Louise Soucy
Hello, everyone! This year our class will be celebrating our 35th Reunion October 25-27. You should have received a “Save the Date” postcard, so I know you have all put the dates in your planners and started making reservations! I look forward to seeing many of you this fall!
I ran into Lauren Corey at a tax seminar this winter. She has started her own business, Lauren Corey Consulting, based in Portland, ME. Prior to that, she spent 28 years at the accounting firm MacPage. Lauren looks exactly the same as she did in college! I hadn’t seen her in years and it was great to catch up!
I attended the Bangor Chamber of Commerce annual meeting in January and chatted with Ken Colpritt ’85 and Tracy Harding. Ken is a senior vice president at Bangor Savings Bank and was there with his wife, Gemma. They have kids and live in the Bangor area and that is all I could get out of Ken.
Tracy was at the event with his wife, Aimee Smith ‘85. He is a principal at Berry Dunn in their Bangor office and is currently a member of the Auditing Standards Board, a senior committee of the American Institute of CPAs.
Pat Dunn returned to Maine a few years ago and started Cushnoc Resiliency Advisors, helping position businesses for disaster recovery, which he says could be anything from a cyber attack to a flooded basement. MaineBiz did a nice Q&A with him in the March 19, 2018 edition, where he outlined steps businesses should take to position themselves should a disaster strike. Pat lives in Augusta with his wife, Lucie, and their two dogs.
Kay Adams Allcroft is the human resources director, corporate risk manager, and safety coordinator at CES, a Maine-based firm of engineers, environmental scientists, and land surveyors. Kay recently became a Society of Human Resources Management Certified Professional, a SHRM-CP. The certification acknowledges the expertise she brings to CES as HR director, a role she has held for the past 33 years. Congratulations, Kay, on the new letters!
There are several changes to play-by-play broadcast voices for UMaine sports. Jim Churchill has been the radio voice of the baseball team for nearly two decades and has done radio play-by-play and commentary for men’s basketball. Last fall, he took over the play-by-play duties for UMaine’s home football broadcasts as well. What a great season to announce football games! We have season tickets for football so we went to the home games and then also the playoff game. What excitement — it was so much fun!
A couple of classmates have recently published books. Bea Broder-Oldach G wrote Diamond Pin: Stories from the Street, in which she shares the experiences of a street chaplain engaged in street ministry. It is a collection of stories about people experiencing homelessness.
John Ayers has written Runner, which describes his seven-year battle to overcome a mysterious crippling disease and not only walk again, but run. As he says, he was “just a regular guy with a wife and three kids — a regular guy who juggled, unicycled, and ran half marathons. When I suddenly became crippled by an unidentified disease it was devastating to me and my family.”
John is the chief scientist with Epitax Engineering, a semiconductor research firm, and is an associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Connecticut. Runner is his eighth book, but the first one outside of the field of semiconductor engineering (which is probably why I haven’t read his previous books).
I had a lovely email exchange with Bob Gordon. We met our freshman year at UMaine and had more than one class together. I was trying to remember which classes those were — was French one of them? There were only 10 or so students in the class and the professor was Luchinski (totally phonetic spelling). If I whispered oh-so-quietly in English to the person next to me, he would say, “Français, s’il vous plait, Mademoiselle Soucy!” It was a very good class and I still have my Harrap’s New Collegiate French and English Dictionary 38 years later.
Speaking of books from college, Diana Douglas Nye recently posted a picture of her copy of Lisa Birnbach’s The Official Preppy Handbook. (Does anyone else still have theirs?) I was immediately reminded of a pink and green Fair Isle sweater I owned. I miss that sweater.
Thank you all for reading. It brings me great joy to do this twice each year. It would give me even greater pleasure to hear from more of you. I have been given permission by John Diamond ’77, ’89G to make up things I write here. I could not say which of you I might choose to write about first, so perhaps you should all be preemptive and send me an email about what is going on in your lives. I’m sure your classmates would be thrilled to read all about it. Enjoy the rest of 2019 and see you at Homecoming!