FRASIER MEADOWS MANOR RETIREMENT COMMUNITY

FRASIER MEADOWS MANOR
RETIREMENT COMMUNITY
RESIDENT BIOGRAPHIES
VOLUME 18
2011b
Dedicated to all — residents and staff — who have loved and
dedicated themselves to the Frasier Meadows Retirement Community.
FMRC
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS and CREDITS
THE WRITERS WISH TO THANK RESIDENTS FOR THEIR
WILLINGNESS TO SUPPLY BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
FOR THIS AS WELL AS FOR PAST AND FUTURE VOLUMES
CONTRIBUTING TO THIS VOLUME:
WRITERS:
JESSMA BLOCKWICK, KEVIN BUNNELL, ANNE FISHER,
LOUISE LINDSEY, JANET KLEMPERER, PETE PALMER,
TRISH RAKESTRAW, and PHIL WAGGENER
COMPUTER FORMATTING AND COPY WORK:
PETE PALMER,
COMMITTEE CHAIRPERSON:
PETE PALMER
PHOTOS:
MARK STEINER
This volume, along with Volumes 1 through 17 represents an attempt
to recognize and preserve memories of as many residents as possible
who live or have lived at Frasier Meadows Retirement Community.
FMRC
MINI-BIOGRAPHIES
VOLUME 18
Byland, Jean
DeVries, Connie and Bert
Cotts, Ron and Ellen
Dixon, Linda
Ewan, Alicelee
Fisher, Stephen and Anne
Harms, Bobbie
Heiple, Clint
Imel, Ray and Dorothy
McCarthy, Rose
Rosenberg, Bernice
Scholten, James and Priscilla
Waggener, Phil and Elaine
Note: Master volumes which include all Mini-Biographies written at
Frasier Meadows Retirement Community are located in the History
Room across from the central stairway on the Main Floor.
FMRC
JEAN BYLAND
In June 2011, Jean Byland moved to Frasier Meadows Retirement
Community from New Jersey to be near her Boulder daughter.
Big move! Jean misses her old friends, but is enjoying Frasier
and its activities, and thinks the climate is great. She loves young
children and taught for thirty-six years.
Jean was brought up in a small coal mining town (Madera, Pennsylvania). She was the youngest in her family and only twelve
years old when her mom died and twenty when her dad died. She
continued living at home and was one of only fifty in her high
school graduating class.
She decided to be a teacher because she enjoyed children so much. She
took her training at a Pennsylvania State Teachers College which she loved. She
got her first teaching job when a recruiter flew her and others to New Jersey to
visit a school. This was Jean's first airplane ride which was definitely memorable
AND she got a teaching job. She happily continued on in the education field and
taught all elementary grades plus special education. Her favorite grade is first
grade.
The state of California appealed to Jean and she was going to move there,
but changed her mind when she met the man who was to become her husband.
Jean married Tom Byland and stayed in New Jersey. They had two daughters.
One still lives in New Jersey, the other lives in the mountains near Boulder.
Jean and Tom had made extensive retirement plans and sold their New Jersey home. Then Tom died suddenly of a heart attack in early 2011. Three months
later Jean moved to Boulder and then on to Frasier.
Jean has enjoyed traveling a great deal -- Europe, Australia, Alaska Hawaii.
She is so glad she did as much as she did.
Jean is enjoying her new life at Frasier. She especially enjoys the singing
group, swimming, exercise, memoirs, art, and bingo.
Louise Lindsey
ELLEN AND RON COTTS
Ellen and Ron Cotts moved to Frasier Meadows
Retirement Community, Apartment #181 FN, in
April 2011, from a retirement community in Silver
Spring, Maryland. They have both lived stimulating, world-wide lives!
Ron was born and grew up in Kansas City,
Missouri. He received his BA and MA in chemistry from the University of Kansas City and followed up with a PHD from Kansas State University. His education was interrupted by World War II when he served in the infantry, primarily in the Philippines and Korea. Ron’s work was in research and development for manufacturers of building materials. He lived in Evanston (IL),
Overland Park (KS) and Devon (PA). In Evanston he was active in working for
Fair Housing. He has three daughters.
Ellen was born in LaGrange, IL and moved to Georgia when she was 14 - at
that age a traumatic move. She graduated from the University of North Carolina,
majoring in Economics. Ellen worked in Hartford, CT, married and had three
daughters (just as Ron!). She later continued her education at the Wharton School
(U of PA) where she received an MBA in 1978. After graduation, Ellen worked
for Conrail for 10 years as a Manager of Economic Analysis.
Ron and Ellen met in the bridge club of their church. They were married in
1983. When they both retired they became Peace Corps Volunteers in Kenya.
Ron taught science and ceramics and Ellen taught finance in the Rift Valley Institute of Science and Technology, a post-secondary technical vocational school. After completion of their Peace Corps service, Ellen was hired as Peace Corps staff
(Administrative Officer) in Kyrgyzstan. After a little over two years she was
transferred to Ukraine. In both countries Ron worked for the American Embassy.
After retiring for a second time in 1999, Ellen continued to work for Peace Corps
as a trouble shooter - traveling to several countries a year for about a month each
time.
In 2004 Ron and Ellen moved to Riderwood, an Erickson retirement community in Maryland. It is a huge well-run complex (2800 residents). They enjoyed it a great deal and hated to think of leaving. However, they decided it
would be best to live near family and Ron’s children are all close to Frasier.
(Ellen’s are on the East Coast but not necessarily permanently settled). To facilitate this move they called the Unitarian Universalist congregations in Colorado
and asked if any members lived in continuing care communities. They then came
for a visit and decided that Frasier was the answer!!
After moving in they took on BIG jobs. Ellen ran the 2011 Thanks-Giving
Party for Frasier staff and Ron has built two much appreciated cabinets for their
church. They both play bridge and enjoy playing with some of the Frasier groups.
They find Frasier to be a wonderful home, full of interesting people and fascinating programs and trips.
Welcome to an active, intelligent and stimulating couple!
Louise Lindsey
CONNIE AND BERT DeVRIES
Bert DeVries believes he survived being held captive in his
mid-teens because of his “absolute conviction” that he
would live through the ordeals. He was a Dutch lad growing up in the Dutch East Indies when the Japanese invaded
and his family was interned and eventually split into separate camps. Amid the fear and uncertainty, apart from his
parents, Bert maintained his morale and health by devising
wise tactics such as boiling his clothes and growing vegetables from scrounged plants and seeds, while attempting
to conserve his energy. He gave pep talks to his brother, who survived a severe
case of dysentery. Both boys labored with a crew building a railroad while imprisoned.
It was after WWII ended that Bert faced the greatest risk of being killed.
When the Japanese abandoned the prisoners in the fall of 1945, Indonesian rebels
went to war against the Dutch. En route from the camp to a safe house, Bert and
his brother hid for two nights in a tree, evading the warring rebels. It was the Tibetan Gurkhas who came to the rescue of the Dutch against the local rebels.
In August of that year, the boys learned that their mother had died months before. Their father had been picked up in early 1944 because of his government
position in the Ministry of Economic Affairs, and survived torture. Reunited with
his four children, Mr. DeVries was summoned by his government back to The
Hague, near Bert’s grandfather and extended family in Holland.
Prior to departing Indonesia in March 1946, Bert was able to retrieve the family silver from where he had hid it when the Japanese invasion was imminent. As
the family hurried to leave home and belongings, Bert watched neighbors bury
their valuables in the back yard. He decided to go to extra effort to safeguard the
silver. He dug down and under the sidewalk in order to elude vertical probes. Enemy looters unearthed the goods of the neighbors, but Bert found the DeVries silver just where he had placed it.
Bert had no schooling during the war. In post-war Holland, a country still reeling from devastation by the Germans, he finished high school in three years rather
than the normal five. In 1951, his father accepted a Washington D.C. position as
director of Economics in Tropical Agriculture in Third World Countries. Bert was
thrilled with the opportunity to emigrate. “It was fascinating to come to the U.S.
— the land of cowboys and Indians.”
Bert earned a bachelor’s degree in three years at the University of Maryland,
graduating in 1954 with a degree in chemical engineering, and went to work in
the Research and Development Engineering Department of General Foods in Hoboken, New Jersey. He worked on the creation of Jello, instant coffee, Tang, Kool
-Aid and Dream Whip. His application for U.S. citizenship in 1954 made Bert eligible for military service. He was drafted in 1956 and assigned to the Army prosthetics research lab at Walter Reed.
On a blind date in 1958, Bert met Connie Cassidy, a nurse at Providence Hospital. Among the first attributes Bert noticed about Connie: “She’s a great listener.” Connie was reared in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, in the state’s north central region, near Johnstown. She was trained as a nurse at Pittsburgh’s Mercy Hospital.
Connie and Bert were married after a five-month courtship, which included
many late-night bridge games with the other nurses after work. Connie also attended Catholic University, before they welcomed four babies between June 1960
and June 1963: twins Tina and Mary, Lexi, and Jim.
When the children were in grade school, Connie earned a degree in psychiatric nursing, graduating summa cum laude from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. She had a rewarding career in psychiatric nursing, until Bert needed her
assistance with his business. She returned to school again — this time to study accounting — and managed the books for QUAD (Quality – Assurance and Development), a sewage treatment odor control systems business co-founded by Bert,
while residing in Dayton, Ohio.
Bert holds 11 patents: nine of his patents are for odor control systems; one patent relates to the prevention of moisture in the insulation of refrigeration facilities, and in air conditioned buildings in humid climates; and one patent is for a
one-way valve in packaging, specifically designed to let gases escape from coffee
packaging without letting air in.
While in corporate R&D, Bert’s dream was to have the freedom to initiate
his ideas without having to fight for their acceptance or push them through the bureaucracy. He applied his ingenuity and problem solving skills for the benefit of
several companies prior to developing QUAD. Among those were: Bird’s Eye in
Albion, New York; Topco in Chicago, and First National Stores in Boston, and
Liberal Markets in Kettering, Ohio.
Bert and Connie moved to Frasier Meadows in May 2011, having spent their
earlier retirement in Palm Desert, California. Their daughter, Mary, and two
grandchildren live in Niwot. Daughters Tina and Lexi reside in New Jersey and
Minnesota, respectively, and their son, Jim, lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Trish Rakestraw
LINDA DIXON
Enthusiasm radiates from Linda Dixon. She was
born and raised in the small coal-mining town of
Vestaburg in southwestern Pennsylvania. After
graduating from high school in 1958, she took her
enthusiasm for science and math to California
State Teachers’ College (now California University of Pennsylvania) and graduated with a degree
in Biology (minor in Chemistry and History) in
1962. She got hooked there on genetics, as a perfect blend of science and math, and it has been her passion ever since. Following
momentary confusion about her background (California in PA??), she was admitted to graduate school at Berkeley and received her MS in Genetics there in 1964.
While there she was the TA in the first-ever Behavioral Genetics Summer Institute
Subsequently, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to attend the University of
Würtzburg in Germany for 1964-1965. Following that, one of the professors in
attendance at that summer institute in Berkeley invited her to the University of Illinois for a Ph.D. which she received in Behavioral/Quantitative Genetics in 1967.
That field of study, with regard to humans, was so new that it was housed at the
time in the College of Agriculture, Dairy Science Department.
After completing her Ph.D. she obtained a post-doctoral appointment at the
Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado for 1968-69. In
1969 she joined the Biology Department of CU-Denver where she remained until
retiring in 2004. She enjoyed sabbaticals at the Waxman Institute in New Jersey,
the University of Hawaii, and Penn State, and had a wonderful time as a Professor
for the Semester-at-Sea program in 2000. While on sabbatical in Hawaii, she coauthored a book that introduces non-science students to the topic of Behavioral
Genetics; this later became adopted as a text in a number of schools, including being translated into Korean and used at a University in Korea.
Travel is another love after genetics, especially educational trips. After retirement, she has taken such trips on the Inland Waterway to Alaska, and through
the Panama Canal. In addition, she loves opera, games (poker, scrabble), hiking,
and educational seminars of all kinds.
Linda’s son, Robert, graduated from CU in 2005 with a major in International Relations and fluency in Spanish. He has traveled extensively in South
America. Her brother and sister-in-law live in Columbia MD and Tampa FL and
their daughter Christy lives in San Francisco.
As of July, 2011, Linda became an enthusiastic resident of FMRC.
Pete Palmer
ALICELEE EWAN
Alicelee Ewan was born on November 5, 1921 in
San Francisco. She moved with her family to Hawaii, where she lived until she was six years old,
then moved to Long Island. By the time that Alicelee was in high school, the family was back in
San Francisco. She spent her summers with her
grandparents in San Jose, and she graduated from
San Jose State in 1944, with a teaching degree.
Alicelee continued her education at Oregon State
College, where she earned a M.A. in counseling and guidance, while working
with Episcopal students for the Episcopal Church there. She met and married Edward Caulfield in 1946, and they moved to California to live. After eleven years
of marriage and four children, Alicelee found herself a widow. She taught elementary school and was a very busy single parent for eight years. In 1965, Alicelee met Ray Ewan at a San Jose State summer school class. They were married
for twenty years before he passed away.
Alicelee taught school in San Jose for 25 years. After retirement, she was a
docent at a project called History San Jose, which has programs that revolve
around historical buildings relocated to that site. Alicelee developed some educational programs for school children, who had field trips to a one-room schoolhouse, to experience what education was like in the "olden days." At age 89, she
retired for the second time!
This active woman has a love of travel and has made trips to many places,
including Greenland, Alaska, England, Scotland, Costa Rica, France, Austria,
Russia and Italy, many of these as Elderhostel trips.
She had visited Boulder quite often to be with her daughter Sharon and family, so
that is how Alicelee came to be here at Frasier Meadows. She moved in on April
1, 2011.
Alicelee has four children: Sharon in Boulder, Sara in California, Jan and
Rick in Alaska. She has eight grandchildren. Her interests here at Frasier include
walking, bird-watching, Pilates, book discussions and music.
Janet Klemperer
STEPHEN AND ANNE FISHER
Stephen and Anne lived in Boulder for 45 years
before moving into Frasier Meadows in June,
2011. They began their lives in widely different
areas, however. Stephen was born in Bucharest,
Romania and lived there until his middle teens.
His father was an eye doctor who had been critical of the Germans and was teaching in Mexico
City when European hostilities began. In 1940,
he decided his family should leave Romania and
emigrate to the U.S., which turned out to be a complicated endeavor. Stephen and
his mother and brother first went to Italy where they were temporarily stranded
because Italy had entered the war on the side of the Axis. They eventually got to
Greece, took a ship to Portugal, then across the Atlantic to New York, and ended
up in Boston. Two years later, Stephen had learned English well enough to enter
Harvard where he graduated with an AB in Chemistry, then switched to History
and received a Ph.D. in Near East studies in 1949, focused on the Ottoman Empire and its Balkan neighbors.
Anne was a Boston native majoring in English at Radcliffe when she met
Stephen in a Shakespeare class at Harvard in 1943. She interrupted her studies to
serve as a civilian code-breaker and translator for the Army Signal Corps in Washington, D.C. After the war ended in 1945 she returned to Radcliffe, changed her
major to History, and graduated with her original class of 1946.
After receiving his Ph.D, Stephen moved to Washington D.C. where he was
an Intelligence Research Specialist with the State Department from 1951 to 1953.
While there, he and Anne were married in 1951. They then moved to New York
where Stephen worked at the Mid-European Studies Center from 1953 to 1955.
He then landed an academic job at Wayne State University in Michigan where he
taught for 11 years before moving to the History Department at CU in 1966.
While at CU Stephen recognized the need for a focused journal in his area
of expertise. In 1967 he founded The East-European Quarterly which published
short scholarly papers by contributors from Europe and America from 1967 to
2010. He also founded the East European Monograph series which published
over 700 larger works during that same period. Although he “retired” in 1989, he
continued teaching summer session courses for several additional years. During
his time on the CU faculty he traveled extensively in eastern Europe, meeting
with many East European heads of State, intellectuals, and prominent political
figures.
While their two daughters were young, Anne learned word processing and
worked at home as a free-lance editor, indexer and typesetter. Their elder daughter, Wendy, has returned to Boulder after living for some time in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia and now has two grown daughters of her own. Wendy’s younger sister,
Nancy and her husband Pete Tyson, a world handball expert on the faculty of the
University of Texas, live in a small town north of Austin, Texas.
Travel has been one of the joys Stephen and Anne have shared. In addition
to Europe, they have made extensive visits to southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand and several of the larger countries in South America. Other pleasures are
grandchildren, classical music, theater and opera (Stephen), while Anne has loved
small-boat cruising off the Maine coast and Colorado powder skiing, both crosscountry and alpine. Now they are enjoying a relaxed and comfortable full retirement at friendly FMRC.
Pete Palmer
BOBBIE HARMS
One of the biggest things in Bobbie Harms’ life
these days is Community Food Share of Boulder
and Broomfield Counties. She spends a lot of
time there as a receptionist, and is charged up by
being part of a nationwide network devoted to
feeding families.
As she unfolds the better parts of her life, it is
clear that she is most devoted to work that raises
the quality of the lives of others. This engagement on behalf of others began early. As a child, she stocked shelves and carried
groceries at the store her father managed in Newton, Kansas, near Wichita.
At 17 she qualified for admission to Colorado College. Before she could
enroll, her father died. That sad news changed every thing. Back she come to
Newton and entered the music program at Wichita State College. There she discovered she could earn a teaching certificate with 60 hours of credit. Family finances being tight, she took the quickest route into the profession of teaching.
The early years were spent happily with elementary children. Later she was able
to return to Wichita State to finish her bachelors and masters degrees. After marriage and three children, these credentials carried her to the inner city of Wichita
where she taught again at the elementary level. Boosting the quality of life there
was a far bigger challenge than her work earlier with more rural children—but rewarding nevertheless.
Ken Harms, Bobbie’s husband to be, was taken into World War II at age 17.
After service he returned to town and began working for the Veterans Administration. After their marriage, Ken continued in his lifelong career as a counselor of
veterans, and Bobbie devoted herself to raising three children who grew to share
her values of contributing to the betterment of others. The eldest, Greg, is now
the Director of the Boulder Homeless Shelter; the second, Brian, is an engineer
for Qualquam a local company where he holds several patents; and the third, Julie, lives in Basalt where she is a landscape architect and conserver of public
lands.
A fascinating interlude in the Harms’ history was their acquisition of land
and a cabin near Marble, Colorado, the town that produced much of the marble
that built the great monuments in our nation’s capital. Ken, Bobbie, and the kids
spent many vacations there and informed themselves about the up and down history of the town, the marble quarry, and surroundings. For years, after Marble vacations, Ken and Bobbie returned to their work in Wichita. By then, the three
children had their jobs in Boulder and Basalt
As retirement time approached one can guess that there were questions
about mom and dad moving west too. “When are you going to put your names on
the Frasier waiting list?” Ken’s encounter with early stage lung cancer catalyzed
that idea. Soon the two were in Boulder, moving into Frasier in January, 2011.
Sadly, within six months, Bobbie had joined the many other Frasier widows. She
is like them...
“For they have moved beyond the debilitation of their grief.
They are preoccupied with living.
They enjoy the bounty of the harvest.
They invest emotions in operas from the “Met”
The see the full moon at sunrise.
They are centered again.”
Bunnell
And Bobbie is centered on the idea that needy people can be fed a proper
diet---if we can just manage our food resources properly, and if we can wisely assemble surplus food and distribute it judiciously all across this nation and pass it
unfailingly and fairly to those in need of it.
I believe Frasier folks will be hearing from Bobbie Harms, for she is a doer
of good things.
Kevin Bunnell
CLINT HEIPLE
If you see a helmeted motorcyclist leaving the
north parking garage, you might think it is one of
our youthful employees. More than likely, however,
it is Clint Heiple, who moved into Frasier North in
February 2011 from his nearby Boulder home. Motorcycling is just one of his many enthusiasms,
which include alpine skiing, bridge, tennis, hiking
(especially in Utah’s slot canyons), photography,
bicycle touring, trail building, wild mushroom
hunting, and woodworking (he built an addition on his home and most of the furniture for it). Somehow he has also found time for wide-ranging travels to such
places as Antarctica, Alaska, Kenya, Tanzania, and Tibet.
Clint’s education and career have focused on the science of metallurgy. He
won a National Merit Scholarship to attend Stanford University and received a
B.S. in materials science in 1961. Upon graduation he was awarded a National
Science Foundation scholarship and attended the University of Sheffield in the
UK, where he received a master of metallurgy degree. That was followed by a
Ph.D. in metallurgical engineering from the University of Illinois in 1966.
After a postdoctoral appointment in southern California, Clint joined the
Physical Metallurgy Group at Rocky Flats, where his primary research interests
were stainless steel welding, nondestructive inspection using acoustic emission,
beryllium metallurgy, and surface analysis. He authored or coauthored more than
75 papers, one of which received an award from the American Welding Society
for the best research paper of the year. He was also named Engineer of the Year at
Rocky Flats in 1985.
Clint retired from Rocky Flats in 1992 but continued to use his expertise as
a consultant at Los Alamos National Laboratory for the next 10 years. He is past
president of the Acoustic Emission Working Group and continues to be responsible for its financial and tax affairs as associate treasurer.
Clint has two daughters, one in Boulder and the other in Hawaii. He and his
wife Joanne were divorced in 1979 but cooperated in raising the girls and continue to maintain an amicable relationship. Joanne preceded Clint at Frasier Meadows, moving into Frasier East in 2010.
Phil Waggener
DOROTHY AND RAY IMEL
Ray C. Imel, Jr. was born at the Boulder Sanitarium, November 1, 1929, weighing 2 pounds 11
ounces and was 21 inches long. The family
moved to Jamestown in 1934 where his father
was a gold miner and his mother, Genevieve
Robinson Imel was a housewife. Ray and his
younger brother Don grew up there and enjoyed
the two-room schoolhouse for eight years. For
high school they commuted to Boulder. The
mines closed in 1942 and Ray’s father bought a pool hall, Bills Billiards, where
Ray worked weekends, serving beer and racking balls on the tables.
In 1948 his dad bought Timber Tavern and built Tulagi on the Hill at CU;
Ray’s second brother, Terry, was born. Ray worked at both his father’s places
while going to CU, but joined the Air Force in 1950. He went to Russian Language School at Syracuse University for 12 months and was eventually stationed
at Misawa, Japan; he was discharged as a Staff Sargent.
Following his Air Force experience, he went to the University of California,
Berkeley and majored in Russian Studies but did not graduate. He came back to
Boulder to work with his father and brothers as the Coors Beer Distributor for
Boulder and Gilpin Counties and the north Denver suburbs. Ray and his brothers
bought the business from their father in 1962 and sold it in 1988 after being in
business for 35 years. So Ray has been “at leisure” for 23 years.
At a fraternity brother’s party in 1958 he met Dottie and promptly proposed
later that night. “You’re crazy” she said and left the next day to go home to Dallas
for the summer. As soon as she got back to Denver they started dating and were
married two months later, on November 1, 1958.
Ray’s interests include cooking, travelling, ghost towns, photography, tennis, gin rummy, poker, and bridge. He is also a voracious reader.
Dorothy Myers Imel was born in Stoughton, Wisconsin, July 29, 1934 and
was in such a hurry she beat the doctor to the hospital. Her parents owned a laundry and dry-cleaning plant. After WWII they sold the plant and moved to a small
town near Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. Between her junior and senior years in high
school her parents moved to Dallas, Texas, and she graduated there from Hillcrest
High School in 1952.
She then went to Texas State College for Women where she majored in
Child Development and minored in Elementary Education. For one semester she
attended the Merrill Palmer School in Detroit, Michigan. Graduating in January,
1956, she obtained a job teaching kindergarten in the Port Arthur Texas school
system. In that same year, she and a friend from Merrill Palmer were hired by the
Denver Public Schools and they joined up in Denver. After she married Ray on
November 1, 1958 she moved to Boulder.
She has published a reference book “Goddesses in World Mythology” and
is working on a book about her great uncle who was killed in the Civil War at the
battle of Prairie Grove, Arkansas.
Her interests are writing, cooking, travel, bridge, reading and volunteering.
Ray and Dottie have four sons, Ray Imel III, Randall Imel, Russell Imel,
and Robert Imel, and five grandchildren, Jackson, Kayleigh, Jack, Katelyn and
Abby.
Jessma Blockwick
ROSE McCARTHY
Rose’s youthful looks and spirit belie her 91
years. An only child, she was born in Mound
City, Illinois on December 4, 1920. As a child,
she and her mother moved to various cities in
Ohio and Illinois where her father, an accountant,
found work.
Following her graduation from high school,
she landed a job working for a newspaper at the
grand salary of $8 per week. She managed to
save enough from this to buy herself a fur coat! She remembers the Great Depression of 1929 when she says “a dime really meant something”; the poverty and
joblessness of the times made a lasting impression on her, even as a child of only
nine. At twenty-one she held a job in the accounting division of the Illinois Highway Department at the vastly improved salary of $80 a month
Rose vividly remembers the terrifying Great Flood of 1937 in Mound City,
IL when the water level from the Mississippi River actually rose to the roof of
their house.
Rose married Bob McCarthy in 1947, and they first came to Colorado on
their honeymoon in Colorado Springs. Their elder son, Michael, became an attorney in Denver after receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of
Michigan and his law degree from the University of Colorado. Michael’s wife,
Dr. Marilyn Dougherty, is an ophthalmologist and a member of the Board of Trustees of Frasier Meadows Retirement Community. Sadly, the McCarthy’s younger
son, Bobby, died at only 51 in 2008. Rose is proud of her granddaughter, Brooke,
an attorney living in Denver and her grandson, Fenton, who has his M.D. but is
doing advanced studies in Philadelphia in specialized heart and lung surgery.
Rose was living in Springfield, IL until about a year ago when health issues
made it advisable to move nearer to her son, Michael. She lived briefly in Assisted Living at The Academy until she was able to move to FMRC in September
2011. She is happy to be here and has made many friends already! Among her
interests are reading newspapers and travel, especially to Paris; and she loves
milk. “One of the best things I ever did”. she says, “was to have a knee replacement!”.
Anne Fisher
BERNICE F. ROSENBERG
Bernice F. Rosenberg was born in Chicago on
January 19, 1920, the daughter of hard-working
and ambitious immigrants to America. Her parents' families came from rural Pale, which was
part of Russia or Poland at various times in history. Bernice grew up in the rich cultural environment of Chicago, although the Great Depression
affected everyone's lives very much. It was then
that she was inspired to become a social worker.
Like her parents, she was ambitious and hard-working and was able to work her
way through college.
She then completed her social work education at the University of Chicago
School of Social Service. While at the University she met a very appealing young
man, Dr. Sol S. Rosenberg, a psychologist, and they were married in April, 1951.
Shortly afterwards they moved to Peoria, Illinois, where they lived happily for 40
years. Bernice was able to combine social work, teaching at Bradley University,
and family life, and considered herself very fortunate. When they tired of Illinois
winters, Bernice and her husband moved to Sarasota, Florida, where Bernice continued to work during the 20 years that they lived there, as did her husband. Their
professions made it possible to travel to many places in the U.S. and abroad.
Over the years Bernice had occasion to visit Colorado several times, beginning with work at Fitzsimons General Hospital in Denver for the Red Cross after
World War Two. Two of her children attended C.U. in Boulder, so after her husband died in 2009, Bernice decided to move to Colorado to be near her children
and their families. Her daughter Judith is an attorney in California; daughter Deborah is a psychologist in Denver, and her son David is a real estate broker in Colorado. Bernice has two grandchildren in college, Jacob and Claire Andreas.
Bernice came to Frasier Meadows in January, 2011 and finds the facility, the
staff and the residents a perfect place to be.
Bernice Rosenberg and Janet Klemperer
JAMES AND PRISCILLA SCHOLTEN
Jim grew up in Spirit Lake, Iowa with his parents
and one younger brother. He graduated from Cornell College in Iowa, majoring in music education. His father was a rural veterinarian, his
mother a homemaker. Jim was drafted into the
army after college and served two years stationed
at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the 440th
Army Band. His duty assignment was in the Base
band. His first teaching job was at Sioux Center,
Iowa for two years as director of the high school band. His next teaching position
was at Eagle Grove, Iowa as a “traveling” vocal music teacher in five separate
buildings for kindergarten through the sixth grade.
Priscilla grew up south of Mason City, Iowa, with her parents and one
younger brother. Her father was a farmer and her mother was a homemaker. She
graduated from Iowa State Teachers College (now Northern Iowa University) in
Cedar Falls, Iowa. Her first position was teaching physical education in Eagle
Grove, Iowa where she, too, was a “traveling teacher” in grades kindergarten
through junior high school.
Jim and Pris were married during their first Christmas break, with the
school superintendent’s permission as then required. In the four years they spent
in Eagle Grove they each completed master’s degrees at Drake University in Des
Moines, Iowa. Jim also served as organist and choirmaster in St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church in Ames, Iowa during that time.
The Scholtens then moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan while Jim pursued his
doctorate in music education. Pris taught full-time in the city schools and parttime in the summer at the University of Michigan teaching swimming for seniors
with arthritis. Their daughter, Catherine, was born there.
Jim then took a position at Ohio University in music education; he was
twice awarded a grant from the National Arts Foundation to conduct research (and
eventually publish) about a capello shape-note singing in America, especially in
churches in northern Alabama. He also received a grants from the Ohio University College of Education under the sponsorship of the United States AID program
to do consulting in Swaziland, South Africa.
Pris was a consultant/teacher for three years in the first Head Start programs in southeastern Ohio, then taught in the Athens city schools for 35years,
and one year at Ohio University.
The Scholtens enjoyed summer motoring trips to the East Coast while
Catherine was attending Wesleyan College in Connecticut. They hiked most of
the trails of the Smoky Mountains and their favorite Blue Ridge Highway areas
many times.
They arrived at Frasier in the summer of 2011, and are very happy to be
here, enjoying their many new acquaintances, the Colorado weather, and, especially, being near Catherine and John and their 5-year-old granddaughter, Gabrielle who live in nearby Gunbarrel.
Anne Fisher
PHIL AND ELAINE WAGGENER
Elaine and Phil both have midwestern
roots. Elaine was born in Lawrence, Kansas, the youngest of three daughters in a
family that was always on the move. Her
parents, both of whom were seminarians
and educators, alternated between church
and campus. Among the family’s residences were parsonages in several parts of Kansas, including Kansas City; an apartment in
Philadelphia; and a house on the campus of a small church-related college
in Wadley, Alabama, where her father was its president.
The next stop was Columbus, Ohio, where Elaine began attending Ohio
State while her dad was head of the social sciences department at nearby
Otterbein College. But an urge to spread her wings led her to join a sister in
Tucson, where she enrolled at the University of Arizona. That’s where she
met Phil, who was beginning his senior year as a journalism major and editor of the student newspaper.
Phil also had migrated from the midwest. His father was a machinist in
the Detroit auto industry and his mother a teacher before moving to the dry
climate of Tucson for health reasons.
Phil and Elaine were married in 1950 and began their life together in a
small copper mining town, Miami, Ariz., where Phil was the lone reporter
and editor of the weekly newspaper and Elaine worked for a bank. He was
called to active duty in the Air Force in 1952 and assigned to Air Defense
Command headquarters in Colorado Springs, which was engaged in a crash
effort to strengthen the nation’s air defenses in reaction to the buildup of the
Soviet Union’s fleet of long-range bombers. He started as a public information officer but later moved into intelligence analysis and reporting. That
experience led to a Ford Foundation fellowship at the University of Chicago and an offer of a position as an analyst at the CIA in Northern Virginia.
He and Elaine hesitated to leave beautiful Colorado for the humidity and
congestion of the Washington area, but the lure of new challenges and experiences won out. Phil held a variety of positions in the CIA’s analytical
directorate, including a year-long assignment in London, and ended up as
deputy director of the component that assessed foreign military programs
and capabilities and provided intelligence support to negotiators seeking
verifiable arms control agreements with the Soviet Union.
After retiring from government service Phil worked for a private research organization, the Center for Naval Analyses, for 10 years and later as
a free-lance writer and editor—an avocation that he continues to pursue today. He also volunteered at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
During their nearly 40 years in Northern Virginia the Waggeners were
active in church and local affairs. Elaine served as a volunteer information
specialist at the Smithsonian Institution for many years and as a teacher’s
aide in inner-city D.C. She also worked as an administrative assistant at
George Washington University and for a Quaker nonprofit organization
called Partners for Productivity that promoted sound economic development in Africa. Both Waggeners enjoyed sailing on Chesapeake Bay and
flying about in small planes, with Phil as pilot and Elaine as navigator.
When their oldest daughter announced in 2003 that her husband’s company was transferring them from Massachusetts to Boulder, they decided
that they too would return to Colorado. To take a break from suburbia they
opted to try urban living in a Denver high-rise apartment building and
stayed for seven years before moving to Frasier in February 2011.
The Waggeners also have a son in Virginia, a daughter in the San Francisco bay area, seven grandchildren, and a great-grandson.
Phil Waggener