Mary Bennett of Charlottesville, Va., retired from the Virginia Department of Transportation’s research division last October. She writes that she and her partner, Andrew Hershey, celebrated her 70th birthday in January with a Zoom birthday gathering complete with candle blowing-out and shared by longtime friends that included former residents of 382 Brook Street in Providence: Dr. Joel Betesh, whose medical career in Philadelphia has included internal medicine, geriatrics, informatics, online medical records rollout, and lately Zoom appointments with people just after they test positive for COVID-19; his wife, Joan Katz Betesh, poked her head in but was busy with one of her many retirement activities; Jane Desmond, poet and professor of anthropology at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose specializations include animal-human studies; Susan Hansen-Flaschen, who retired a few years ago from a career in Philadelphia as a high level nurse managing treatment of HIV/AIDS patients in very vulnerable populations; her 382-visiting husband, Dr. John Hansen-Flaschen ’72, a pulmonologist and emergency medicine specialist, was not present, probably being on a frontline for COVID-19 treatment planning; Lucy Harris, who retired not long ago from a career in hospital management with Kaiser Permanente in the San Francisco/Oakland area; M. Carol Millican ’72 of Los Angeles, who has retired from a prolific career in animation; and Barbara Streeter, a child therapist and education manager who is starting to wind down her career at the Hanna Perkins Center for Child Development. Lucy Winner was not able to attend as she’s super busy as a professor and mentor in arts and media at Empire State College in New York City. For my birthday, I bought six dozen cupcakes (70 plus 2 to grow on) and passed them out to friends around Charlottesville, including Robert Hueckstedt ’77 (started as class of ’73, finished later due to a trip to India where he learned to play the tabla), Sanskrit professor at the University of Virginia, and his wife Nazen Merjiam, who was a librarian at the Rock when he met her in the ’70s. I was inspired by Joan Katz Betesh, who brought cupcakes to Joel’s local friends pre-Zoom party when he turned 69 in October 2020.”
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Class of 1973