Owls With Friends

CLASS OF  1954
John Aronson (BA) writes to advise us of the interesting people he has met in the retirement home: The son of a man who won an Oscar for scenery design in “Gone with the Wind”; a French woman who lived in Beirut, Iran, etc. with her GE engineer husband; a 96-year-old retired soldier who is deaf in one ear, suffered when a Nazi V-1 blew up the building in Antwerp, Belgium, next door to his home; a woman who fled with her child during the Nazi invasion of Belgium; a multilingual wildlife veterinarian from pre-Mandela South Africa whose name he cannot pronounce; a woman whose art professor husband was at Kent State during the terrible event there; and a retired Army colonel who was shipped out one day before an atomic bomb explosion that unfortunately caused cancer in many of his comrades.  — contributed by class recorder Neil O’Brien (BA)

CLASS OF 1961
Jody Hanke Schwarz (Jones: BA) participated in the 1961 sit-in [at the Greyhound bus station lunch counter in Houston] and she sends the following: “I found a newspaper article about the sit-in and a letter I’d written to my parents about it. Being Rice students, we brought some books or assignments to work on in case we were arrested! To my knowledge, no one was arrested.”
— contributed by class recorder Nancy Thornall Burch (Jones: BA)

CLASS OF 1981
This winter found George and me traveling on a Viking Cruise to Australia and New Zealand. Within hours of arriving on the ship (which carries only 930 passengers), I met four people with Rice connections — Owls are evidently traveling far and wide! One couple’s connection is to a current student, already delighted with the Rice experience. The second couple are alums — Emily Steinbis ’02 (Baker: BS), who studied bioengineering and is currently an OB-GYN, and her husband, Adam AufderHeide ’07 (PhD), who also studied bioengineering and is currently an eye surgeon. They live in Oregon. Both are very accomplished and were adding sailing skills on an America’s Cup class boat to their resume when we met. 
— contributed by class recorder Gloria Meckel Tarpley (Brown: BA)

CLASS OF 2009
“After graduating from Rice, I moved to Taiwan on a scholarship that allowed me to study Mandarin and earn an MBA at a local university. During that time, I met my husband, Leo, then a PhD student in electrical engineering, who provided me with the knowledge base of one of Taiwan’s key industries, semiconductor manufacturing. In 2015, I took a position as speechwriter to the executives at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., while my husband took a position as a principal R&D engineer.”
— contributed by Kelly Ramos (Baker: BA)

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