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Voice of the Sixties (Vol. 2, No. 1) - Jan. 1999


 

by Michelle (Fearey LaGue) Mock - ASM '69

 

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).