| Happy New Year everybody! A year ago, I could not have
imagined that I would be sitting here today, putting together a newsletter with so much
information about people who attended the American School of Madrid during the Sixties.
This has been an incredible experience! With the exception of 1962, we have found
someone from every class in the decade. Most classes now have Class Agents and more and
more of you get in touch with each other every day. Who has been found? Where are they
now?
Class of 1963:
Aurelio J. Cancio lives in Miami, Florida. He has been a plumber for the past 23
years and freelances as a web page designer and computer and internet consultant. He
married in Puerto Rico and has two daughters (ages 25 and 21). Aurelio is Co-Class Agent
with Bill Caram for the Class of 1963.
Bill Caram also lives in Miami, Florida and is Co-Class Agent for 1963.
Class of 1964:
Omer Pirinccioglu lives and works in New Hope, PA, and is the Class Agent for
1964.
Mark Johnson produces movies and television shows in Hollywood.
Class of 1965:
David Johnson works in advertising. He is married and has two daughters (17 and
13). They live on the Upper West Side of New York, three blocks from Zabar's food
emporium. David is the Class Agent for 1965.
Arne Mortensen is a VP of engineering for Qualcomm. He has most recently been
heading up software development in Chennai, India. He lives in Carlsbad, California with
his wife of 26 years and family. He has four children (ranging in age from 13-25) and two
grandchildren.
Vikki (Mortensen) Regier lives in San Diego, California. She
works as an English as a Second Language Instructor of adults in continuing education.
Vikki and her husband, Lloyd, have two sons.
David Robinson is married and has a six year old son. When he is not doing
computer related work, he enjoys the outdoors - sailing, camping, mountaineering, skiing,
biking, jogging. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
Class of 1966:
Jill (Echols) McMahon is married with two children (a boy 20 and a
girl 11). She lives in Sacramento, California. She has her own business as a
multi-line representative for various travel related companies.
Mimi Johnson lives with her husband, Bruce, and two daughters in
Santa Monica, California.
Ron Miller is on staff at the University of Michigan School of
Education. He is married and has two sons (ages 16 and 14). His wife, Mary Ellen, is a
registered nurse.
Class of 1967:
Peg Danos Castelli lives in Western Springs, Illinois with her husband, Frank
Castelli (ASM '66). Their two daughters (ages 22 and 20) are in college. Peg is a teacher
and currently works as an Inclusion Specialist and Study Skills teacher in a junior high.
She is the Class Agent for the ASM Class of 1967.
Ana Ferrer Illsen lives in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida with her husband, Alex and
three daughters (ages 25, 23 and 12). She works in Sales for a legal publisher.
Sarita Gómez Mola lives in The Hague, Netherlands with her husband and 9 year
old daughter. She works as an interpreter and maintains two interpreter related websites.
Maria (Conchita) González lives with her husband, Tom Santos in Santa Clara,
California. She works out of her home (traveling 80% of the time) as a course developer
and instructor for AT&T. She is also a reserve officier (Lieutenant Colonel) in the
U.S. Army.
Madeleine Goudi is an ex-banker, current beach bum, living in Miami. She has
three children.
Bettina Guidotti Whitley is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who lives
in Houston, Texas with her husband (a Psychologist). She has a 26 year old son and an 18
month old granddaughter.
Mari Carmen Marin lives in Oxford, England, with her husband, Steve, and two
sons (18 and 14 years). She was able to influence her sons with her love of languages and
her oldest speaks four languages and the youngest speaks three.
Connie Rodriguez is married and somewhere out there in Cyberland. She can be
contacted at AikRod@aol.com. Mary "Coke"
Caram is also somewhere out there and can be reached at cocola@gateway.net.
Doug Weldon is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Hamilton College
in Clinton, New York, where he and his family have been living since 1977.
Robert Zimmerman is married and he and his wife spend winters and springs in
Barcelona and fall in Chicago and Southwest Michigan. He is a former teacher who now works
as a writer. His daughter recently graduated from college.
Class of 1968:
Jim Karna is the Class Agent for 1968 and lives in Houston, Texas, where he works
as in-house counsel for Aramco Services Company, an oil services company. His wife Carol
is a programmer who works for a chemical company. Their son, age 5 and his stepdaughter,
age 12 live at home. He also has a 19 year old son from his first marriage who is in
college and hopes to be a musician.
Teresa Goudie lives in New York, where she is a clinical social worker. She is
married and has two children.
Gary "Oakie" Johnson graduated from law school and spent most of his
career in Phillips Petroleum Company's legal department. He has been in private practice
since 1990 in Denver, Colorado.
Leslie Smith Deely is in San Francisco, California. She is the Internal
Accounting Manager for a Local CPA firm. She lives in The City with her husband Tom (a
general contractor) and their daughters (13 and 10). There's more to life that commuting,
so the Deelys live 12 blocks from her office and she walks to and from work.
Albert Darna is in Madrid, Spain.
Janet Kevlin is in Miami, Florida.
Class of 1969:
Pedro Arbona is in Springfield, Virginia. After a successful 21 year career in the
military, he now does defense related work in Washington, D.C.
Ricardo (Ritchie) Daugherty is married with two children (a girl 16 and a boy
13). After four years in the military, he graduated from Georgetown University and now is
a Senior Vice President at a Miami bank. His wife, Celina, is from Argentina.
Carol Farron is the Community Development Director at Lodi Memorial Hospital in
Lodi, California. She attended ASM from February 1965 to June 1967. Had she stayed, she
would have graduated with the Class of 1969.
Michelle (Fearey LaGue) Mock is married with two children (a boy 16 and a girl
13). A former computer programmer, she is now a teacher (computer and Spanish for Pre-K
through 8th grade) and a part-time Vision Therapist. Her husband, Jerry, is a
computer programmer who currently designs irrigation controllers used in golf courses,
city parks and other large scale applications. The "West Coast" Mocks live in
Corona, California. Michelle is the Class Agent for 1969 and ASM Decade Liaison - Sixties.
Connie (Guzman) Coleman lives in Munich, Germany with her husband, Clay, and two
children (a girl 16 and a boy 13).
Joanne (Hattrick) McGrath lives in Panama with her husband and five children
(two girls ages 18 and 9, and three boys ages 15, 13 and 11).
Jamie Kevlin lives in Pottsville, Pennsylvania with his wife, Mary Joan, and 5
year old son. Jim is the Editor of the Republican and Herald newspapers in Pottsville and
puts out an electronic newsletter called "Letters from Home".
Bill Mock is Regional Translations Manager at Lucent Technologies in Miami,
Florida. He is married with four children. His wife, Carmina, teaches yoga. Their two
oldest daughters are in college. A son (14) and a daughter (11) are still at home. The
"East Coast" Mocks live in Miami, Florida.
Inge Möller-Rizo works as an interpreter at the United Nations. She lives in
New York .
Carmen (Pickett) Catalá just completed her MBA. She works as Assistant Vice
President Treasury Marketing and Sales at Barclay Bank in Miami, Florida. She lives in
Miami Lakes, with her husband, Rick, two daughters (19 and 16) and a son (10).
Henry Sanz is Vice President-Sales of a construction company. He lives in Miami
with his wife and two children. His daughter (12) is a level 9 gymnast and son (8) has a
black belt in Karate.
Al Schlundt is Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences and head of the
Biology program at Faulkner University in Montgomery, Alabama. He lives in Montgomery with
his wife and two sons.
Xamara Villar also lives in Miami. She is First Vice President at a Swiss bank.
Carmen, Ricardo and Xamara work within a stone's throw of each other.
[I hope I have not missed anybody. If I did, please tell me ASAP. If you are in
contact with any other Sixties ASMers who are not on this list, please let me know and ask
them to contact me.]
And now, more voices from the Sixties.
From Sarita Gómez Mola, ASM 1961-1967, writing from The Hague in
The Netherlands:
After ASM in 1967, I went to The American College of Switzerland, where I skied,
crammed in French, and managed to get my BA in 3 years, to then go and learn something
useful! After graduating I somehow directed my steps towards conference interpreting in
Paris, and ended up at the interpreters' school of the Sorbonne, based in former NATO
headquarters (emptied after France withdrew and NATO moved to Brussels, leaving the
simultaneous translation equipment behind). After some grueling years I got my diploma,
and in 1974 returned to Madrid to work as a free-lance interpreter.
In Madrid 1974-78 I saw a lot of Ana, Emy and Coke, and in the summer of 1978 at The
Red Lion, a British pub not 500 meters away from the old ASM, I met my husband Peter:
British from Northern Ireland, geologist on his first Shell posting, looking for chicas in
Madrid. Great guy. After four years of dining out together every single night (the things
one could do in Madrid!) Shell gave us a posting in Holland. So in 1982 we got married (to
my parents' audible sigh of relief), and came to live and work in The Hague. The next
posting was Norway, where in 1989 my daughter Vivian was born, view to the fjord.
Since 1992, we have been back in The Hague. The Hague has the sea, the government, the
embassies, the royal court, the international organizations, and plenty of wooded parks.
Here I continue to work like mad, plus do the mother thing. I jog, I swear, whenever I
can. And maintain two interpreter related websites on the side. All in the space of any
given day.
My father Miguel sadly died in 1985. My sister Vivian, her daughter Sarita (born 1988),
and my mother Sara currently live in Austin, Texas. I visit the U.S. often and have been
known to show up in South Beach and Fort Lauderdale. I keep an apartment in Madrid and go
back once a year.
Although I've been terrible at replying to ASM friends, I follow this permanent
electronic reunion closely and enjoy it immensely. Can't wait till we start sending each
other carefully doctored .jpgs.
Love to all!! ****SARITA****
Sarita can be contacted at: sarita_gomezmola@compuserve.com
From David Robinson '65
I graduated from ASM in '65 - having spent the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades
there. One great memory was going to see The Beatles at Madrid's Plaza de Toros.
Like others that I regard this high school experience as wonderfully unique and very
different from growing up in one's native country. When I returned to the US for college
at the University of North Carolina, I definitely felt out of place but managed to get
through and get a degree in computer science and religion in '69.
From my computer work, I got a programming job at an IBM research lab and avoided the
Vietnam War till my lottery number passed into the safe zone. I then spent about a year
travelling overland from Istanbul to Nepal, and back. Roughly six months of that time I
spent hiking in the Himalayas. I came back and worked for the summer at the Colorado
Outward Bound School - more camping, climbing, etc.
I moved to Boston, where I had a girlfriend; and then had over roughly ten years a
variety of computer jobs, girlfriends, stints in graduate school, and the experience of
starting a software consulting business. But the snow, and the racism of Boston, wore me
down - so when the opportunity came up I moved the San Francisco area and have been here
for the past fourteen years. I have worked for mostly small software companies doing a
variety of sales, marketing, and business development jobs. I just keep looking for that
gold mine.
I am married, have been for seven years (!) and have a wonderful six year old son. No
other marriages; no other children. I spend as much time as possible outdoors - sailing,
camping, mountaineering, skiing, biking, and jogging. My wife enjoys these activities as
does my son.
I am looking forward to going to one of the ASM reunions sometime soon.
David Robinson can be contacted at: adavidr@worldnet.att.net
From David Johnson ('65)
After graduating from ASM I went for about three months to study French at the Sorbonne
in Paris, then returned to the U.S. where I escaped the Vietnam-hungry draft by the skin
of my teeth by enrolling in college. I graduated in 1970 from the University of Missouri
School of Journalism with bachelors in journalism.
After almost ten years growing up in Spain, I felt like a stranger in America, so I
returned to Madrid and practiced journalism wherever I could, including temporary jobs at
the Spanish news agency EFE and also Associated Press. With an introduction from the
latter I came to New York and switched my sights to advertising. I've been doing that ever
since and also nearly got an MBA in marketing and intl. business from NYU (never finished
my thesis or computer requirement, I hated COBOL and FORTRAN).
If you watch much TV I'm sure over the years you've seen my work for clients like Pepsi
Cola, Mug Root Beer, Dupont Stainmaster carpets, AT&T, GE and probably this winter for
Campbell's soup ( if you see a spot with a Fred Flintstone thermos, that's me). I work at
BBDO in midtown, my title is Senior Vice President, Senior Creative Director, but I still
say I'm mostly just a writer.
I'm married to a lovely English lady, we have two daughters 17 and 13 and live on the
Upper West Side three blocks from Zabar's food emporium.
Recently I finished a book about my first five years in Spain in what was then a
fishing village called Torremolinos. After visiting it this spring and seeing what it had
become, I wanted to capture in words some of what it once was. I'm now looking for a
literary agent and a publisher.
My sister Mimi is married with two daughters and lives in Santa Monica, California. My
brother Mark is a successful movie producer in L.A. (he won an Oscar for "Rain
Man)". He lives in Brentwood so close to where OJ did, I watched the white bronco
drive past Mark's house in that live TV chase.
David is the Class Agent for 1965 and can be contacted at: DERJ490@aol.com
This newsletter is distributed by Michelle (Fearey LaGue) Mock (ASM '69) on the
first of each month. If you wish to receive a copy of future newsletters via e-mail,
please send a message to MFeareyASM@aol.com . Past
newsletters can be found on line at < http://www.gutech.com/asm/
>. Please check out the Official ASM web site at < http://www.amerschmad.org > and the
"Unofficial" ASM web site at < http://gutech.com/asm/
>. Please register and fill out the questionnaires at both sites (even if you were only
at ASM a short time and did not graduate in Madrid). |