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1980-1989

Mark your calendars now: 2013 is a reunion year for the classes of 1983 and 1988.

1980

Paul Carney received the 2012 Educator of the Year Award from the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System. An instructor in English nationally recognized for his work on college readiness for writing, he is the developer and coordinator of Ready or Not Writing, an online program allowing high school students to submit their writing to college English instructors for feedback and support, and the creator of Roadside Poetry, a public arts project celebrating the “personal pulse of poetry in the rural landscape.” He lives on an eight-acre hobby farm in Underwood, MN.
Timothy R. R. Gordon has been named to the board of directors of Middlesex Genealogical Society in Darien, CT.
Denise Marrs is the general manager for American Airlines in San Francisco, where her group has won three customer service awards. Working for American for 30 years, she has traveled extensively and worked in places such as London and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Her home is in Pacifica, CA.
Vernon Scarborough, Ph.D., is a professor of anthropology at the University of Cincinnati. He was part of a multiuniversity team to visit Tikal, a prominent urban city of the ancient Maya. Their findings on the Maya water and land-use systems appeared in an article that Dr. Scarborough co-authored: “Water and Sustainable Land Use at the Ancient Tropical City of Tikal, Guatemala,” which appeared last July in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and received prominent coverage in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

1981

Deborah Ballard (M.F.A. ’90) is a Dallas artist whose sculpture was presented last May-June in an exhibition at the Valley House Gallery and throughout its sculpture garden. Seeing Egyptian antiquities on a recent trip influenced her sense of scale as revealed in her “Memories of Egypt” series. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Meadows Museum at SMU, the San Angelo Museum of Art and the Museum of Art of Monterrey, Mexico.
Denise Gerneth, writing as Denise Weeks, has published a mystery novel, Nice Work (Oak Tree Press, 2012), winner of the Oak Tree Press First Mystery Novel contest in 2011. The first book in a series, it’s available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or any bookstore. She used a pseudonym writing young adult fantasy novels and has done ghostwriting, but Nice Work is her first novel using her married name.

1982

Robert (Bob) Cheek plans to attend his 30th SMU class reunion. He has been disabled since 1993.

1983

Randy Krone is a writer-editor for the Dallas Mavericks official Wikipedia page, featuring the history of the Mavericks basketball franchise from 1980 through present day.
Sheron C. Patterson (M.Div. ’89, D.Min. ’96) is a well-known Dallas pastor, author and breast cancer awareness advocate. On May 13 she launched a fundraiser, “A Year of Living and Giving,” celebrating her five-year mark in surviving breast cancer by raising $200,000 to provide free mammograms for low income women in Dallas. She will partner with the Methodist Health System for screenings in areas with high cancer rates and low screening services.

1984

Joe Drape, author of the bestsellers Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen, The Race for the Triple Crown and Black Maestro, is an award-winning sports reporter for The New York Times. His Aug. 1, 2012, Times article on Forrest Gregg, “Coach Who Revived SMU Looks Back With Pride,” recounts his visit with the legendary coach who restored integrity to the SMU football program in the late 1980s. Now, after spending the past year with the football team at West Point, Joe has written Soldiers First: Duty, Honor, Country, and Football at West Point (Times Books, September 2012), an inside story of the 2011 Army football season. Joe lives with his wife and son in New York City.
Jennie Fish Firth (M.L.A. ’90) married Jeff Johnson July 13, 2012, in Austin, TX.
John Gilchrist passed the examinations for advancement to Fellow in the Association of Healthcare Philanthropy, one of only 180 healthcare development professionals in North America to have earned this distinction.

1985

Linda Beheler (B.F.A. ’86, M.B.A. ’99) has joined the SMU Meadows School of the Arts Communications Studies Advisory Board. She works for Celanese Corporation, a Fortune 500 chemical and specialty materials company based in Dallas, with responsibility for global internal and external communications.
Laurie A. Farnan received the 2011 Great Lakes Region of Music Therapy Scholarly Activity Award and the national American Music Therapy Association 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award. She has influenced professional music therapy practice for three decades, having served as the coordinator of music therapy services at Central Wisconsin Center for the Developmentally Disabled for 36 years, training 121 interns. She developed a partnership with the Madison Symphony Orchestra as a consultant for the “HeartStrings” community engagement project, and she has been involved in Very Special Arts.
Rick Mase was promoted to vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, where he has worked for 26 years. He has responsibility for the cash services function.
James T. (Jim) Moorhead is founder/publisher of Renew, a magazine and website he started in 2010 to stress the positive aspects of living in recovery (www.RenewEveryDay.com). There is much in every magazine to inspire and inform recovering alcoholics and addicts. Subscribers include treatment centers, sober living homes, therapists and individuals across the country. He lives in Chicago.
Cynthia Colbert Riley was appointed vice president for institutional advancement for the University of St. Thomas in Houston and will lead the University’s fundraising efforts in the “Faith in our Future” capital campaign. Most recently she served as the interim executive director and vice president for development at The Methodist Hospital Foundation in Houston.
Linda A. Wilkins has established Wilkins Finston Law Group LLP, practicing in employee benefits and executive compensation. She is listed in Best Lawyers in America in employee benefits law.

1988

Chris Hymer and Debbie Suchy reconnected after 25 years during last fall’s SMU v. UTEP tailgate and were married March 23, 2012. He is an executive chef for Lone Tree USA based in Utah, and Debbie owns Eclectic Galleries in Snider Plaza near SMU, specializing in American fine craft.

1989

Gregory W. Kugle has been appointed to the board of directors for Meritas, a global alliance of 175 independent business law firms in 75 countries. He is a director of the Honolulu-based law firm Damon Key Leong Kupchak Hastert.

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