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1970s

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1975

Noreen P. Reilly
noreen.reilly@verizon.net

Lisa Laidlaw Bry visited Skidmore last fall with her husband and son—her first foray onto campus since 1974. She was impressed and found the place “quite different than our days there.” Lisa, who retired in March, is grateful for the opportunity to be home with son Andrew, 12. Her husband “just took off his golden handcuffs,” leaving an 18-year partnership to start a new restaurant chain.

Cate Beckstein sees and hears from Marcy Hirschfeld Raines and has had a letter or two from Laney McDonough. Cate is divorced and lives in Clinton, CT. She flew for United Airlines for about six years but took a leave of absence after 9/11. A Skidmore English major, she is now back in school for a degree in nuclear medicine technology and muses, “Funny how I managed to avoid all those science courses, only to be doing them 30 years later!”

Susan Luthy’s boys, Nick and Dylan, are happy at Savannah College of Art and Design and the University of Hartford. Susan lives in Ridgewood, NJ, and is human-resources director for worldwide finance and info technology at Becton Dickinson. “Family is great, and work is very much appreciated,” she observes. She can’t wait to see everyone at our 30th reunion.

Janice Trebbi Richards lives in Cos Cob, CT. A marketing consultant, she is developing materials for a new cancer foundation that focuses on gene therapy research. She is also co-president of Greenwich High School PTA. Daughter Kimberly is a sophomore at Connecticut College, and Alex is a senior at GHS and looking at colleges, including Skidmore. Caroline (12, going on 30) is in seventh grade. Husband Bruce has been working for National Australia Bank for four years, and Janice went there with him in May. Earlier in the year, she had a great visit with Patty Hurley Wieser, who lives in Hong Kong.

Lucy Noonan accompanied her mom, Martha Larkin Noonan ’44, to her 60th reunion, which Lucy described as “a bunch of 82-year-old chicks running wild in Jonsson Tower for three days.” Martha and her best friend from Skidmore, Claire Anderson McCann ’44, eventually requisitioned a lovely high-school volunteer to chauffeur them around. Lucy also reported that Susan Lipper’s photography exhibit at the Tang Museum was “stunning.”

Kim Hotchkiss Hewitt earned her master’s in special education, with a concentration in educational consulting, from the University of Vermont. She and a colleague are planning to start an alternative school. This summer Kim visited friends on the St. Lawrence River, then went to Baltimore to visit son Kyle, who interned at the National Institutes of Health. She and husband Ken also explored West Virginia and rafted on the New River. In August Kim rendezvoused with college roommate Libby Relihan Porter, spouse of Tom Porter (The Sandwich Man!), in Saratoga.

Debbie Sacks Chapin lives in Mamaroneck, NY, with husband Steve, a banker, and their three children: Ben, a junior at Duke; Sam, a freshman at Duke; and Sarah, a high-school sophomore. Debbie is a retired lawyer and has been involved from time to time in local politics. She was mayor of Mamaroneck and is currently managing a NYS Assembly race. She regrets that she has lost contact with almost everyone from Skidmore. However, her daughter and Holly Saltzman Ryan’s youngest daughter are on the same soccer team, so she has the occasional chance to reminisce about the T&L and D’Andrea’s.

Lisa Roberts never thought she would end up in Saratoga, but she bought a Victorian on Church Street (up the street from the Hub) two years ago. After a career on Wall Street in NYC during the ’80s, Lisa took some time off and, at age 43, had a son, Trevor. Lisa returned to the investment business in 2002 as a financial advisor at Morgan Stanley and commutes to Albany. She misses cooking, biking, and the arts, and is trying hard to get back to some of those things. Lisa is active with the Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation and the Community Foundation of the Capital Region.

Peggy O’Higgins Boyers writes, “To think that Mabou was once something of a head shop is funny, considering what a high-end ultra-bourgeois store it is now!” Peggy is married to English professor Robert Boyers. By senior year they were together, and they married in December 1975. Peggy has made her life—very happily—at the college, working on Salmagundi and recently beginning to emerge, she reports, as a poet. Her first book, Hard Bread, which was reviewed last spring in Poetry magazine, came out in 2002, and another one is in the works. Peggy gave a reading this year at the Library of Congress with three other emerging poets. She claims she was the “Grandma Moses of the group, but was too thrilled to mind.”

Diane DiPasquale Puckhaber is practicing law in Concord, NH, with husband Robert. Their oldest child, Jon, graduated from Saint Paul’s School in Concord and is attending the University of Pennsylvania. Diane’s youngest, Sarah, in her second year at the Ethel Walker School, is very busy with academics and equestrian competitions. Diane and Sarah enjoyed a tour of the Skidmore stables recently.

Paula Wesolowski Michaels is a VP with Morgan Stanley in Washington, DC. She and husband Clyde Smith stay busy traveling and raising two teenagers. Their oldest, Paul, is applying to colleges and hopes to major in aerospace engineering. Youngest son Masha, a high-school junior, is a talented artist and athlete. For fun, Paula fox chases, which is a real change from the dressage she learned at Skidmore. She finds that riding at such speeds is a great release.

Sarah Melling Guterman enjoyed turning 50 in many ways. A vocal music teacher in a K–5 school, she threw a party in every class that day, playing “pin the musical note on the staff” for prizes. Sarah spent much of the summer in an apprenticeship program to teach Orff Schulwerk (a method of teaching music to children) and taught her first Level I class in July. She was also busy remodeling her home.

Janice Bellows Feaman set up the first lending library in Bolivia with the help of son Louis. An honors high-school student and varsity athlete, Louis entered the US Naval Academy at Annapolis this fall. Janice is a librarian at the St. Paul Lutheran School in Boca Raton, FL.

Lucie Denkewicz renovated her summer home on Great Sacandaga Lake near Saratoga. She and Barb Nieman’73 shared cocktails on the dock this summer and see one another year-round. Lucie travels statewide, training NYS Department of Health employees.

Our 30th reunion is coming up, folks. Jay Morrissey and Brenda O’Hara Kingdon have both reported—no, promised—that they’ll be making their first appearance at a reunion in 2005.