Class Notes

NEWS OF 1948

From Jean Baxter McCracken:

Emmeline Ungurian Dimmick and her husband, Leonard, are waiting for an apartment in Moravian Village, which is not yet under construction. They took a Mediterranean cruise from Barcelona to Istanbul, stopping at the French Riviera, Pompeii, Venice, and Athens, where they climbed the Acropolis. Last year, they purchased a condo in Ocean Village, Fla., where they have a guest room for any ’48ers to visit. Emmy is active in three literary groups, one with Marge Schussler Sherry, who is retired. Emmy has one grandson at Vassar College and one about to graduate with honors from Moravian Academy, hoping to attend Northwestern University.

Jane Hall Holben and her husband, Gene, just returned from their third Heritage Tour with their church. The first one went to Rome and Florence, the second to England and Scotland, this year’s to Switzerland. They were in Oberammergau on September 11, where the local people expressed sympathy to all the Americans.

Maria Sideris Chapis obtained her certification to teach in Lancaster. Frances Longacre Bernard ’51 introduced her to McCasky High School, where Maria taught for eight years. She has been active in teaching English as a second language and became director of the Literacy Council of Norristown in 1996. “I am fortunate to be able to spend time on one of the most important issues of this age at my age,” she says.

Lorraine Egizio Jackson called from Texas to say that she lost her husband six years ago but has children and grandchildren nearby. Her family had a 75th anniversary party for her October 15. She has a granddaughter who seems to have inherited her musical ability, and Lorraine hopes she’ll study voice when she gets older.

My oldest grandson is in Germany with the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, assigned to chemical warfare. Charley and I pray for him. Our artist daughter lives in New York and had studio space in one of the World Trade Center towers. Fortunately, she’d had to move out in July.

NEWS OF 1947 - Reunion May 31 – June 1

From George Kirkpatrick:

The Class of 1947 is unique in that many of us served in World War II, then got married and returned to Moravian to finish our courses in year-round accelerated programs.

I’m still waiting for stories of your war service and careers. In the meantime, I’d like to pay tribute to three outstanding classmates.

Stanley Frankenfield, a chemistry major, participated in the invasion of Okinawa. One of his field comrades was world heavyweight champion boxer Jack Dempsey. After the war, Stan registered for his junior year but was stricken with a South Pacific disease called elephantiasis. He died in St. Luke’s Hospital in 1946 at the age of 23.

Dick Groman, B.S. in chemistry, was the owner of Groman’s Bakery, which he expanded extensively in Bethlehem and Allentown. Dick was a combat infantryman who received a battlefield commission and won a bronze star and the Purple Heart. In his later years, Dick suffered from kidney failure, lost his eyesight, and spent a long time in a wheelchair before his death several years ago.

Paul Kostenbader, also a B.S. in chemistry, was a senior research scientist at Bethlehem Steel Corp. He invented and patented a purification process for treating steel company wastewater. It was featured in Time magazine. Paul was a combat infantryman in Europe who won two bronze stars and the Purple Heart. He died of a heart problem in 1998 in a Philadelphia hospital.

NEWS OF 1946

From Ileen Whitehead Birnbaum:

Grace Keeler Hodge said she had a great time at the 55th reunion. Her travel year featured the British Isles, including St. Paul’s Cathedral, Kensington Palace, Windsor Castle, Trinity College in Dublin, and the Waterford crystal factory. She had seen the Queen on her first tour; this time, she just missed seeing Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles. She and her travel companions enjoyed afternoon tea with the friends they met when they were there 25 years ago. Other travels this year included Chautauqua and the Great Lakes.

Jean Mandell Litow is busy with repairs to her dining-room porch. Her son Alan will be visiting to “straighten out me and the computer, as we have our differences.”

Martha Meixell Danner called to say that she plans to move from her big home to something that will suit her better. She has six grandchildren: four boys and two girls. Her son David, who is about to retire from the Naval Air Corps, was on the third floor of the Pentagon when it was hit on September 11. His entire unit was fortunate to escape injury.

We’ve made several camping trips. We went to North Carolina to visit our grandson in the U.S. Coast Guard and to British Columbia to tour this beautiful part of the Americas with Canadian cousins. We’ve enjoyed the Johnstown Flood Museum and the Oyster Bay Feast with Frank and Ada Zellner Flower. We also visited Wisconsin’s cranberry country, stopping to visit Audrey Roach Long ’44 and her husband, Jack, along the way.

From the Alumni House:

Lloyd Fatzinger wrote the following letter to the “Men of the ’40s”:

“Every time I read an alumni publication, I wonder why so little is said about the men of the ’40s. Is it because we tend to be less active in alumni events? Is it because there are so few of us left? 

“We never numbered that many to start with, because we were then a truly small college, where students and professors knew everyone on campus not only by name but also by first name or nickname. We were a tight-knit group with a feeling of belonging, and we gave back what we could by being members of two or more organizations on campus. Yes, we were very active in that respect, and we enjoyed a closeness that is hard to put in words.

“We are a different group of alumni: a group that saw some of its members pay with their lives in the war. That war is history now, referred to as World War II, but for us it will always be ‘the war’—‘our war.’ Some went on, as I did, to serve in other wars of the century.

“We don’t know what class to identify with—the one we started college with or the year we completed our work at Moravian. I was scheduled to graduate in 1943, but at the end of my junior year, I was drafted into the Army. I served until January 1946. 

“I returned to college and completed my degree requirements within six months. Did that make me a member of the Class of 1946? I think not. There were but two of us who completed our work at that time, too late to participate in the graduation ceremony for the Class of 1946. I was well into my graduate work at Lehigh University, in the spring of 1947, when I participated in Moravian’s graduation ceremony for the Class of 1947. Does that make me a member of the Class of 1947? No! I am carried on the rolls of the Class of 1946. But I think of myself as being of the Class of 1943.

“In reality, I am a member of that anomalous group that was given the name by Sam [Rev. Samuel Zeller] as ‘Men of the ’40s.’ For a long time, Sam kept us all informed of where the others were and what they were doing. Maybe we should be called ‘Sam’s Class.’
“To those left, I say hello and thank you for being a major part of my life. To those gone, I can say only that I miss you, for you, too, were a part of my life and college experience.

“I shall always be proud of the fact I am a graduate of the finest liberal arts college I know.” 

NEWS OF 1945

From Jane Smith Ebelhare:

Jackie Stout McGiffert and her husband, Bob, entertained their 8-year-old grandson Cameron, who came to visit them all by himself. He spent a week with them at Flathead Lake in Montana. When their son Brian came to pick up Cameron, their daughter and her family arrived, making it a very pleasant get-together, including lots of exercise in Jackie’s lime-green kayak.

Florence Drebert Fritts and her husband, Warren, are really enjoying living in Lititz. They’ve joined the Moravian Church there, which has lots of connections to Bethlehem. In February, Florence’s brother Bill Drebert and his wife moved to Lititz from Fryeburg, Maine, and now Warren’s brother has moved there from Easton. They are very much pleased to have family near them.

Dorothy Stump Lied thinks she leads “a very mundane life.” I think it’s anything but. Much of her time recently has been spent helping members of a Spanish-speaking church in Lancaster to improve their English. These are mostly professional people working menial jobs because their training isn’t accepted here. Fortunately, Dorothy took Spanish at Moravian, but she does have to rely on her Spanish/English dictionary a bit! Though her preference is classical music, she went to a Rod Stewart concert in July. However, there was a very good reason for it. Stewart wanted a string quartet as a backup group, and Dottie’s granddaughter, Nicole, a senior majoring in cello at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, was part of the quartet. There was Nicole in front of an audience of 10,000 people, and the audio was good enough for the strings to be heard well.

Lois Moser Harke and her husband, Al ’43, have been very busy retirees. Lois sings in several senior choirs and leads a study group. Their oldest grandchild, an engineer working on a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, got married in October. Their son Gary, the father of the groom, and his two other children were there for the wedding.

Andy and I again will take off for Florida in early January and will be there until mid-April.

Janet Moyer Paulus and her husband, Dick, have a grandson, Jason, in the U.S. Coast Guard. After September 11, he spent a month guarding New York Harbor. Now he’s back at his home base for further training, but his grandparents wonder what comes next. Despite all the disruption, they still planned to see the “Mini Moravian” group at its annual get-together before Christmas.

Jackie Haas Bauder says she’s not as productive as she used to be, but I don’t think you’d agree if you read her e-mail. She is still an elder at her church, which means “other committees, joint board meetings, and calling people to do things.” She also is part of a Cursillo Community, which sponsors spiritual retreats for the Moravian Church, and it held one at the end of September.

Her youngest daughter, Wendy, moved with her family back to the Washington, D.C., area in July, so Jackie went down in August to help them get settled. Wendy works in a library across the Potomac River from the Pentagon and could see the flames when the airliner hit on September 11. Her husband, Peter, works at the National Gallery, and their 5-year old daughter, Natalie, is in kindergarten at the Museum of Natural History. Both museums are on the Capitol Mall, and the family was involved in hours of nightmarish traffic that evening.

Jackie and 250 classmates attended their 60th high school reunion at the Radisson Hotel Bethlehem. She, Janet Moyer Paulus, and Florence Drebert Fritts also planned to get together with Jim Cherrington, widower of Doris Fetterman Cherrington ’43 Secretarial, in November.

Jackie tells me that Lillian Stefko Schaedler’s husband, Kurt, died unexpectedly in October. She also keeps in touch with Betty Wachstetter Griffis, who loves to go to craft shows and does beautiful counted cross-stitch; and with Ann Bachert, whom she visited at Kirkland Village. Jackie planned to travel to Florida and the Bahamas in January. 21

NEWS OF 1944

NEWS OF 1943

From June Bright Reese:

Recently, the Classes of 1943 and ’41 Secretarial held a joint mini-reunion at a local restaurant. A big thanks to Betty Adams Roach for making the arrangements.

Our members are still active and have interesting lives. Maxine “Macky” Kerrigan Sortwell and her husband, Thomas, along with daughter Debbie and friend Sue, traveled 7,600 miles on five different trains to see some of the United States. They spent time in San Francisco, toured Alcatraz Island, went to Harrah’s casino in Reno, and traveled another 22 hours to get to Seattle. There they saw a Mariners game on Macky’s birthday, thanks to Dave Myers, the club’s new third-base coach, who is the oldest son of a friend of Macky’s from York Hospital Pathology Department. Thomas thought the food on the trains was fabulous but “nothing like that on a cruise,” according to Macky. Thomas says he cruised quite enough in the Pacific in 1945 and wants no part of cruising or flying, which is why they take the train.

Margaret Mason Marcks spent her ninth summer at Yellowstone Park, and it was an eventful one. On June 12, they had 9 inches of snow, and all the entrances to the park were closed. In August, there were three fugitives in the park, and all visitors were evacuated until they were caught. The park area also saw terrible firestorms last summer, and Peggy says 800 firefighters and some helicopter pilots were more or less in their back yard.

Marian Carty Durkee attended an Elderhostel in North Dakota that observed the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The weather was bizarre, she says, but accommodations and hospitality were very nice on the campus of Mary University on the Missouri River. The beautiful rolling countryside was especially lovely, Marian reports.

Nancy Reichard Kichline enjoys her family, who live nearby. She feels very fortunate to be able to be independent and in her own home. The newest member of her family is a great-grandchild.

Marion McCall Bray likes her new residence in the Union Boulevard Moravian House. Her children are nearby, as well as five grandchildren with whom she is very involved.

Betty Karte is looking forward to moving into a new retirement home. Bill and I have done just that: We moved to Westminster Village a few months ago.

Betty Adams Roach was nominated for a second three-year term on the Alumni Association board. She would like to remind our class members that the year of our 60th reunion (2003) is also the target date for completion of the new Academic Building. Betty says: “Plan now to attend our 60th to see this new complex, the renovated Colonial Hall, and many other improvements on campus.”

NEWS OF 1942 - Reunion May 31 – June 1

NEWS OF 1941

NEWS OF 1940

From the Alumni House:

We are still looking for a class correspondent. Interested? please contact the Alumni Office at 610 861-1366.

NEWS OF 1939

From Elizabeth Batdorf Hummel:

Isabel Wadsworth Gilligan is another class memberz who has down-sized. With the help of her children, she moved from a large home in Lenox, Mass., to a continuing-care community named Devonshire. She is enjoying her one-bedroom apartment with a balcony. Since she doesn’t drive, she really appreciates the convenience of the facility’s bus transportation.

Here’s from our traveling classmate Mildred Ladner Thompson: “I’ve been on the go! Holland, Luxembourg, and Belgium with my daughter Mary Pat in tulip time. I spent two weeks in Tulsa in May and took a New England jaunt with my Boston daughter in July.” She also was planning a trip to Colorado Springs in September to be with her younger daughter, then to Albuquerque to visit a stepdaughter.

NEWS OF 1938

From Evalyn Adams Hawk:

How joyous it was for six of us ’38ers to be together September 11 at the Aspen Inn, Bethlehem, for lunch. Christine Roberts Fraley and Jeanette McCandless Vary drove together from Carlisle/Harrisburg; Olivia Musselman Barnes from Allentown; Mary Fabian Strock from Springtown; and Lois Park Salmon and I from Phillipsburg, N.J. Alumni relations director Bertie Francis Knisely ’69 joined us. We missed Catherine Marquard from Langhorne, who had planned to attend but was not able to, after all. But it was wonderful to enjoy the warm friendship of 63 years.

NEWS OF 1937 - Reunion May 31 – June 1

NEWS OF 1936

NEWS OF 1935

Moravian College trustee Frederick P. Sutliff ’43 got a bird’s-eye view of Slovenia while touring the Central European country as part of a group from St. John’s Windish Lutheran Church in Bethlehem. He and his wife, Helen, went on the 14-day trip (which also included side jaunts to Vienna and Budapest) in late August.

Slovenia was the homeland of Helen’s father, an immigrant whose surname was Filo. So while there, the Sutliffs looked up the family and found “about 15 relatives Helen didn’t know she had,” said Sutliff, an ophthalmologist, now retired, who practiced at Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia.

One cousin’s family “slaughtered a pig and we had it for lunch,” Sutliff said. Another cousin had a boyfriend—“I would pronounce his name Vlado,” Sutliff said—who persuaded the 80-year-old doctor to take a ride with him in an ultralight aircraft that he’d built himself. Vlado actually makes his living by raising “10,000 pullets every six weeks and taking them to market,” Sutliff said. “He’s the Frank Perdue of Slovenia.”

The ultralight is a small aluminum plane with a lawn-mower engine: “a motorcycle with wings,” Sutliff calls it. The passenger sits piggyback with the pilot. That’s Sutliff in the purple flight suit above, with Vlado in shorts.

" We went up about a mile, and a little thunderstorm came along,” Sutliff said. The plane was so light that “I think we were going backwards!” They were airborne for about 15 or 20 minutes, he estimated, before landing without incident. Several others in their party then decided to try it: “ ‘If that 80-year-old guy can do it, we can do it,’ ” as Sutliff described it.

Though the Sutliffs have long made their home in Narberth, north of Philadelphia, their connection with St. John Windish Lutheran Church goes back even longer. They were married and their children baptized in it.

The church itself has a long connection with its Central European roots. “Windish” is a German variant of Vindonissa (the name of what is now Slovenia when it was a province of the Roman Empire) and refers to the area when it became part of the Hapsburg Empire. The members of St. John Windish Lutheran have gone on many church-organized trips to explore family ties in the Old Country.

After World War I, Slovenia became part of an independent kingdom whose name was changed to Yugoslavia in 1929. But when Yugoslavia fractured into its various ethnic states in 1991, Slovenia managed to avoid the sectarian violence of neighbors Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia. “It’s a beautiful country with very friendly people,” Sutliff said. “And there’s a lot of history there.” In the northeast corner of the country, where Helen’s cousins live, “you can walk into Austria over here and Hungary over there.”

The Sutliffs made the discovery of pumpkinseed salad dressing in Slovenia (“It’s delicious!”). And the doctor found that the one word of Slovene he’d learned from his father-in-law was still useful. “I don’t know how to spell it,” he said, “but it’s pronounced ‘bojeevy!’ and it means ‘cheers!’ ” When they met Helen’s cousins, “first you’d have a little slivovitz, then a little wine, then a little more slivovitz and a little more wine,” he said. “And everyone kept saying: ‘Bojeevy!’ ”

Helen thought he should have his head examined for going up in the ultralight, but he shrugged it off: “My insurance was all paid up.” He said the experience was worth it: “I’m going to go over again someday and go up in that plane—after I’ve had more slivovitz.”