Ridge Reservation in Porcupine, South Dakota.

The school embodies a true and dynamic partnership between Jesuit and Lakota values, including education, the arts, culture, and social justice. John has spent two years teaching science and technology at the K–8 school and plans on returning for a third year. // David Zulewski is working as a nurse at Boston Children’s Hospital inpatient pediatric psychiatric unit. The unit provides patient- and family-centered care for 8–17-year-olds, offering effective treatments within a safe environment to help children during a behavioral health crisis. David was part of the Keys to Inclusive Leadership in Nursing (KILN)

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

COURTESY OF PASCAL LOUA, S.J., STL’23

program, which prepares students from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in the field to become nurse leaders.

2023

Fr. Hilary Ogonna Nwainya, PhD’23, who recently defended his dissertation in the Theology Department at Boston College, has been appointed an assistant professor and director of theology programs at St. Thomas University, Miami Gardens, Florida. // Pascal Loua, S.J., STL’23, sends greetings from his missionary post in the Republic of Tchad.

He teaches philosophy and human and religious education in one of the Jesuit schools in Kyabé, where he is also a school chaplain. All the experiences and knowledge he got at BC are very useful for his mission in Tchad.

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Class Notes // Baby Eagles

Megan and Chris Accardo ’94, Kylee Christine, 9/3/22

Sarah Yoo ’08 and Brian Min Su Jung, Bella and Henry, 1/21/22

Allison Minogue-Dionne ’12 and Gil Dionne, Gabrielle, 10/23

Jennifer Cerami ’01, Lorenzo Michael, 11/23/21

Alejandra Maruri Trucillo and Eugene Kane ’08, Isabella Valentina, 9/13/23

Brittany ’15 and David Taranto ’16, MEd’18, Conor, 11/1/23

Cristina Duran and Maxi Arias ’02, Mateo, 10/13/23

Sydney Sanchez Angrand ’10 and Fitz Angrand ’09, Maya Josephine, 3/13/23

Sam Scinta and Charles Groome ’15, Charlotte and Eloise, 4/30/23

Maryclare Magee Gildea ’03 and David Gildea, Meredith “Merry,” 6/2/23

Lindsey Herzog Shipley ’11 and Colin Shipley, Luke, 6/12/23

Alhanouf and Feras Abdullah Aldoaij, MS’16, Abdullah, 12/25/22

Allison Hirschorn and Ben Weinberger ’06, Nathan “Nate,” 10/13/23

Marlena Papavaritis ’11 and Sergio Alvarez, Amalia Sofia, 5/22/23

Eden Hicks and Lauren Leslie, MA’21, Samuel, 3/5/23

Kristin Jacques ’07, MS’13, and Timmy Ho, Noah Rivers, 12/6/22

Justine Romano Dellaria, MSW’11, and Brian Dellaria, Brian Jr., 10/27/23

Diksha Thach ’21, Sahg Gondiz, 11/1/23

COURTESY OF JENNIFER CERAMI ’01

COURTESY OF SYDNEY SANCHEZ ANGRAND ’10

COURTESY OF JUSTINE ROMANO DELLARIA, MSW’11

COURTESY OF CHRIS ACCARDO ’94

COURTESY OF LAUREN LESLIE, MA’21

COURTESY OF LINDSEY HERZOG SHIPLEY ’11

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Reunite at the Heights!

Save the date to reconnect with old friends, network with fellow Eagles, and make new memories at the place where it all began!

— Registration begins in March. bc.edu/reunion

May 31–June 2

1989 (35th)

1959 (65th)

1994 (30th)

1964 (60th)

1999 (25th)

1969 (55th)

2004 (20th)

1974 (50th)

2009 (15th)

1979 (45th)

2014 (10th)

1984 (40th)

2019 (5th)

COMMUNITY DEATHS Christopher Donovan, of West Roxbury, Mass., on June 25, 2023. He was a custodian, Facilities Services, from 2001 to 2019.

Vincent Nuccio, of Needham and West Dennis, Mass., on October 14, 2023. He was a professor emeritus, Lynch School of Education and Human Development.

In addition to being appointed a full professor in 1974, he also was appointed to several administrative roles from 1963 to 1993.

Richard Gaillardetz, of West Roxbury, Mass., on November 7, 2023. He was a professor, Theology Department, from 2011 to 2023.

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

Larry Mclaughlin, of Newport, NH, on November 9, 2023. He was a Professor of Chemistry from 1985 to 2020. He also served as Department Chair and Vice Provost for Research.

Brian Casey, of Wilmington, Mass., on November 11, 2023. He was a first cook, Boston College Dining Services, from 1999 to 2021.

Josephine von Henneberg, of Davis, Calif., on November 15, 2023. She was a professor emerita of Art History whose tenure spanned four decades from 1963 to 2001.

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Class Notes // Fond Farewells

1940s

Francis Murphy ’55

Lorna Lyon PMC’59

William Dickson, MBA’63

Helen Reynolds ’55

Mary McGrath, MSW’59

Dennis Donnelly ’63

Francis Sacco ’55

John McGuire ’59

Tom Granger ’63

Paully Shook PMC’55

Pat Mullins ’59

Thomas Grondin ’63

Paul Smiegal ’55

Robert Murphy ’59

Francis Harvey ’63

Paul Spinale ’55

Louis Sabadini ’59

Marie Lynch Hermann, MA’63

Norbert Timmins ’55

Michael Sahady, JD’59

Justin Kelleher ’63

Claire Lacouture Woodworth ’55

Albert St. Hilaire ’59

Dave Long ’63

Mary Ann Alves, MA’56

Ellen Egan Stone NC’59

Robert McMillan ’63

Gemma Armey ’56

Alice Neary Tweedy ’59

William Michael ’63

Edward Bennett ’56

1960s

Francis Moy ’63, MDiv’69, BD’69

Anne Bickel PMC’60

Edward Niziolek ’63

Michael Casoli ’56

Sarah Anne Brown ’60

Rosemary Quinn, MA’63

Michael Connor ’56, MEd’60

Ken Cahill ’60

Donald Seymour ’63

Helen Conway Welch, MEd’56

Walter Colantuono ’60

Roberta Shanks ’63

Ann Digirolamo ’56, MSW’68

Mary-Ellin Curnyn ’60

Joan D’Arcy Sheridan, MEd’63

Kathie Dwight PMC’56

John Donohue, STL’60

Maura Smith Emery, MEd’56

Judith Lydon Driscoll ’60

George Yezukevich ’63, MA’66

Mary Erving PMC’56

Brendan Galvin ’60

Lawrence Fagan, JD’56

Kathleen Gates, MEd’60

Celia Welsh Creskoff ’64

Leo Fahey ’56, MA’57

Vincent Hogan ’60

Kevin Curry ’64

Evelyn Lynes ’56

Anne Howorth, JD’60

Phyllis Kearney Dunn NC’64

Donald McCarthy ’56

Paul Keaveney ’60, MS’62

Michael Ford ’64, MDiv’75

John Poirier ’56

James Kelly ’60

Carol Mazuy ’64

Francis Simonetti ’56

Rose Corita Mailhot ’60, MS’63

Kevin McGillicuddy ’64

Edward Amaral ’57

Max McAuliffe ’60

Walter Miles ’64

Jean Butler ’57

Mary White Rivers ’60

Jerry Powers ’64

Frank Carmichael ’57, MEd’60

Loretta Conde Bento ’61

Jane Sheehan Smith ’64

Dick Coleman ’57, JD’60

Anne Carrigg MA’61, PhD’71

Walter Sullivan ’64

Joan Hanlon Curley ’57

Gerald Cawley ’61

Grace Valentino ’64

Michael Fahey ’57, LST’65

James Conway ’61

Betty Cook Chase ’65

Paul Martel ’57

Maureen O’Brien Daly ’61

Carol Tasso ’57

Irene DiFlorio ’61

Anita Lanciaux Collins, MSW’65

Brenda McCarthy Whalen ’57

Nino DiIanni ’61

Louis Belinfante ’58

Lucetta MacDonald Ganley ’61

Raymond Delpo, MSW’58

John Keegan, MSW’61

Betty Cook DiMilla ’58

Ruth O’Neil Kenney NC’61

Alexander Fekete, MS’58

Paul McIntire ’61

Laura Frick PMC’65

Francis Ferney ’58

Frank Micciantuono ’61

Walter Gleason ’65

Pauline Gallagher, MEd’58

Michael O’Connor ’61

Steven Griswold ’65

Robert Kozacka, MEd’58

Francis Piscal ’61

Dennis Haley ’65

Mary Griffin Lehmann ’58

Mary Soule ’61

Joseph Kelliher ’65

Dick McArdle ’58

Ann Acken NC’62

Robert Kelliher, MBA’65

Mike Murphy ’58

James Catrambone, MBA’62

David Mahle ’65

Nancy Costello ’62

Michael McGunnigle ’65

William Surette ’58

Barbara Lynch Dilatush NC’62

Edward Mulholland, MA’65 Dan Murphy ’65

Florence Connolly Barnes NC’55

Anthony Temmallo ’58, MEd’60

John Kelly ’62 Jack MacKinnon ’62

Donald O’Rourke ’65

Peg Francis Calloe ’55

Charles Connors ’59

Peggy Kugler McLaughlin NC’62

Thomas Ryan ’65

Peggy Hart Foley, MEd’55

Frances Beane Drees NC’59

Alexander Urban ’62

Gary Sencio ’65

Jeff Hayden ’55, MBA’63

William Hartnett ’59

James Athy ’63

Frederick Silver, MEd’65

John Johnson ’55, JD’60

Leonard Jukins ’59

Jack Byron ’63

Joseph Tontodonato ’65

Hugh Moran ’55

Joseph Leary ’59

Joseph Ciccarelli ’63, MBA’73

Kathleen Lawler Walsh ’65

Peggy Sterns PMC’42 James Canty ’43 Bette Fitting PMC’44 Weezie Wilson PMC’45 James Barrett ’47 Norine McCahey PMC’47 James Calabrese ’48 Elizabeth Booth PMC’49 Vince Nuccio ’49

1950s

John Armstrong ’50 Alfonso D’Aniello ’50, MEd’55 Robert De Yeso ’50 Joseph Foley ’50 Charles McCarthy ’50 William Attridge ’51 Walter Corcoran ’51, JD’57 Thomas Curran ’51, JD’58 Richard Hines ’51 Nicholas Lembo ’51 Alfred Murphy ’51 Jane Shields Campbell NC’52 Peter Capodilupo ’52 Charles Daly ’52 Leo Johnson ’52 James Smith ’52 Mary Parrish Bacon ’53 Edward Early ’53 Gerald Eskin ’53 Joseph Giovino ’53 Marie Courtney Hester ’53 Donald Hodgins ’53 Margaret Lillie, JD’53 Jack Lynch ’53 Robert Manning ’53 Vincent Pizzano ’53 George Rochefort ’53 Whip Saltmarsh ’53 Frank Sullivan ’53 Susie Wright PMC’53 Ann Horrigan Coakley, MA’54 Joseph Joyce ’54 Dominic Raso ’54, MS’60 Patricia Love Sullivan ’54 John White, JD’54

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Alan Beresford ’56 Ann Gilligan Canniffe ’56

Jo-Anne O’Leary Murphy ’58

Richard Antonelli, MSW’64

Ernest Congiliando ’65 Robert Demers, MS’65 Edward Easton ’65 Mary Leonard Fitzgerald, MEd’65

Jean Boswell ’66

Paul Shanley, JD’69

Gregory Burke ’66

1970s

Annmarie O’Connor Casey ’66 Anthony DeSimone ’66

Paul Aucoi ’70

Beth Sjostedt Fontaine ’66

Nancy Balgobin ’70

Kenneth Gamble, MA’66

Robert Blute ’70

Larry Maxham, JD’66

Paul Boudreau ’70

Susan Darney Orsini ’66

Mary Buckley, MEd’70

Sally Webb PMC’66

Dee Foley ’70

Hank Androski Anderson ’67

Marc Gordon, JD’70

James Atkinson ’67

Bill Mallon ’70

John Burke, PHL’67

Paula Pariseau, MSW’70

Matthew Callaghan, JD’67

Joseph Savino ’70

Anthony Capraro ’67

Paul Schilling ’70

Maria Planes Chandler, MEd’67

Christine Skowronski ’70, MA’78

John Costello ’67

Florence Stanley PMC’70

Georgiana Day, MS’67

Rick Ahearn ’71

James Dinneen ’67, JD’70

Franklin Berkey, CAES’71

James Fitzpatrick ’67

Robert Eaton ’71

Francis Foster ’67

Robert Griffith ’71

Maureen Heafey ’67

Timothy Higgins ’71

Bernard Hennessy ’67

Deborah Langkopf ’71

Edward Manion ’67

Gerald Ridge, CAES’71

Ric McKay ’67

Raymond Ripple, JD’71

Mary Mulligan, MA’67

Robert Beauregard, JD’72

Robert Paskey, STL’67

Michael Hayes ’72

Bob Slattery ’67

Robert Hill ’72

Stephan Szecskas ’67

Alex Hofrichter, JD’72

Catherine Murphy Agresto ’68

Judith McNamara ’72, MSW’74

Claire Belforti, MEd’68 Peter Chaney, MBA’68 Carl Croce ’68 Alyce Boissonneau Galiano ’68 Jim Gilcreast ’68, MBA’79, MA’81 Joseph Gould ’68 Nancy Crofts Hayes, MA’68 Maureen Agnes Hull, MS’68 Kevin Lessard, MEd’68 Faye Mandell, MA’68, PhD’72 George Manning ’68 James McConchie, JD’68 Richard Meade ’68

Donald Bennett, JD’73 Donald Burroughs ’73 Barbara Butler, MS’73 Rose Cuddemi ’73 John Daelhousen ’73 Andrew Demambro ’73 Chester Goldberg, JD’73 David Kaplan, JD’73 Vincent Molloy ’73, JD’76 Agnes Stumpf, MS’73 Patricia Mullins Ambrogio ’74 Jane Flatley ’74

John Reardon ’68

Paul Foley ’74

Mary Connolly Sullivan ’68, MA’71

Jack Gagne ’74 John Moloney ’74

John Amero ’69

Christine Pakatar, MS’74

Louis Bocchetto ’69

James Sennett ’74

John Bonica ’69

Martha Titus Wirecki ’74

Eugene Carmichael, MEd’69

Michael Brita, CAES’75

William Fitzgerald ’69

Joanne Brown-Oda ’75

Michael Gargan ’69

Matt Deane ’75

Leo Kruger ’69

Martin Flores, MSP ’75

Roland Segalini ’69

Daniel Graham, MEd’75

To submit your note, visit bc.edu/cla ssnotes or email cla ssnotes@bc.edu.

Kevin Michel ’75 John Munley, MA’75 Carol Gallagher Raposa, MEd’75 Raymond Ensman, MEd’76 Thomas Klessens ’76 Robert LeClair ’76 Carol Russell Mastronardi ’76 Joseph McCabe, MBA’76 Janice Millette ’76 Robert Olson, MS’76 Yolanda Morano Sherman, MA’76 William Tassinari ’76 Patricia Costello Allietta ’77 Mary Haltmaier Morrisett ’77 Chris Slattery ’77 Julie Ann O’Connor Viera ’77 Karen Canzanello, MS’78 Phil Hazard ’78 Elisabeth Mansfield ’78 Linda Pellerin, MS’78 Peggy Pressman, PhD’78 Geraldine Hantman, MEd’79 Ellen McNamara Swirsky ’79

1980s

Robert Fitzgerald ’85, DED’09 Neil Harrington ’85 Christopher Tota ’85 Ethan Lewis ’86, PhD’91 John Trainor, MSW’86 Janet Finley, MEd’87 James MacGillivray ’87 David Brown, JD’88 Michael Dunphy, JD’88 Stephen Miller, MBA’88 Kathy Rudden ’88 John-Paul SanGiovanni ’88 Elliott Smith, MS’88

1990s

John Nestel ’90 John Fitzgerald, MS’91 Mary Loar, MSW’91 Tiz Polizio ’91 Christine Harmon ’92 Joseph Mueller, MDiv’92 Cheryl Vincent, MS’92 Michael Greene ’93 Michelle Damian Campbell ’94 Dian Jaffe Lerman, MSW’94

Joanne Delory ’80 Andrew Gelson ’80 Linda Guaragna Herlihy ’80 Jim Lerner, JD’80 Marc Padellaro ’80, JD’83 Louise Spracklin, MA’80 Steven Stargardter, MA’80, PhD’81 Brian Essman ’81 Nancy Kenyon, MA’81 Lisa Irwin ’82

Eric Liwanag ’94

Stephen Wald, JD’82 Anne Clark ’83 Marilyn Devaney Herschlein ’83 Carol Nelson, MEd’83 Sharon Bacon, MSW’84 Ann Castle, MSW’84 Jeanine Demers, MSW’84 Nancy Difillipo Pantazopoulos ’84 Jacqueline Baum, CAES’85

David Petrini, JD’05

Edward Gaudette ’95 Hannah Sullivan, DED’96 Sean Farrell, MTS’97 Bill Richardson, HON’99

2000s Lisa Moy, MBA’02 Neil Cronin ’03 Matthew Purcell ’03 Emily Weissbach ’04 Michael Panichas, PhD’06

2010s

Jeff Clark, JD’11 Brandt Davies ’14 Kevin Quinn ’14 Sam Norton ’19

Community Deaths can be found on page 67.

The “Fond Farewells” section is compiled from national obituary listings as well as from notifications submitted by friends and family of alumni.

It consists of names of those whose deaths have been reported to us since the previous issue of Boston College Magazine. Please send information on deceased alumni to Advancement Information Systems, Cadigan Alumni Center, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 or to infoserv@bc.edu. w i n t e r 20 2 4 v bc m

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Class Notes // Advancing Boston College

The More The Merrier

Formation activities at Boston College encourage student growth and ignite their desires to be Eagles for others.

It’s easy to argue that there’s never been a more competitive time in college admissions—and Boston College is no exception.

Last year, BC admitted just 15 percent of applicants for the Class of 2027, the lowest in its history and less than half the rate of 2017, when the Class of 2021 was admitted at 32 percent. On top of that, the first-year class was tabbed as “the most academically accomplished” and diverse ever at the Heights.

So how exactly does one stand out from the proverbial crowd? It’s a question that Stephen Harrison ’24 fields a lot as a campus tour guide and a member of the Student Admission Program (SAP) Council.

“It sounds really cheesy, but I always say ‘just be yourself,’” says Harrison, a communication major in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences. “And make sure you’re doing things—a job after school, an extracurricular or club—the [admissions] counselors want to see how you’re spending your time outside of the classroom. Because that’s really going to translate into how you make the community better on campus when you get here.”

That doesn’t mean applicants or current students need to be “better” than everyone else. But being “more” is a hallmark of the formative BC experience. In Jesuit-speak, the term most often associated with “more” is magis, a derivative of the Society’s unofficial motto Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, or “For the Greater Glory of God.” Think quality instead of quantity.

“At BC there are so many different ways to get involved to better the community while you’re also bettering yourself emotionally, socially, and spiritually,” Harrison says. “The campus and the people really push you to be involved, to be with others, to push your personal growth along—which I think is really special.”

As a graduate of a Jesuit high school in the Philadelphia area, Harrison had participated in Kairos before arriving at BC. The Covid-19 pandemic prevented him from joining a retreat in his first two years at the Heights, so he pursued other opportunities,

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like 48 Hours and SAP. Harrison was finally able to lead a Kairos retreat last fall.

For Astrid Umanzor Andino ’24, magis focuses on the choices she makes. “My BC experience has really challenged me around some of the most important questions in my life and some of the most important issues in the world. And challenged in a way not to just think about them, but to do something about them,” says the applied psychology and transformative educational studies major in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development.

“

It means challenging yourself through the heart, soul, and mind and becoming a more intentional person.”

—Astrid Umanzor Andino ’24

Umanzor Andino, an endowed scholarship recipient who also has been a BC tour guide, led outreach for the FACES anti-racism group, and danced with Vida de Intensa Pasión (VIP), grew up in Revere, Massachusetts, where she attended Mass and received sacraments. But it wasn’t until she came to BC that she realized she had simply been going through the motions with her faith. “I did not know what God meant to me or how I encountered God in my day-today life, questions that Kairos allowed me to explore deeply,” she says.

Retreats were not initially on Umanzor Andino’s radar. “I put my name in for Kairos freshman year after upperclassmen suggested I do so,” she recalls. “I did not know much

Astrid Umanzor Andino ’24 Enrico Cataldo Scholarship Fund Sullivan Family Pops Scholarship McGillycuddy-Logue Fellows Program

about the program or what it entailed—it was an opportunity to put myself in the unknown and I had no expectations.”

As a retreatant, Kairos gave Umanzor Andino more questions than answers to think about and work through. She calls the experience the most formative of her time at BC and ultimately applied to lead a retreat, which she accomplished in December 2022.

She and Harrison both appreciate the human connections the retreats create, as well as the chance to leave the bustle of campus to take time for reflection. “Kairos at BC not only serves as a weekend to stop and stand where our feet are, but also an opportunity to pause and engage in reflection and discernment, something a lot of us fail to do in daily life,” Umanzor Andino says. “It allows us all to realize that even with the brokenness and shame that we may carry, we are still loved.

It reminds us that what makes us beloved is who we are as a whole, not just a piece of the puzzle.”

Some Boston College students have it all figured out before they set foot on campus. They know what they’ll study, what clubs and activities they’ll participate in, and, occasionally, what job they’ll hold after graduation. Others take more time to figure it out.

Of course, there is no right or wrong approach to college, and that’s the beauty

“ Stephen Harrison ’24 Mary Ellen and Jeffrey Jay Cornerstone Scholarship Seidner Family Pops Scholarship

Magis means striving to do more than what’s expected of you. That really shines through in Jesuit education.”

—Stephen Harrison ’24

behind what BC offers: formative programs like Kairos that provide opportunities to figure out how one can do more and be more for others.

Umanzor Andino’s experience with the McGillycuddy-Logue Fellows Program encouraged her to consider what it means to be a global citizen and how to stand in solidarity with others, and it’s inspiring her to pursue a year of service after graduation before applying to law school. Harrison’s experience with SAP has him considering a career in college admissions. An endowed scholarship recipient, he has received support from Eagles who came before him and he’s already passing it on to future generations, in his own way.

“I had someone come up to me earlier this year, a first-year, who said, ‘You were my tour guide when I was visiting.’ And I was like, ‘That’s really cool,’” Harrison recalls.

“Then he said, ‘You’re the reason that I’m here.’ Like, that’s crazy. It’s amazing to think I could legitimately change the course of someone’s life by just conveying my own experiences at BC.” n

Jesuit education emphasizes the magis or being “more.” As we approach the annual BC Giving Day on March 20–21, Boston College asks you to consider: How can I be more for BC students? We hope that one way you will answer this question is by supporting the life-changing formational experiences that only the Heights can offer.

The record-breaking 2023 Giving Day saw 4,200-plus donors give nearly $2 million to a wide range of BC causes that support the University and its students. This year’s gifts will count toward Soaring Higher: the Campaign for Boston College.

As always, we are grateful for the commitment of BC alumni, parents, and friends.

bc.edu/givingday

How can you be “more” for BC students?

[1974] is when I really started working in the field of bilingual education. I also became very involved in the politics of the issue. I was an expert witness representing a parents’ organization in a desegregation lawsuit in Boston. We got the judge to assign bilingual kids according to the schools that had personnel who spoke their language. I did similar work with parent groups in cities like Detroit, Hartford, and Wilmington, Delaware. The most satisfying thing I did in my testimony was tell the lawyers on the other side to shut up. They didn’t know what they were talking about, so they had to shut up and listen to me. And we got what we wanted. The parents know what’s good for their kids. But they can’t express it with fancy words and theories. So I could help them with that.

Take pride in who you are. I raised a daughter who’s fully bilingual and two granddaughters who are fully bilingual. They’re not just able to reserve a room in a hotel, they can argue politics. I made sure they were bilingual and that they were proud of it, because it’s very hard to raise kids with a Spanish heritage in this country. You’re put down all the time.

There’s so much prejudice.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED

Maria Estela Brisk Professor Emerita Maria Estela Brisk has taught more students, trained more teachers, written more books, and testified in more desegregation lawsuits than can easily be kept track of. Across a legendary half-century career, including twenty-one years at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Brisk has earned her reputation as a leading expert on language and education, and an unapologetic warrior for the rights of America’s bilingual learners. She “retired” from BC in 2020, but no one seems to have noticed, most likely because of the online courses she continues to teach, and because of the three books she’s written since then.

—John Wolfson Sometimes leaving home helps you find your way. I was born in Argentina, the youngest of seven. Spanish was our native language but we learned English and French in my house.

My mother didn’t think you could be educated unless you spoke several languages. I wanted to do my graduate work abroad, like all my brothers had done. So much to my mother’s dismay, I came to the States—at the time, it wasn’t a thing to do for a girl to go on her own to a different country. I enrolled at Georgetown.

Mind the culture gap. I was ready to come home about ten minutes after getting to Georgetown. The culture shock was brutal.

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It was also difficult because even though I was fluent in English, no one had taught me to write in my second language. I cried the entire first semester. Then a friend said, “Stop crying. I’m going to teach you how to write a paper.” I ended up marrying the guy—I wasn’t letting him go! So I have always watched out for my foreign students. They’ve spent time at my house. I’ve signed leases for them. I’ve helped them get jobs. Because it’s very hard in the US, and it has nothing to do with language. It’s the cultural differences.

Children have the right to learn in their native language. When I first came to Boston

Master the written word. It’s hard when you’re writing professionally in your second language. It took me a long time to get my confidence. I didn’t publish my first book until I was almost sixty years old. Since then I have written eleven. But because nobody taught me, I became very interested in making sure that people teach bilingual kids how to write in both languages.

There’s a special reward in educating the educators. Over the past twenty years, I’ve been working a lot with teachers in Boston schools, teaching them writing theory and how we can apply it to the classroom. And I find that to be the most rewarding because they are teaching children and they want to learn how to do a better job. And they go out and implement what we discuss immediately.

They’re not worrying about grades. They’re worrying about teaching kids.

You never really stop working. I retired in 2020, and I’ve published three books since then. I work nonstop. It’s just too much. My mother raised us to be workaholics, and I’m terrified of being bored. I’m eighty-three and I’m in a lot of demand right now [laughs].

That’s why I’m going out of my mind. n all photos: Caitlin Cunningham

Parting Shot

Making Waves Only ten percent of certified dockmasters nationwide are women, and Christina Martin ’93 is one of them.

Since 2015, she’s been Director of Marina Operations at the Nantucket Boat Basin, a destination marina for vacationing boaters in Nantucket Harbor, where she manages the comings and goings of fishing charters, high-speed ferries, and 260-foot luxury yachts. In high season, celebrities and CEOs flock to the island, keeping Martin’s fifty-person staff busy around the clock. “Bill Belichick has been out here quite a bit,” she said. “Sometimes people are just standing around his car and I’ll see them and be like, Get out of here. Let him out!”

—Alix Hackett

How can you be “more” for BC students?

Z

Boston College helps students find their own meaning of magis, or “more.”

Your Giving Day support helps make their formative education possible.

march 20 –21

Z bc.edu/givingday