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Class Notes NEWS OF 1983 From the Alumni House: Kathy Kanish Helm wrote that she has been thinking about her classmates now that she has turned the “dreaded big 4-0.” However, she’s not had too many quiet moments to reflect on this milestone. She spends much of her time with her 3-year-old daughter Catherine and was working in her uncle’s campaign for his sixth term in Congress. NEWS OF 1982 From the Alumni House: Russ Bennett, a flight attendant, worked a military air charter flight earlier this year. He was not told where it was going, but he knew its destination could be Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or Pakistan. Its mission was to pick up American troops who had been fighting in Afghanistan and bring them back to home base in Kentucky. Russ said he has never been so proud to wear his American flag pin than he was in the presence of these troops. NEWS OF 1981 From Craig “Kegger” Bartlett: Harry Beisswenger and his family stopped by on a June afternoon on their way from Ohio to visit with Kegger, Crist (“Seal”) Smith and the Michael Castles family. After three days of amusement parks (Harry is a big roller coaster rider), they arrived in Boiling Springs around 5:30 p.m. We had a great time reminiscing about Momo, catching up with the past 10 years. Harry looks good, thanks to his new hobby: mini-triathlons. (How anyone can find joy in punishing the body is beyond me.) He competes in the 40-44 age group and usually finishes in the middle of the pack. He does well biking, pretty well in the water, and so-so in the runs. He is still with Changepoint, selling software solutions and surviving the technology crash. His kids, Will, 9, and Bridget, 7, are good-looking and well behaved. Kerry is doing well as a stay-home mother and still plays tennis. They love Tampa. Seal is still with the U.S. Postal Service and doing well. His son graduated from high school this year, attends community college, and plays drums in a punk-rock band. (No piercings or spiked hair, thank goodness.) Seal still plays softball, too. The Castles family is alive and well in Boiling Springs. Mike’s free time is spent landscaping his pool, which, so far, is good stress relief. At this point he doesn’t regret not hiring a professional, but he’s still trying to find time for a vacation. The first annual Noel J. Foster Golf Classic took place August 9 in New Jersey. Many Moravian alumni were there to remember our classmate, whom we lost on September 11. NEWS OF 1980 From the Alumni House: Edward Ford married
Shelly Duvall in July, and they moved to a new home in Greensboro, N.C. Their boat was a rare wooden FJ that Woody had just purchased over Memorial Day weekend. It’s a 13.5-foot two-person racing boat with two sails, an additional parachute-like spinnaker for downwind sailing, and a trapeze for the crew to help keep the boat upright in strong wind. Sailing in the middle of Iowa? “Well, there’s not much else for a 40-something geezer like myself to do in Ames on summer weekends!” says Woody, who is a research scientist for Ames Laboratory (a Department of Energy facility on the campus of Iowa State University) and an adjunct assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Iowa State. NEWS OF 1979 From the Alumni House: Anne McCandless Rampolla and her husband, Kenneth Rampolla, are very proud of their daughter, Liz, who was recognized at the third annual District XI Tennis Scholar-Athlete Banquet in June. |
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"It's
All Doc's Fault." |
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It’s a common refrain among Moravian theater graduates. Jack R. “Doc” Ramsey, Bertha F. and Bernard L. Cohen Professor of English Language and Literature and professor of drama, has been responsible for a lot of stage (and backstage) careers in his 31 years on the faculty. So it was with Lynn Schwarzbach Mastio ’83, who has been on and off the stage—mostly on—in the 19 years since college. Part of an extended Bethlehem family, Lynn went from Moravian to the Goodman School of Drama at DePaul University in Chicago and then into a busy life in the Chicago area’s network of dinner-theaters. She also got married. “I bought the house and the dog and the yard,” she says. But life in the Chicago suburbs didn’t work out quite the way it was supposed to. Her husband complained about her evening work hours. “He was not very supportive,” she says dryly. After enough of that, she got unmarried and moved to Long Beach, Calif., to lick her wounds with the help of a married sister, Lorie Schwarzbach Rodriguez ’78, a rehabilitation nurse. In the eight years she spent in California, Lynn worked on the stage (under the name of Lynn Carol Dunn) but never cracked the big screen or the small one. Mostly she waited tables and got discouraged. “You get tired of being broke,” she says, “especially when you don’t have a lot of friends in the industry.” Finally, she decided to come home, where she found roles at Allentown Civic Theater and other local companies. In 2001, she was the professional guest artist in Moravian’s production of Suddenly Last Summer, a Tennessee Williams drama just perfect for her throaty voice, rich coloring, and dramatic gifts. And then she got a break. At the second New York audition she’d ever had, she sang—“I’ve been singing since I could open my mouth,” she says—and snagged a year’s contract (she has just extended it into 2003) for the national tour of The Music Man. She plays one of the mayor’s wife’s chorus of friends and also understudies the mayor’s wife, whose name is Eulalie Shinn. In Detroit, when the actress playing Eulalie threw out her back, Lynn took the role for a week. A year and a half on tour will be enough, she thinks, and there are other shows to try out for. And there’s a compelling reason to keep her home base in the Lehigh Valley. It’s nice that her mother is in Easton and her brother Chip a dentist in Bethlehem, but there’s this golf professional at the Hawk Point Country Club in Washington, N.J., who’s the real magnet. First she has to finish her contract. “We went on the road in September,” she says, “and sometimes the show seems trivial compared to the real events of that month. But it turns out the timing of the show was just about perfect. It really is the all-American show, and it was just what we needed.” —Judith Green |