Fall 2014 | Volume 12, Number 1
INSIDE
THIS ISSUE:
Chuck Antonio
Beth Pye
Chuck Bennett
Beth Anderson
Fredonia Church
Honors Jackson Bush
Alumni Weekend 2014
Donors
Angela and Alan Giles:
Legacies of Education
The Gordon State College
2013 Experience
22%
2,758 Full-Time Students
1,429 Part-Time Students
Enrollment by Degree
2%
5%
1%
Associate of Science in
Nursing
3%
22%
Associate of Arts
Associate of Science
28%
of students originate
from Henry County
150
Graduates in first Fall
semester graduation
ceremonies
93%
of full-time first-time
students receive
financial aid
13
4
10
19
24
CONTENTS
Bachelor of Arts
39%
Bachelor of Science
Bachelor of Science in
Education
RN to BSN Completion
Degree
Student-Faculty
Ratio
21:1
$141
Dedication ...................................................................2
million
contributed to the
regional economy
Gordon State College President: Max Burns, Ph.D.
Publisher: Rhonda Toon, VP, Institutional Advancement
26%
6%
5%
22-24
18-21
17 and under
as a Result of Institutional
Related Spending
374
1,044
OFF-Campus
Chuck Antonio:
A Career Up In The Clouds ..................................4
Beth Pye:
Knowing Where To Look ....................................10
Chuck Bennett:
A Fifth Generation Charlestonian................... 13
Class notes: Natalie Rischbieter
Design: Niki Walker, TWG Plus
Fredonia Church Honors Jackson Bush..... 24
Photography: Photography: Gary W. Meek, Peter Boltz, Tamara
Boatwright and Natalie Rischbieter. Heather Beauchamp shot the Class
of ’64 photo on the back page and photos for the Class of ’64 reunion
dinner. Jeopardy Productions provided the photo of Marc Muneal and
Alex Trebeck. Mary Boltz provided additional photography of Alumni
Weekend 2014.
Campus News ......................................................... 26
Writers: Peter Boltz, Tamara Boatwright, Rhonda Toon and Raven Willis.
Alumni News ........................................................... 35
Class Notes...............................................................48
Donors ........................................................................ 53
Acknowledgements:
Beth Pye of Gordon State College’s Hightower Library provided research
support. Candi Babcock provided research and other essential support in
the Advancement Office.
© 2014, Gordon State College.
Gordon State College is part of the University System of Georgia.
ON-Campus
President’s Letter .....................................................3
Beth Anderson:
Everyday Is Different
at Blue Fox Designs .............................................. 19
Editor: Peter Boltz
Job Creation
Statistics courtesy of Dr. Kimbrely Clark, director of GSC Institutional Research.
Fall 2014, Volume 12, Number 1
On the Cover:
Angela and Alan Giles believe in education so strongly that they have
rewritten their will to include a legacy gift to Gordon State College. Their
story starts on page 53.
Student Age 63%
25 and over
PRESIDENT’S REPORT
The President’s Report is produced by the Office of Advancement,
Vice President Rhonda Toon, Gordon State College, 419 College Drive,
Barnesville, Georgia 30204; 678-359-5124; fax 678-359-5738;
www.gordonstate.edu.
Make Gordon part of your legacy.
Include the Gordon State College
Foundation in your estate planning.
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 1
DEDICATION
He was a familiar face at many
Gordon functions across a time period
that stretched half a century. Whether
Gordon was known at the time as
Gordon Military College, Gordon
College or Gordon State College, Maj.
Paget was a presence, and one liked
and enjoyed over the years by too
many people to count. Even those who
didn’t know him, especially during the
last 12 years, can remember him as the
man in that trademark red blazer of his.
Although he served in the U.S. Army
of Occupation in Berlin at the end of
World War II in 1945, his rank of major
came to him as the commandant of
cadets at Gordon Military College 1954
to 1959.
One of the stories he liked to tell
was about a man falling through the
much for spitting while in formation as
for spitting on his son.
Years later, Paget unexpectantly
met the cadet, now a high school
principal. Just as unexpectantly, the
principal told his former commandant
how he appreciated Paget’s “firm and
fair” discipline.
After leaving Gordon, he continued
his work as an educator, becoming the
principal of Jonesboro High School
in 1959, Bremen High School in 1962
and then Jackson High School in
1969. He ended his career as assistant
superintendent of the Butts County
School System in the 1990s.
Maj. Paget passed away on Oct. 29,
2013, at the age of 87.
PRESIDENT’S LETTER
Dear Friends,
First of all, thank you. Gordon State College has done great things and will
continue to do great things because of you. Over the years you have supported
us with your engagement, encouragement and generous contributions. Your
stories, shared through this publication, have inspired countless young people
to come to Gordon and pursue their dreams.
Top: Commandant Paget in 1959.
Bottom: Paget with Claudine
Pippin White in 2009.
Speaking of young people, here are three recent successful graduates. Camilo
Caballero (AS Pre-business ‘12) recently graduated from Georgia Tech and was
awarded a Thomas R. Pickering Fellowship in foreign affairs for graduate studies.
Laura West (BS Biology ‘14) received a fellowship for the graduate program in
marine biology at the University of South Alabama. And Chris Childress (BS
History ‘14) will be entering Mercer University’s law school in fall 2014.
These young alumni are wonderful examples of Gordon’s quality programs.
Our bachelor’s students leave prepared for top graduate schools, our associate
students leave prepared to transfer to quality bachelor’s programs, and our
professional programs in nursing and education prepare graduates to step into
the workforce.
If you have driven through campus during 2014, you noticed construction on
the new Student Activity and Recreation Center on the corner of College Drive
and Highlander Way. Less visible will be the interior renovation of the Hightower
Library. Both the Center and the Library projects ensure the quality of Gordon’s
programs well into the 21st century.
“Ben” Manchester Carroll Paget Jr.
ceiling in his bathtub. When he was
commandant, he and his wife were
housed in a faculty apartment in South
Barracks as was the practice of the
time. The two of them were watching
television in their living room when all of
a sudden the ceiling gave way and man
and bathtub came through. Other than
embarrassment, the man was unhurt.
Whether or not the story was
completely true is unknown, but
anyone who heard the story knew one
thing to be absolutely true – the fun
Paget had in telling it.
His son Mike remembers as a boy
riding his bike down the ranks of
cadets in formation when one of them
spit on him in passing. Seeing this,
Maj. Paget disciplined the cadet as
2 | President’s Report
Max Burns
President
Gordon State College
Something we can all be especially proud of is the imminent construction of our
military memorial. We are so close that I would like to extend an invitation to all
of you to attend the dedication of the Gordon Military Memorial during Alumni
Weekend in April 2015. This will be a fulfillment of a powerful dream.
And a final note. If you have been a faithful contributor, thank you. I’d like to
encourage you to continue or enhance your support; the need for external
support has never been greater. If you have never contributed, it’s not hard to
do. In fact, you could do it right now. Make your check out to the Gordon State
College Foundation, then mail it to the address on the back of this magazine. I
promise that your gift will make a difference in the future success of a deserving
student. You’ll be glad you did!
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 3
T
A Career
by Peter Boltz
It is March and we are sitting outside, the weather is wonderful – clear
blue sky and warm – and the view of legendary Superstition Mountain
spectacular. Obviously this does not describe Georgia in March but does
describe a typical winter day in Chuck and Julie Antonio’s backyard in
Gold Canyon, Ariz. I met Chuck at his 50th high school class reunion at
Gordon, learned about his professional life as a physician and operational
test pilot, and asked if it would be okay to interview him for an article for
the President’s Report. He graciously accepted, hence the opportunity
to spend a warm winter day away from the cold Georgia weather.
4 | President’s Report
he mountains that can be seen from Chuck
Antonio’s backyard are part of the Superstition
Wilderness, which is a very large recreation area
that Chuck likes to spend hours in, hiking by
himself or leading group hikes. These can go for miles
and last for hours, like one he took with a group in
March – 11 strenuous miles that lasted 10 hours.
Visitors to his home can take a shorter hike around
his small yard landscaped with a wide variety of deserthearty trees like the palo verde, the palo blanco and the
ironwood. The ironwood is an especially dense and hard
wood. Chuck has a broad and long ironwood table on his
patio that he uses for food preparation.
Trees suited for the desert climate are not the only
plants in his yard. He also has agave, ocotillo, gopher plant,
brittlebush, fairy dusters, jojoba, penstemon, and verbena.
Hummingbirds are welcome on the property and
make well-camouflaged nests in the palo verde tree,
whereas rabbits are fenced out to protect the plants.
“Julie is a master gardener,” he said, explaining in
part the variety and health of the yard’s flora. The two
of them met in China Lake, Calif., in 1986 and have
been married for 24 years. Chuck has a way with plants
himself, something he learned from his parents who
always had a garden.
His father grew up in Forsyth, Ga., where Chuck’s
grandparents owned and operated the Royal Palm Café.
His father, Basil J., graduated from Gordon Military
College in 1936. When the United States was drawn into
World War II, Monk, as he was called, joined the Army
Air Corps, became a B-24 Liberator navigator and later
retired as a lieutenant colonel.
Chuck said his father was part of the ill-fated Operation Tidal Wave air attack on the oil refineries of Ploesti,
Romania, on Aug. 1, 1943. Fortunately, his father’s
bomber was ordered to fall out of formation to check on
another B-24, which had to ditch in the Mediterranean.
By the time his father’s plane had returned to altitude, it
was too far away to return to formation.
“I probably wouldn’t be here right now had my father
gone on,” Chuck said.
After the war, his family moved around. He remembers starting 3rd grade in Macon, Ga., and moving back
to the family home in Forsyth where he started 8th grade
at Mary Persons. As a schoolboy, he remembers his father
waking him early in the morning, going on his newspaper
route and returning in time to make the coffee at the
Royal Palm Café.
“One day my dad asked me if I was interested in
Gordon,” Chuck said, and when he said he would be, they
drove “way over” to Barnesville to meet with Gordon’s
president, Col. C.T.B. Harris. As was his habit, Col. Harris
interviewed his prospective student and when it was over,
he told Chuck that he would be glad to have him come to
Gordon to start his 9th grade year.
For his freshman and sophomore years, Chuck was a
commuting student who rode with another Forsyth cadet
named Charles Jensen.
“I liked the school and the courses and the military,”
he said, and that he was also able to take some college
courses while in high school. “By the end of my sophomore year, the family moved to Barnesville where my
father got a job at a bank.”
This suited Chuck just fine, he said, because his
commute cut into the time he could spend with both his
Forsyth and Barnesville friends. As he put it, he “missed
out on friendships” and so during these two years he
“buried himself in sports and academics.”
An algebra teacher stands out as a significant influence, Mrs. Bobbie Rainey.
“She woke me up,” he said. “She told me not to take
myself too seriously. She encouraged me in a really useful
and mature way, even allowing me to teach a couple of
classes.”
He also remembers the strong influences of Miss
Marion with her mnemonics like “P-Y-R-R-H-I-C, we hope
to graduate in ’63.” And also Maj. Reynolds Bush, who not
only taught him mathematics but also taught his dad.
“What made Gordon so good were the academics,”
Chuck said. He ended up being his class’s valedictorian
and an Eagle Scout to boot even while working at Wisebram’s Department Store and Mansour’s Men Shop.
As a town cadet, he was allowed to live in the family
home on Rose Avenue and to own a car – a pickup truck
really, a ’47 Studebaker his dad bought for $10 at a
police auction. It was in pretty bad shape, but with a new
distributer cap, spark plugs and a little tinkering, they got
it going and kept it going for 1½ years.
“One day my friends and I cut drill and took off into
the hills in the Studebaker,” he said. “I thought I could
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 5
(1) Naval Aviation Cadet
Antonio, 22, outside the
cockpit of a T-2A Buckeye at Naval Air Station
Meridian in Mississippi
in 1967. (2) Antonio with
his ’60 MGA in 1967.
Antonio’s medals include
(left to right) the Armed
Forces Expeditionary Medal,
the Vietnam Service Medal
with bronze service star for
service in two campaigns, the
Gallantry Cross (Vietnam) with
palm, the Meritorious Service
Medal, the Air Medal with 8
Strike Flight awards for the
99 combat missions, the Navy
Commendation Medal with
Combat V, and the National
Defense Service Medal. Above
them all is his flight surgeon pin.
make it between two pine trees, but I got it stuck.” They
got it out but bent the fender in the process. Chuck’s
solution was to use a broom handle that was in the bed of
the truck to not only bend the fender back but to hold it
in place. The broom handle remained part of the truck’s
fender up to the day of its well-deserved retirement.
“I went to Georgia Tech in 1963 for a year,” he said,
“and then I went to the Air Force Academy but quit that
after 3 months and returned to Georgia Tech. Since I had
signed up in the Air Force when accepting the academy
nomination I had to do duty as a reservist at Dobbins
Air Force Base. While there, I noticed Marine Corps F-8
Crusaders landing and taking off on the other side of the
base where the Navy was located. So I went over to that
side one day and spoke to a Navy recruiter who asked me
why I was interested, and I said I wanted to fly.”
The recruiter told him about the Naval Aviation Cadet
(NAVCAD) Training Program, which Chuck promptly
applied for.
“The program was due to be cancelled the next year,”
he said, “but I was accepted.” He entered the program
after he finished one more quarter at Tech, leaving
completion of his degree for a later date.
His first solo flight was in a piston engine T-34 B
Mentor in October 1966, after which he went into basic
jet training flying the North American T-2 Buckeye and
then advanced jet training flying the Grumman TF-9J
Cougar in 1967. With his commission as a Navy ensign
in hand and his wings pinned to his chest, he became an
attack aircraft pilot on his way to Vietnam.
Chuck wanted to fly attack aircraft because he liked
the mission and the aircraft. He knew fighter pilots got
all the attention – think Tom Cruise in Top Gun – but he
wanted to do air-to-ground strafing and bombing missions
6 | President’s Report
2
1
while supporting the ground troops. He said he likely
was inspired by World War II movies and film clips on
television that he and his dad watched as well as trips to
air shows with his dad.
He flew 100 combat missions in an A-7B Corsair II
from the deck of the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga (CVA14), a third of them at night, mostly into Laos and the
DMZ (demilitarized zone) between North and South
Vietnam. Then, one night in May 1969, he had to eject
from his A-7 into the South China Sea after a refueling
mission went wrong. After quite enough uncertainty in
a failing life raft in “heavy seas and stormy weather,”
he was rescued and returned to flying combat missions
within a couple of days.
After his tour in Vietnam, he was transferred to a
training squadron, instructing others how to fly in the
T-2 Buckeye, but this turned out to be something he did
not want to do, so in March 1971, he left the Navy and
completed a BS degree in industrial management at Georgia
Tech in December 1972. He would not return to the Navy
until 1978.
As a civilian, he flew for the Sea Pines Company and
Charles E. Fraser, the initial developer of Hilton Head,
S.C.; the WFC Corporation of Miami; and then Saudia,
the namesake airline of Saudi Arabia. He flew the Cessna
402, the Mitsubishi MU-2, the de Havilland Canada DHC-6
Twin Otter, and served as a pilot-qualified flight engineer
on a Saudia B-707.
Then he heard about the Navy’s Naval Aviator
Research Flight Surgeon program, which would allow him
to continue flying as a physician. So in 1975, he went
back to school, Armstrong Atlantic State University in
Savannah, for two years. He drove back and forth between
Savannah for school and Hilton Head for work, which was
anything he could get from driving a
golf cart, to working as a dockhand, to
piloting or whatever.
As he explained that part of his
working career, “I was broke.”
Despite it all, he earned a bachelor of
science in chemistry at age 32 in 1977.
“I was competing with younger
men and women with 4.0 averages for
medical school, so I got the chemistry
degree to be more competitive,” he
said. And just to be even more competitive, he graduated summa cum laude.
Nonetheless, he wasn’t immediately accepted into medical school,
“was starving,” and needed work. A
friend he knew from his Navy and
corporate flying days told him that a
Saudi Arabian airline named Saudia
was looking for pilots. Two of his
friends, J.P. Jones and Bud Garske,
were already working for Saudia, so
Chuck did two things.
First, he applied to medical
school a second time, and second,
just in case, he accepted the position
of pilot-qualified flight engineer for
Saudia, which at the time was being
managed by TWA airlines.
“The day I completed the flight
engineer course while in Kansas City,
Mo.,” he said, “I learned I had been
accepted into med school, so I called
my med school adviser and asked him
3
(3) This picture of a B-24, which his dad flew,
and an A-7B, which Chuck flew, hangs in
Chuck’s office. (4) Chuck (sixth from the right,
standing) with his fellow aviators on the Ticonderoga. (5) Lt. Cmdr. Chuck Antonio, front
seat, wearing Cats Eyes night vision goggles
in 1988. The aircraft is an F/A-18B Night Attack
Hornet test aircraft.
4
5
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 7
if there was any advantage to starting school that summer
instead of working. I told him I had been hired by Saudia
and was broke. He told me there was no advantage and to
go make money and to come to school in the fall if this
was still what I wanted to do.”
So he went to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he worked
and weighed the idea of quitting at the end of six months
to start medical school. His friends at Saudia advised him
to go to medical school with a blunt evaluation of working
for the airline: “This job is boring.”
He agreed and left Saudia and Saudi Arabia in August
1978 to enter the Medical University of South Carolina
(MUSC) in Charleston, S.C.
To help pay for his schooling, he applied to and
was accepted for the Armed Forces Health Scholarship
Program, but this meant he had to resign his commission
as a lieutenant commander in the Navy and return to the
lowest officer rank in the Navy, ensign. This didn’t prove
to be a problem for Chuck, but it did lead to some interesting situations.
As a veteran Navy combat pilot in Vietnam, Chuck
was awarded an impressive amount of “fruit salad,” or
decorations, to wear on his uniform – much more than an
ensign in the Navy’s Medical Corps could normally expect
to wear. One day, while he was fulfilling his eight weeks of
active duty in Pensacola, Fla., these ribbons attracted the
attention of a salty old senior chief petty officer, someone
to be treated carefully by your run-of-the-mill ensign.
But Chuck was not such an ensign. He and his fellow
pilots on the Ticonderoga would often have a little fun
with the carrier’s chief petty officers by deliberately
misnaming parts of the ship. They would call bulkheads
“walls,” hatches “doors,” and ladders “stairs,” which
would lead to patient corrections by the petty officers
until they caught onto the game.
The chief didn’t know this about Chuck, and when
his curiosity got the better of him, the chief came up to
him and said, “I gotta ask about all those ribbons on your
uniform.”
Chuck couldn’t resist messing with yet another chief,
and so he spun a yarn about being in the flight surgeon
program and wanting some ribbons to dress up his uniform.
“I could see the chief getting red and worked up
when I told him this because wearing unearned decorations is a court martial offense,” he said. “But at the
8 | President’s Report
Chuck Antonio in his
senior high school year
at Gordon Military.
right moment I explained to him my service in Vietnam
and reduction in rank.”
In their junior year, medical students are asked what
they want to do their residency in, and Chuck declared
his desire to attend the Navy Flight Surgeon School after
completing a family practice internship at the Naval
Hospital in Pensacola, Fla.
“Flight surgeon is really a misnomer,” he said.
“Flight surgeons are really general medicine doctors.” He
explained that the term derived from World War I when
the doctors who deployed with aviators could and did
perform minor surgeries. During World War II, flight
surgeons became responsible for the general health care
of pilots, referring them to specialists when necessary.
It was not certain he would attain his ambition to
become a Naval Aviator Research Flight Surgeon since
the Navy had only eight billets for that specialty at the
time, but when he graduated from MUSC in 1982, he
became one of the eight. In 1983, he was an intern and in
1984 he was in flight surgeon school.
He spent the first two years of his life as a flight
surgeon, starting in mid-1984, at Naval Air Station
Oceana in Virginia Beach, Va., with Fighter Squadron
101, also known as the Grim Reapers. It is here where he
was trained to fly the Grumman F-14 Tomcat fighter while
also serving in the Navy clinic on base as a medical doctor
for Navy and Marine families. Eventually, he became an
F-14 instructor specializing in night formation flying.
This, he said, prepared him early in 1986 to join
VX-5, an operational test squadron, at China Lake, Calif.,
where he continued to be a flight surgeon and a pilot, this
time flying the McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet fighter/
attack aircraft. He would eventually become the squadron’s chief operational test director (COTD).
“I was one of two pilots and the only pilot/flight
surgeon doing F/A-18 night vision testing,” he said.
“This was very early” in the military’s use of night vision
technologies in fixed wing aircraft, and Antonio helped
develop a training program to aid pilots in their understanding of the physiological and perceptual effects when
flying with and using night vision devices.
A year before he left the Navy in 1991 to pursue other
interests, he was selected by the Navy as one of its pilot
candidates for the NASA space shuttle program. He was
then selected by NASA to interview as a mission specialist,
which is what he wanted since he could then make space
walks. Unfortunately, he was not one of the 24 who were
selected from the final group of 100 applicants selected
by NASA for an interview at the Lyndon Johnson Space
Center in Houston. Although disappointed, he was very
much honored.
“I was amazed to even be interviewed,” he said.
“There were many very bright and talented people among
those selected to interview.”
After leaving the Navy, Chuck went to work as a
contractor for an Air Force Research Laboratory at
Williams Air Force Base in the eastern part of Phoenix,
Ariz. There he was able to help introduce night vision
systems into a number of Air Force aircraft such as the
A-10, F-15, F-16 and C-130, as well as help develop a
Night Vision Goggle (NVG) training program that is still
in use by the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
In 1999, he joined the Federal Civil Service working
for the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division in
Patuxent River, Md., testing night vision devices and
helmet mounted displays (HMD). In 2006, he moved with
Julie back to Phoenix where he continued to work as a
Navy civil servant. In 2008, he retired from the civil service
and became a part-time Navy contractor continuing to
support the same programs while also developing training
programs for various night vision and HMD systems.
He also provides consultant services to various organizations and is a part-time instructor for the National
Test Pilot School in Mojave, Calif., a position he’s held to
this day since 2000.
Antonio likes to call his work in night vision systems
his “real job,” and to hear him talk about the many and
changing technologies that make up these systems is to
hear a man still very much up on the latest. Dichroic
patch visors, retinal scanning, electron bombarded active
pixel sensor, and distributed aperture systems are terms
that pepper his descriptions of night vision systems and
make laypeople dizzy.
And even though he hasn’t practiced medicine in
decades, he also stays abreast of the of medical literature.
Every now and then medical problems arise in his and
Julie’s family, and when they do, Chuck’s medical knowledge comes in handy.
For a man who says he’s retired, he sure sounds busy,
but this is in keeping with the man who started his life
as an Air Force brat, woke before dawn to help his father
in the restaurant, and became valedictorian of the 1963
graduating class of Gordon Military High School. Whatever interests him, beckons him, and if takes hard work
to reach his goal, he’ll do it. It’s just how he is.
Chuck and Julie Antonio in their backyard in Gold Canyon, Ariz. The mountains
in the background are part of the Superstition Wilderness Area.
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 9
KNOWING WHERE TO LOOK
Research Librarian Beth Pye
by Tamara Boatwright
F
or nearly 27 years Beth Pye has been providing
reference and research assistance to students,
faculty and staff at Gordon State College.
“Everyone in the library provides reference or
research assistance as needed, but I specialize in it.
As the reference or research librarian, I help Gordon
State faculty and staff find the information they need
for their research or projects and teach Gordon State
students how to find the information they need, and
in certain cases help them find it,” Pye explained. “I
teach the Methods of Library Research class, present
orientations to classes and work with students on a
one-to-one basis as necessary. In addition when the
general public uses our library, such as local high
school students, I help them find any information
they need.”
Pye is also the go-to person on campus for
items that have been, or need to be, archived. This
job includes processing and cataloging the growing
collection – treasured gifts from alumni and friends
of Gordon or items found at yard sales and at online
sites. The items range from pieces of jewelry, to
photographs to uniform pieces from the Gordon Military era and even a snare drum.
Each piece is meticulously cataloged, delicately
wrapped or secured in special paper and stored in
archival boxes – no newspaper packing and boxes
rescued from a dumpster for these items.
“Everything must be dealt with properly to
preserve it,” Pye explained as she pulled off a pair of
cotton gloves explaining that even the oil on hands
that appear dry can eventually damage items.
10 | President’s Report
Pye discovered that she likes finding things and
had a knack for it early on – way before Google, the
Internet and computers made research easier for all
of us.
“When I sat down and really thought about
what I wanted to do, I decided getting my master’s
in library science would allow me to do what I love:
researching different subjects and teaching/helping
people to find the information that they need,” she
explained. “Each question gives another chance to
teach someone how to find useful, accurate information for their purposes. I always tell students that I
would much rather help them find the information
they need than anything else.”
She recalls one evening receiving what she initially
thought was a robo-call advertising something.
“It became clear that the computer-generated
voice on the phone was someone without the use of
their voice seeking research help,” she said. “We went
back and forth several minutes and the person thanked
me and hung up. I’ve never heard back, but I feel good
about being able to help someone in that way.”
And while technology has certainly impacted
nearly every part of our lives, Pye thinks physical
libraries will always have a place – at least in the near
future.
“In the future with information available in
physical and increasingly in electronic format I
think libraries will have two versions of themselves:
the physical building and the electronic version.
The physical building serves as a research place
containing or providing access to information in both
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 11
Of course Pye is a big reader and
claims a number of favorites.
Pride and Prejudice – “I like the
humor and the relationship between
Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy.”
Gone Away Lake – “The idea of two
cousins finding a forgotten town
that only has two residents and
making it their own is interesting.”
All the Weyrs of Pern – “This is
part of Anne McCaffrey’s sci-fi
Dragonriders of Pern series. I love
the characters, how it gives more
information about the beginnings of
Pern and uses science to solve the
main problem of Pern.”
The Lord of the Rings – “This is a
wonderful fantasy novel that is just
fun to read. I love all the characters
and the story of the quest.”
Aunt Dimity’s Good Deed – “This
is one of Nancy Atherton’s Aunt
Dimity mystery series, and I like it
because it continues the adventures
of Lori and Aunt Dimity. Lori
looks for her father-in-law after
he disappears, meets some of her
husband’s relatives and digs through
the family’s history in England.”
12 | President’s Report
physical and electronic formats. It provides
space for groups to work together on a
research project as well as individuals who
need quiet spaces to access information and
think about their particular project. I think
libraries will store some items outside the
library but still maintain a physical collection of pertinent sources for quick and easy
access by patrons. If and when digitizing
technology becomes cheaper, more and
more individual libraries may digitize unique
materials for which they own the copyright
while students working on research in
connection with their college career may
digitally publish this research through
their college and allow access through the
library. The use of small wireless devices
will increasingly be used to take advantage
of the library’s materials and services both
within and outside the library.”
Pye grew up in Rex, Ga., the second of
four children. She attended North Georgia
College, the University of Georgia and Emory
University where she earned a bachelor’s
degree in English literature and a Master of
Librarianship. Her hobbies tie into her life’s
work. She enjoys reading, spending time
with family and friends, watching old movies,
family history, and travel.
She wants to get back to London so
she can make her way through the entire
British Museum and would like to visit the
Louvre in Paris and walk along the canals
in Amsterdam. L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, Arles,
Nîmes, Avignon and Nice in the South of
France are also on her list
When asked to name the one person who
has most influenced her, Pye says she can’t.
“I can’t choose one person because my
family and circle of friends over the years
have influenced or taught me different
things such as be helpful, work at things if
they are important to you, messing up is
part of life, try to look at things from others’
viewpoints and it is possible to have a circle
of best friends.”
A Fifth Generation
CHARLESTONIAN
by Peter Boltz
H
is is a very old neighborhood in a coastal city older than the country
itself. Although he doesn’t live along this particular stretch of
Charleston, South Carolina, he has spent a great amount of time as
a child and as an adult at his grandmother’s home located on what is
commonly referred to as High Battery. He may not live here with his
wife and family, but this is his neighborhood nonetheless, and he treats
those passing through it with the grace and pride of a resident.
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 13
Two Charleston visitors
(left) on their morning
walk are delighted to meet
the man on the sign. The
rotunda of Charleston’s
Hibernian Hall, the hall
itself which can accommodate 800 people, and the
Hibernian Society’s 1841
inaugural punch bowl.
On one particular morning, Chuck Bennett was chatting with an acquaintance when one of the city’s parking
meter men came up on them from Atlantic Street.
Bennett greeted the man, and with that, Bennett and the
man talked a short bit about the state of meter collections
and thoughts about the city’s tourism economy. It was
as if the two of them had known each other since high
school in some small town rather than a city of about
125,000 residents and 4 million-plus visitors a year.
Shortly after the meter man continued on his rounds,
two women came up on Bennett from South Battery. He
greeted them, and once again a conversation ensued – this
time about the renovation of the city’s historical homes.
The women appeared delighted they were meeting one of
the city’s premier renovators, and then they took their
leave, off on the rest of their morning walk.
“I had been working on this house a little less than
a month,” he said, “when a tourist came up to me and
asked if I had been working on the house since 1986.”
The memory brought a smile to his face because of
the irony – 1986 was the year he started his contracting
business, not when he started working on the house
located on High Battery.
From a humble beginning of $1,500 and a donated
truck, Chuck Bennett Contracting today is as established
and respected as the historic homes he works on. His
sign, affixed to the homes he works on bears the slogan
“Restoring Charleston Since 1986,” and many of the
14 | President’s Report
buildings he’s worked on bear the coveted marker of the
Preservation Society of Charleston.
According to the Society’s website, buildings have
the right to bear their marker when a building possesses
architectural integrity. Other criteria include the historical and artistic values, and unique construction methods
of a building.
When Bennett takes on a historical building’s renovation or remodeling, he has to take these things and more
into consideration. Most of the time, this means the outside
of the building has to retain its architectural integrity while
the interior can be changed, even drastically.
One of his most extensive renovations was 58 King St.
“The house was in such deplorable shape that I had to
tear down everything except the north and south walls,”
he said. “I even had a backhoe inside the house to gut it.
It was so deteriorated that nothing was salvageable. You
couldn’t go in it as it was; you would have fallen through
the floor.”
The current asking price for the house is a million
six, and it proudly bears a circular metal marker from
the Preservation Society of Charleston for the year 2000.
On the marker are the words “Carolopolis, Condita A.D.
1670,” that is, “Charleston, founded 1670.”
Another of his jobs was the remodeling of 19 East
Battery, a yellow brick home on what was once the site
of a military fortification called Fort Mechanic, built in
1794 and demolished in 1818. Bennett said the house is
the newest on the block, built in 1920, and it is situated
next door to 17 East Bay where he spent a good deal of his
childhood with his grandmother, Iona McAlister Willis.
“My mother [Mary Willis Bennett] was raised in
that house,” he said. “When I was a baby, my mother
would drop me off with granny but not before mother
cautioned her to never let me walk on the high battery.
When I was older, I spent many weekends up there on
the second story porch, sleeping on a rollaway cot. My
mother’s wedding reception was in that house, and my
own wedding rehearsal party, 42 years ago, was also held
in that house.”
When a hurricane hit Charleston in 1935, water came
up to his grandmother’s front door.
“The Coast Guard came up and bumped its boat
against the front door to get her to evacuate, but granny
and other family refused to leave. They had moved the
piano to bolster the front door and rode out the storm
unscathed.”
Bennett claims a Charleston heritage that reaches
back five generations, but his wife, Fran, claims nine. Her
family, the Seabrooks, came to Charleston in 1680. Not
only is this a long time ago, the year of the Seabrooks’
landing is only 10 years after the first landing of 93 people
in 1670. Growing up in Mt. Pleasant, across the Cooper
River from Charleston, the two have known each other
all their lives. Within the first 6½ years of their marriage,
they had four children: Mary Elizabeth, the eldest; next,
Brook; then Guilds; and Chad. Mary Elizabeth has twin
daughters, Mary Grace and Bennett; Brook has two daughters, Seidel and Jamie; and Guilds has a son, Appleby or
better known as App.
Chad lives in Hollywood, Calif., and is the founder
and CEO of Populus Brands. Twice, since he graduated
from Furman University, he has been recognized by his
alma mater for his helping Furman students get internships in television production.
Bennett attended Bishop England High School in the
heart of Charleston, and when he graduated, his father
sent him to Gordon Military College.
“Daddy thought I needed some structure in my life,
so he sent me to Gordon Military,” he said. “Back then,
you listened to your father and you did what he said to do.
The Citadel was an option, but I didn’t want to go there.”
While at Gordon he became close friends with Smitty
Graham who he said was his “absolute best friend” in
Barnesville. Bennett also has high praise for Smitty’s
mother, Rebecca, who he calls a “smart, smart lady”
whose home became his home away from home.
Smitty acknowledges his friend as “a good, good man,”
who gave as good as he got in the friendship. “It seems like
we’ve known each other forever. I guess we have.”
Smitty cannot remember the first time the two met,
but maybe it was because he was already friends with
cadets from Charleston, like Mike Onufer, who took
him on a visit home to Charleston. The proximity of the
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 15
(Clockwise from the left)
Bennett’s yearbook sophomore
photo in 1967. Bennett in the
Gordon canteen in 1967. Bennett
was a member of the racing
crew on the Adios. In the lower
left photo, he is the rightmost
crewman in white long-sleeved
shirt and red hat.
Graham home on Spencer Street to Gordon’s drill field
may also have played a part.
Still, most boarding cadets didn’t have much to do
with the locals, or so Smitty recollects. He remembers a
football player telling him that his family was the only one
who ever invited him over.
Regardless of how the two became friends, once they
did, Chuck was a frequent visitor to the Graham household and Smitty was a frequent visitor to the Bennett
household in Mount Pleasant, S.C., just across the Cooper
River Bridge from Charleston. Smitty still recalls his first
taste of shrimp creole, a dish served by Chuck’s mother
during one visit.
“I thought it was the best thing I had ever eaten,” he
said. “I also remember my first taste of steamed oysters at
one of the parties on one of those islands before you and
Fran got married.”
Smitty owned a ’65 Mustang that the two of them
used to travel to Atlanta, Charleston and other places.
Two stories stand out about this Mustang.
Once, while driving the Mustang home for a visit,
Chuck got his first speeding ticket. He said he managed to
16 | President’s Report
slow down and keep to the speed limit going into Bamberg,
S.C., but thinking he made it through town before he had,
he hit the accelerator. The Mustang, being the fast car
that it was, leapt to 80 mph, and by then it was too late
for Chuck to realize he really hadn’t left city limits.
The second story comes from Smitty, and it’s about
the time he and Chuck drove the Mustang to Rock Creek
down Johnstonville Road, not far from Barnesville. Smitty
parked the car on the far side of the bridge, but not quite
far enough on the far side. When Chuck stepped out of
the car, his footing slipped and he went down the shallow
embankment and into the creek.
“I thought it was hilarious. I laughed but I don’t think
Chuck did. I know that’s pretty insensitive of me, but I’ve
got trophies for insensitivity,” Smitty joked.
When Chuck married Fran, Smitty was in the
wedding, stripped pants, white gloves and all.
“The only thing missing was a cocked hat,” Smitty
said with a chuckle. “The wedding was the biggest thing
I had ever seen. It was in a huge Catholic Church that
must’ve been there when Columbus landed.”
When Smitty married, he and his wife honeymooned
After nearly 30 years of working in Charleston, which include the damage
wrought by Hurricane Hugo just three years after he started his business,
Bennett has intimate knowledge of many of the buildings he passes as he
drives around the city.
in Charleston. Chuck sent a horse and carriage to pick
them up and take them on a tour of Charleston, complete
with champagne.
“That was pretty damned nice,” Smitty said. “Chuck
and Fran have always made me a part of their family.”
Looking back on their Gordon days, Chuck said, “In
retrospect we were merely cadets doing what cadets do
best, looking for trouble.”
Chuck’s grades were not all that good, and in the
summer of 1967, the height of the Vietnam
War, his draft board notified him he was
1A – that is, he was going to be drafted.
Having lived next to the ocean all his
life and having sailed it for many
of those years, he joined the Navy,
serving until 1970.
When his two-year enlistment
was over, he was on a ship anchored
at Mombasa, Kenya, 7,000 nautical
miles from home. As one of only four
quartermasters (navigators) on board,
the ship’s captain wanted him to extend his
enlistment for two months, but Bennett had other
priorities.
“I said no, that I had already enrolled for the fall
semester at Gordon. So I was discharged from the ship in
Mombasa.”
He found his way back home on military flights to
Nairobi, to Rhein-Main, Germany, to Dover, Del., to
Charlotte, and finally to Charleston in August 1970. By
September, he was back at Gordon, where he received
free tuition in exchange for supervising Pound Hall.
“Pound Hall needed an adult presence,” he said, “and
I needed a year to graduate,” which he did, earning his
associate degree in English.
With his degree in hand, he returned to Charleston
to marry Fran and go to work for her father who owned
a power line construction company. For 14 years, he
helped build power lines in five different states, leaving
for work on Monday morning and returning home on
Friday afternoon.
“Then in 1986,” he said, “I decided I had a better
idea.”
Even though he had no previous experience in the
building trade, he decided to start his own building business. What he didn’t know, he learned, and what he didn’t
have time to learn, he contracted out to experts.
After nearly 30 years of working in
Charleston, which include the damage
wrought by Hurricane Hugo just three
years after he started his business,
Bennett has intimate knowledge of
many of the buildings he passes as he
drives around the city.
During an informal tour for a
visitor, he pointed out a window on the
second floor of a building on Meeting Street.
The owner wanted a bathroom placed on the
street side. Another building, also on Meeting,
had the misfortune of having an aged water heater on its
fourth floor. It burst and every ceiling below it fell.
He’s found graffiti left by Union and Confederate
soldiers. He’s found holes made by Union cannon shot,
and when the shot is still in the hole, he removes it but is
careful to leave the hole. When he’s had to excavate, he’s
found the bones of pig, dog and cow but fortunately none
of human, which is a distinct probability in a city which
has been ravaged by war.
When asked how many times he’s renovated historic
Charleston buildings since 1986, he paused, trying to be
precise, but the best he could answer was “hundreds.”
Bennett has a particularly close relationship with a
building that played a significant role in America’s Civil
War – Hibernian Hall, built in 1841 and the only building
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 17
Fran and Chuck Bennett
on the front porch of
their Mt. Pleasant home
built in 1895.
left that is “associated with the National Democratic
Convention of 1860,” according to the National Park
Service. It is also the home of the Hibernian Society,
an Irish benevolent organization, of which Bennett is
a member.
“Our motto,” he said, “is ‘Being familiar with misfortune, I learn to assist the unfortunate.’”
“Both of my sons are members,” he said. “So were
my father and both my grandfathers. It’s an all-male,
father-son society founded in 1801 to help the Irish
immigrate to the United States. It has evolved into an
organization which gives scholarships to the Citadel and
College of Charleston.”
In the foyer of Hibernian Hall is a handsome glass
case protecting a beautiful punch bowl used for the Hall’s
inaugural in 1841. Chuck said he and fellow Hibernians
used to mix Christmas eggnog in the bowl using an electric egg beater, but when his wife, Fran, discovered this,
she called a halt to the practice. The bowl was far too
valuable for anything other than preservation, so Chuck
built the case for it.
Bennett is a member of another all-male club, the
exclusive Carolina Yacht Club, established in 1883. Even
though Bennett will joke that the club was founded for the
purpose of “yachting and drinking,” he’s clearly proud of
the club’s program for teaching young people how to sail.
Bennett himself will tell you he grew up around sailboats and has been sailing since he was 12. As he got
older, the boats got bigger and he sailed them further. As
a member of the Carolina Yacht Club, he’s participated in
yacht club sanctioned races that started in Connecticut
and ended in the Bahamas.
He said that as he grew from a 12-year-old into his
teenaged years, he raced more and more until he got into
ocean racing. For 15 years, Bennett raced on the 45-foot
Beneteau named the Adios. During this time, the Adios
won “63 pieces of silver.”
“For this kind of racing, you need a dedicated crew
who know not only the boat but the ocean as well. Racing
is a huge team effort,” he said. In 2000 he retired from
18 | President’s Report
the sailing vessel Adios and stepped aboard the new
Adios, a 75-foot motor yacht, cruising the waters between
Charleston, Annapolis and the Bahamas.
His grandchildren are too young to be sailing
Charleston Harbor on their own much less the ocean,
but he’s already started to get them thinking about it.
He has built them wooden boat cradles and beds. The
one he built for his 5-year-old grandson App has a pirate
ship theme, a Jolly Roger flag included. Already a couple
of his granddaughters are learning how to sail in sunfish
and 420s at the Carolina Yacht Club’s school for boys
and girls. One day, when he’s old enough, App will join
his cousins.
And one day, they will be like their grandfather and
grandmother’s generations. They will be the ones chatting with meter men and curious tourists on High Battery,
sailing their daily lives through the ocean of tourists who
inundate their city.
But for now, it’s still Chuck’s city. As he stands
looking out over the harbor from 17 East Battery, a car
horn blasts. He turns to see his real estate agent Jane
Smith in a car stopped in the middle of the street.
She calls out from an open car window, “Chuck, I
need to talk with you.”
To the tourists walking and driving around them,
they are just two people having a quick conversation
blocking traffic for a short spell. But they are more than
that. Bennett is more than that. He’s a fifth generation
Charlestonian making sure his descendants keep their
neighborhood along High Battery.
Every Day Is Different
AT BLUE FOX DESIGNS
by Peter Boltz
Beth Anderson says she never was much of a high school student,
but she had a way of rearranging and redecorating her bedroom
at home on a regular basis. She’d move her bed, move the pictures
on her walls and anything else that wasn’t nailed down. She didn’t
think much about it at the time. She had a lot of different artistic
urges, always having loved art, the uses of color and texture.
When she graduated, her
parents urged her to go to
college. She started her college
career at the University of
West Georgia, but she didn’t
return after she completed
her first year. Her parents,
knowing the importance of a
college degree, kept after her
to return to school until she
agreed to go to Gordon as an
art major at age 21.
It ended up being “the best
thing I could have ever done,”
she said, in large part because
of two professors: Pat Hankins
who taught ceramics and
Marlin Adams who taught and
still teaches drawing and other
fine art courses at Gordon.
Ceramics was something
she liked because it was free
form. She started with a “blob
of clay,” and out of that blob
of clay grew a mug, a bowl or
some abstract shape that had
no name until she named it.
And this she found relaxing.
Beth remembers Adams
as someone who could easily
be intimidating because of
his level of artistry, but who
never was. Instead, he taught
with kindness and gentleness,
never pressuring his students,
always encouraging them. And
she learned different “tricks of
the trade,” like getting proportions correct when drawing
someone’s portrait.
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 19
(Left) One of Beth
Anderson’s prized
possessions, her portrait
by Gordon art professor
Marlin Adams.
(Facing page) The class
project that led Anderson
to become a space planner.
She said he would look at the model from behind
his drawing, hold his pencil up, and with one eye closed
measure the nose along the pencil’s length. Then he’d
hold that length of pencil up to the drawing and in that
way get the nose’s length in the drawing correct.
After completing Professor Adams’ class, she modeled
for him and his students in another drawing class. He gave
her his drawing, which is one of her treasured possessions, as did several of the students. She said that some of
their depictions of her are “scary,” but added that she had
“no room to criticize” since her drawing skill is limited.
“I got my foundation in art at Gordon,” she said,
which she explained as “knowing she wanted to one day
make a living out of being creative.”
20 | President’s Report
After she graduated from Gordon in 1997 with an
associate degree in art, she transferred to West Georgia
where she went into its art program taking a lot of
ceramics courses.
“One day, my ceramics professor, Cameron Covert,
asked me what I was going to do with all my ceramics
courses,” she said.
“I hadn’t really thought about it at the time,” she said,
“but somewhere in the back of my mind I saw myself
going around to outdoor markets and festivals and selling
mugs.”
The idea of it strikes her as funny today, but at the
time, Professor Covert wasn’t trying to be funny. He had
known her long enough to see promise in her, and when
she really didn’t have a good answer for all her ceramics
work, he asked her if she ever thought about studying
interior design. She hadn’t, but the next semester she
took a course in it.
Unknown to her at the time, the course was going to
be a revelation that profoundly changed her life.
A substitute teacher taught the first session of the
class since the professor was away, and this turned out to
be a lucky thing for Beth.
She cannot remember the substitute’s last name, but
her first was Maggie. She was clearly a smoker because
not only did Maggie smell strongly of tobacco, she carried
the chalk between her fingers like a cigarette. She had
her own construction company that did residential renovations, wore a flannel shirt, blue jeans and work boots to
class. On her belt was an “old school” type of cell phone
called a Nextel which she used to stay in touch with her
crew, even during class. When it beeped, she answered.
“She was very rough looking compared to us students,”
Beth said. “We were all very much into fashion, well-put
together, and here she was in her work clothes. We were
caught completely off guard.”
The classroom was not the usual box of a room. It had
a loft with an exposed stairwell, huge windows that were
set too high to look out of and white cinderblock walls. A
room Beth described as modern.
Maggie told them she wanted them to measure “the
space” so that they could diagram it in its entirety on
paper. Then she had them reach into a hat, one student
at a time, and pull out a folded piece of paper. Each had
a description of a different client, his or her profession,
income, family size and what the client wanted to use
the space for. Beth came up with a doctor who wanted an
apartment.
And this was her project for the semester, to design
the space as an apartment, and not just the furnishings
commonly associated with interior design like wall and
floor coverings and furniture. She had to show electrical,
plumbing, lighting, and anything else required by building
code – and she had to write a budget that accomplished
the work and didn’t break her client’s bank account.
Beth was hooked from that class onward on a specialty
of interior design known as space planning. And she was
so good at it that after graduation, she landed a job with
Group VI in Peachtree City almost as soon as she graduated. When she went for her interview, she accidentally
locked her keys in her car.
She laughed and said, “So they were stuck with me
the whole day, but they hired me and I worked for them
for five years. I still do contract work with them.”
At Group VI, she worked for Bill Vallely, who she
describes as her boss and good friend. “I learned from
him for five years. He taught me if you don’t know the
answer to something, don’t b.s. Say you’ll find out and
then follow up.”
Besides this bit of professional wisdom, she also
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 21
(1) The Wig Shop in LaGrange, Ga., before Beth’s redesign. (2) The Southern Federal Credit Union that replaced the Wig Shop. (3) The promenade side of the SFCU in
LaGrange. (4) The entrance to Bloom in Fayetteville, Ga. (5) Beth designed Bloom’s “store” where foster children can get clothing, toiletries, books and school supplies.
1
2
“Every day is different,
whether on the jobsite
with a hard hat and
boots, or in a board
room with heels.”
3
4
22 | President’s Report
5
credits Vallely with teaching her enough to start her
own business, Blue Fox Designs in Senoia, Ga.
Space planning requires her to take into account
the space allowed, the client’s needs, landlord requirements, ADA standards, fire code compliance and the
roles of the people who will be using the space. This is
just the first stage of her work, and it requires a lot of
note taking and revisions.
“Once the space plan is completed, the details of the
office are considered,” she said. “For example, a furniture layout is needed to determine where voice/data/
electrical outlets will be located. If it’s a doctor’s office,
special lighting may be needed in examination rooms.”
The “grand finale” of a project involves the finishes,
what people will actually see.
“Whether it’s granite on the teller line in a credit
union or laminate in a break room, every single item
in a space has to be presented, selected and priced to
make sure it falls within budget. All the specifications
have to be documented and located on a drawing for
use in construction.”
Each project involves relationships with real estate
agents, contractors, clients and manufacturer representatives.
“I have worked for the last 15 years establishing
these relationships and the payoff is that 100 percent
of my business is by referral.”
As an example of what she does, she talked
about a wig shop in LaGrange that the new owners
of the building were going to replace with a branch of
Southern Federal Credit Union.
It all started with a chance meeting with the credit
union’s representative at a Target. They recognized
each other because Beth had already worked on earlier
projects for SFCU. He asked her if she was interested,
and a few days later, they drove down to LaGrange, Ga.,
to do an initial survey of a historical building which was
a gas station originally, then a taxi service, and, at the
time of the visit, a wig shop.
She described the shop as open for business, two
sweet ladies waiting on customers. This is how it often
is on an initial survey. She has to work around people
and things in a space, taking measurements and
photographs. Then she takes both back to her office
and starts diagramming the space with AutoCAD on
her computer.
For the job, she also had to work with the local
historical society, which informed her that the front
façade of the building had to be kept intact. In addition to this constraint, she could not build anything on
the city’s promenade on the side of the building. But
it all turned out well, and LaGrange has a branch of
the Southern Federal Credit Union, and Beth has good
memories of the project. To this day, she thinks of it
as one of her favorite and best “before-and-after jobs.”
In a doctor’s office or hospital, doctors never enter
their personal offices through the waiting room; they
always have a separate entrance/exit. Beth sometimes
refers to these exits as “escape routes.”
Whether the space is going to have a president or
a branch manager, whether the space is 2,000 square
feet or 20,000 square feet, she said, “you always start
the design with that number one person.”
As should be expected, style is very important in
this line of work, and it is not uncommon for someone
to ask Beth if she designed a space or not because it
looks like “something she would do.”
Even though nine times out of 10 she can claim to
be the designer, she really doesn’t have a name for her
style. The best she can do is describe her style as a mix
of trendy, the latest and greatest, and timelessness.
“Once a week I have a rep stop by the office to
update the library and show me new products,” she
said. “I love seeing the new trends and finding the
perfect ‘unexpected’ material to use on a project.”
She likes to apply the unexpected to her wardrobe
too, like a bright pair of shoes with a neutral outfit or
a huge necklace with a simple white T-shirt and jeans.
Maybe this is the secret to her professional success.
She’s found a job that suits her style.
“Every day is different, whether on the jobsite with
a hard hat and boots, or in a board room with heels.”
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 23
Honors
FREDONIA CHURCH
Milton Jackson Bush in his
Gordon Military High School
uniform.
JACKSON BUSH
with Donation to
Gordon Military Memorial
by Tamara Boatwright
Mercer Bush, left, with his Aunt Nell and cousins Hill and Jackson.
24 | President’s Report
Jackson Bush was a young man who loved cars and
good-natured fun, but he was also very much a gentleman.
He was such a gentleman that when he heard that
fellow Fredonia Congregational Methodist Church
member and friend Faye Walker was getting married, he
sent her a card.
“Young men usually don’t do that. That shows you
what a caring person he was. I still have that card today,”
Walker said. “I will cherish it always.”
It was the only card that Walker would receive from
Jackson.
Milton Jackson Bush was killed in action near Bien
Hoa, South Vietnam on May 18, 1969.
The C-123K Provider of the 310th Special Ops
Squadron he was on was hit by ground fire while on
an airlift sortie near Tanh Linh, 50 miles east of Bien
Hoa Airbase. The crew tried to get back to Bien Hoa but
crashed six miles short of the runway. All six crewmen
were killed.
Jackson was only 22 and had been in Vietnam a little
less than three months. His body was brought home and
laid to rest in the cemetery of the little white church
where he and his family had been members for years.
“He was such an exceptional young man, so handsome,
thoughtful and so caring,” Walker said. “He could have been
most anything, most anything he put his mind to.”
Jackson was drafted like most young men of his day.
He went into the Air Force and was stationed at Dover,
Del. He was a sergeant with the 310th SOS, 315th SOW,
7th Air Force and worked as a load master.
THE BUSH BOYS
Mercer Bush was Jackson’s cousin and one of what
many people around Barnesville referred to as the
Bush boys.
There was Hill – Jackson’s older brother, now deceased –
Mercer and Jackson. All close in age, all Gordon Military High School graduates and always looking for some
good-natured fun.
“We were like brothers,” Mercer said. “I stayed so
much with Hill and Jackson we might as well have been
brothers.”
Mercer smiles when he recalls some of the hijinks the
Bush boys got into. Some stories he will share, some he
keeps to himself and smiles at the memory.
“When Jackson came home from Dover that last time,
just before he went to Vietnam, he had a parachute with
him. We decided that we were going to hook that thing to
the frame of a car a friend was driving and throw it out
when we got to a certain speed,” Mercer recalls. “Well,
we got to going pretty fast and Jackson threw that thing
out. Nothing happened for a few seconds but then all the
sudden that parachute opened and it jerked us so hard it
threw the car in the ditch. No one got hurt except for a
few bumps, but I can still see that whole thing happening
as if it were yesterday.”
But not all memories solicit smiles.
“I had been with the Barnesville Police Department
for about three months and was working the 4 to 12 shift
that night,” Mercer said. “It was shift change, and I was
in the booth that served as the police station. At that time
the little building was right in the center of town. I saw
a car with U.S. Air Force on the side pull up and two
men, one was a chaplain, came in and asked for directions to Ben Bush’s house. I just froze. I knew why they
were there. I said ‘Jackson’s been killed, hasn’t he?’ the
chaplain replied, ‘Son, I can’t tell you anything.’”
“I got in the front seat and rode with them out to
Uncle Ben’s and Aunt Nell’s house. I remember I just kept
saying ‘Jackson got killed, didn’t he?’ We got to the house
and went in. I couldn’t even bear to look at them. The
chaplain asked them to sit down, that he had something
to tell them. When the chaplain gave them the news I
remember Uncle Ben, who was a big man, stood up, his
arms straight down and his hands balled up in fists. He
looked up and with a voice restrained to just below a
howl said ‘damn.’”
“That was one of the worst nights of my life. I had
been to war, I had been to Vietnam, and I had been in
ground battles as a Marine. I came home with barely
a scratch.”
A WAY TO HONOR, REMEMBER
Last year Faye Walker was thumbing through the
President’s Report – the annual magazine sent to alumni
and friends of Gordon State College. She came upon an
article about the plans for the Military Memorial and had
an idea.
“I just think we all are indebted to those who have
served and fought for the freedoms we have,” Walker said.
“This is an excellent way to remember all the veterans
and to honor Jackson at the same time.”
Walker brought up the Military Memorial to the
congregation of Fredonia Church and sought approval to
make a donation in memory of Milton Jackson Bush.
The congregation approved. Mercer also contributed
to the Military Memorial in honor of his cousin.
“This memorial honors those who gave the greatest
sacrifice for our country,” Mercer said. “But it is also a
part of the history of Gordon where we – Hill, Jackson
and I – all attended. It will be here long after we are gone
and the story of Jackson’s sacrifice, and the sacrifice of so
many others, will continue to be told.”
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 25
Campus Notes
Campus Notes
OUTSTANDING SCHOLAR
The weather could have been
a problem for the Founder’s Day
Concert and Scholarship Fundraiser
in March. Rain had fallen the day and
night before, and there was a chance
more rain would fall during the event
which included a reception/buffet in a
tent set up on the lawn in front of the
Fine Arts Building. Many saw a rainbow
in the east sky arching over the tent
before dusk and took it as a good sign.
As it turned out, it was. Not only
did guests enjoy themselves, but the
event raised the targeted amount
needed to create a scholarship,
$25,000.
Inside the Fine Arts Auditorium
lobby, guests gathered for drinks
and conversation before The Return
started their concert whose two sets
were divided by a Beatles-inspired
reception/buffet in the tent.
Founders Day
2014
Before the band came on stage,
Hoppy Hopkins, chairman of Gordon
State College’s Foundation, greeted
guests and thanked them for helping
to raise scholarship money. No sooner
than he started walking off the stage,
The Return was walking on to screams
reminiscent of the screams heard on
the Beatles debut on the Ed Sullivan
Show.
While The Return is not the
Beatles, Richard Stelling (John), Mike
Fulop (George), Shane Landers (Paul)
and Adam Thurston (Ringo) include a
number of mannerisms characteristic
of a Beatles concert, like joking with
the audience. Just before launching
into Twist and Shout, “Paul” introduced the song as one “stolen from
the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
The song of course was not stolen
from anywhere, but a Beatles cover of
the hit single by the The Isley Brothers.
At intermission, The Return went
to their dressing room to change
costume and rest their voices and
everyone else took the covered
walkway to the tent. The different
buffet items were identified by the
labels on 33 1⁄3 vinyl records made
to look like Beatles’ LPs. Enlarged
album cover art decorated tables. The
centerpiece of the tent was a huge
flower arrangement set above the fruit
and dessert platters.
When The Return returned for
their second set they found a reinvigorated audience full of Octopus’s Garden
mini crab cakes, Sgt. Peppers red and
yellow pepper bruschetta, Twist and
Shout twisted chicken wontons, and
other Beatles-inspired food.
Founders Day 2014 was sponsored by United
Bank, Chick-fil-A, Georgia Power and the
Gordon State College Foundation.
26 | President’s Report
Jennifer Parker
Jennifer Parker is the Gordon State College
Outstanding Scholar for the 2013-14 academic year.
Parker, an emergency room nurse at Southern
Regional Hospital in Riverdale, graduated last
December with an associate degree in nursing. She
began work toward her bachelor’s degree in nursing
in June.
There have been a few bumps along the road to
her dream job. She did not complete high school but
later earned a GED. Her first choice of a career in
accounting didn’t work out because the business she
worked for closed. Her second office job ended for the
same reason.
“I get bored easily,” she said. “And one day I
noticed how busy everyone was in a doctor’s office –
from the front desk, to the medical assistants and
nurses working with patients.”
So she went back to school to become an LPN,
licensed practical nurse.
“It was a great job, but I was limited in what I
could do, and I wanted to do more, so I entered the
nursing program at Gordon,” she said. “It was a tough
two years, but so worth it. Now, here I am again,
wanting to do more and looking at two more years of
school.”
She eventually wants to be a nurse practitioner
and work with acute care patients.
Parker said she could not have made it were it
not for the support of her mother, Pam Thrasher, her
stepfather Maen Yassine and her husband, Nathan.
She said everyone went out of their way to help her
succeed and have pledged to do the same as she
pursues her BSN.
“My husband works away so I moved back into
my mother’s house. Maen gave up his home office
space for me to turn into a study room – I need a lot
of room when I study.”
But those who know Parker say it is her determination that helped her succeed.
“Jennifer took the leadership role to the next
level in her position as President of the Gordon
State College Association of Nursing Students,” said
Samantha Bishop, associate professor of nursing. “As
president, she played an active role in all the events
that GCANS participated in such as blood drives,
tornado relief efforts, the annual Georgia Association
of Nursing Students convention, Empty Stocking
Fund and Operation Christmas Child. She was
actively involved with the campus and community in
the role of volunteer at flu vaccine clinics, hearing
and vision screenings, health fairs, and HIV screenings in conjunction with the Lamar County Health
Department. She has shown extreme leadership and
has great potential as a future leader.”
As Gordon’s Outstanding Scholar, Parker was
recognized on Academic Recognition Day during
the recent session of the Georgia General Assembly.
Academic Recognition Day was first held in 1987 as
a “celebration of individual academic achievement
and recognition of those students who exemplify that
which is best about the University System of Georgia
and its institutions.”
Gordon State Provost Margaret Venable, left,
with Outstanding Scholar Jennifer Parker.
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 27
Campus News
Campus News
I
FALL GRADUATION
Diplomas were awarded to 150 students in the
first ever fall semester graduation ceremonies at
Gordon State College on Dec. 13, 2013.
The ceremony was held in Alumni Memorial
Hall and Sherman R. Day, former interim president
of Gordon College and an administrator with
the University System of Georgia, addressed the
graduates.
Since its first days as part of the University System
of Georgia, graduation has been held only once a year
in May at the end of spring semester on the quad in
front of Lambdin Hall. Students who completed their
degree requirements in summer or fall semesters
would march then.
President Max Burns presents Asia Anderson
(B.A. English) with her diploma.
Recital Series Opens
WITH THE VEGA STRING QUARTET
The Vega String Quartet.
28 | President’s Report
The 2014-15 Gordon State College Recital Series began
Sept. 16 with The Vega String Quartet.
Members include Domenic Salerni and Jessica Shuang
Wu, violins; Yinzi Kong, viola; and Guang Wang, cello. The
New York Times wrote their playing “had a kind of clean
intoxication to it, pulling the listener along.”
Soprano Indra Thomas continues the series with a
performance on Oct. 30. According to her website, she
is “considered one of the foremost Aidas in the world
today,” a role she sang “in a performance that was televised
throughout France during the summer of 2011.”
David Coucheron, concertmaster of the Atlanta
Symphony Orchestra, returns to Gordon on Jan. 20. Originally from Oslo, Norway, Mr. Coucheron began playing violin
at the age of three.
Praised by The New York Times for “playing with superb
agility and accuracy and with a full-bodied, chocolatey
sound,” Shelley Monroe Huang will perform on the bassoon
for the Series’ conclusion on Feb. 18.
All concerts begin at 7:30 p.m. and take place on the
stage of the Gordon State College Fine Arts Auditorium.
nstead of sunning on a sandy beach, a group of Gordon
State College students spent their spring break in Selma,
Ala., working with the nonprofit Freedom Foundation.
Selma was the site of a fateful and violent attack by
Alabama State troopers and local police on a peaceful Civil
Rights march in 1965. More than 50 of the marchers were
hospitalized.
Alongside other college students from across the
country, the Gordon students, most of whom are human
services majors, spent a large part of their time learning
about the social and political structure of Selma. One full
afternoon was devoted to introducing the students to Dr.
Martin Luther King’s nonviolence training and how it can
be integrated into daily life.
While in Alabama, the group was treated to a special
screening of the in-development documentary, I Will
Dance. The film focuses on the history and expansion of
the Freedom Foundation’s youth-oriented group called
the Random Acts of Theater Company, or RATCo. Since
its formation in Selma, RATCo groups have started in
Colorado, Washington, D.C., and Georgia.
Recent Gordon graduate Emily Mumford coordinated
the alternative break for the Freedom Foundation.
“I loved the opportunity to serve as a coordinator. It
is a fulfilling and rewarding experience to see hundreds of
college students impacted and transformed each year by a
week of service learning in the Selma community,” she said.
“While we host a week-long experience, we have noticed
for many that this trip leaves a much longer impact. It is
extremely rewarding and encouraging to witness and be a
part of this program.”
Gordon State College Sociology Professor Christy Flatt
served as faculty supervisor for the trip and is already
working on next year’s spring break opportunity.
“For 2015, I plan on merging the service learning
opportunity with academic concepts. The best elements
of the 2014 trip were both the sociological and historical
ideas visible in Selma,” she said. “I have plans to develop a
course that centers on effects of race and its influence on
the Southern states.”
The alternative spring break trip, though sponsored
by the human services department at Gordon, is open to
all students interested in spending time lending a hand
and learning more about the history of Selma and changes
occurring in the small southern town.
by Raven Willis
Return to Selma
“I loved the opportunity to serve
as a coordinator. It is a fulfilling
and rewarding experience to see
hundreds of college students
impacted and transformed each year
by a week of service learning in the
Selma community.” – Emily Mumford
(Left to right) Kaley Compton
(B.S. human services major),
Juleia Green (B.S. human
services major) and Emily
Mumford ( ‘14 Gordon State B.S.
human services graduate).
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 29
Campus News
STUDENT ACTIVITY AND
RECREATION CENTER
DUE TO OPEN
IN EARLY 2015
Construction is well under way for the 55,000-square-foot
Student Activity and Recreation Center that will anchor the
northeast side of campus and is expected to be completed in
early 2015.
The Center is adjacent to Alumni Memorial Hall which was
built in 1963. Although the Center will replace Alumni Hall as
the home of Gordon State’s Highlander basketball team, the
older building will continue to be used for student activities.
The Center will contain a basketball court with seating
on both sides of the court and a stage area at one end, weight
training and cardio workout areas, game room and lounge,
multi-use area, food court and food preparation area, offices
and storage areas.
At the groundbreaking, which was held on a bitterly cold
January day, Tommy Hopkins, representing the University
System Board of Regents, told the crowd that the Center will
be a much needed addition to Gordon State College and will
help accommodate growth and the expectations of students.
“It will make Gordon a more attractive alternative for
prospective students and support student success. This is our
top priority: to significantly increase the numbers of Georgians
completing college and earning degrees at some level through
the Governor’s Complete College Georgia initiative,” Hopkins
told the crowd.
Rachel Adams, then Student Government Association
president welcomed the crowd. Also participating in the
groundbreaking was Chris Childress, SGA president 20122013 and Anni Skurja, SGA president 2011-2012.
HIGHTOWER LIBRARY STEPS INTO THE 21ST CENTURY
When Gordon State College’s library, named after Dorothy
Watson Hightower, was built in 1978, the college’s enrollment
was 1,400 and the first personal computers were still being sold
out of a California garage. Overhead projectors, VCRs, portable
screens and tape recorders were still de rigeur. Today these
“technologies” and the way the library’s floor space is used are
so 20th century.
To bring the Hightower Library into the 21st century, the
college began a $4.9 million renovation in July in order to meet
the needs of the college’s strategic plan and a student body that
has grown 300 percent.
As can be seen in the photos to the right, the current floor
plan does not include collaborative learning space – this is one
thing the renovation will address. The plan also calls for mobile
high-density storage for books and periodicals, and greater
access to electrical power and data.
The renovation will not increase the size of the 35,000 square
foot library but rather make better use of it.
30 | President’s Report
Campus News
Gaither to Lead the Library and
Capers to Lead the Basketball Team
Professor Sonya Gaither is the new director of the Hightower Library, and
Bruce Capers is the new head coach of the Highlanders basketball team.
Gaither was formerly the library assessment officer at Georgia Southern
University and earned her Ed.D. in educational administration.
Despite the growing use of Kindles and the like, Gaither said there will
always be a need for a library building and actual books.
“People will always, at least for many, many generations to come, want to
hold an actual book,” she said.
Capers most recently coached basketball at Aiken Technical College,
and under his direction the program won three Region 10 NJCAA Division 1
Conference championships and two Region 10 NJCAA Division 1 Tournament
championships.
“What it takes to win on the court is the same thing it takes to be a good
student – hard work, dedication and perseverance. I will demand all three things
from the student athletes on the team.”
Third Time’s a Charm
After years of being a fan, Gordon State
College Professor Marc Muneal finally made it to
the set as a contestant on the iconic game show
Jeopardy last fall.
Of the 100,000 people who take the qualifying test each year, only 400 end up as actual
contestants, Muneal explained.
Muneal said he has watched the show since
he was 11 or 12 and had tried to win an audition
three times. His first attempt was in college, then
another attempt in graduate school. In spring
2013, he learned that he was scheduled to audition for the show at the end of the semester in
May – leaving him little time to prepare.
“I did not study for the audition. There
wasn’t time. It was the end of the semester, and
I had just finished giving exams,” he said. “I told
myself, ‘I’m just going to go in there with what I
know and see where it gets me.’”
The audition was successful.
“I’d just finished teaching my summer
class, I was working on getting ready for the fall
semester, and I had a little bit of extra time,” he
said. “So, I was able to do some studying for the
actual performance. I read through some books
that gave a brief synopsis on major issues in
different fields, and I spent a lot of time watching
Gordon Professor Makes It to Jeopardy
documentaries, specifically around American
presidents. By doing this, I learned about everything connected with them, such as wars, policy,
and government.”
Muneal assumed he would have the least
trouble with any category on the topics of television and television history.
“I really enjoy reading about television
history and broadcast history so I was really
looking forward to having those as possible
categories,” he said.
Two categories that he most dreaded were
American sports and 19th century literature.
“I wasn’t born in this country and so many
of the sports I grew up knowing about are not
really the sports that are played here,” he
explained. “I was nervous about being quizzed
on 19th century literature because I was worried
that a question would come up and I would
completely blank or freeze up and then not be
able to face my students or live it down, being an
English professor.”
Muneal says that he enjoyed sharing the
experience with the other contestants as much
as he enjoyed playing Jeopardy.
“The best part of the experience is that you
get to know the other contestants. We all shared
the same fears and were equally nervous,”
Muneal said. “The atmosphere was not cutthroat
at all. We were in it together, and the Jeopardy
staff really went the distance in making sure that
everyone was enjoying the experience as a game
and having fun with one another.”
And the outcome?
Muneal got hung up on the category Toys
and the “answer,” “A caveman-themed game in
which ‘rocks’ were thrown at other players led to
the creation of this product in 1969.”
The correct response: “What is a Nerf ball?”
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 31
Campus News
Gordon Police Officer
Designs New Shoulder Patch
When it was decided that the Gordon
State College Police Department needed
new patches to reflect the school’s name,
Officer James Lane took on the task.
After hours of research into Gordon’s
history and Scottish heritage, Lane
settled on a crest that was featured on
Gordon Military School annuals in 1942,
1952 and 1966.
“I thought it would be good to reflect
a bit of the school’s history in the patch
while also updating it to reflect the
school’s name change,” Lane said.
The new patch features a variation
of the Clan Gordon crest with two Scottish deerhounds, a stag’s head and the
historic colors of the crest.
Also featured is the word “Bydand,”
which means “abiding, steadfast” and the
words, “Animo Non Astutia” which mean
“by courage, not by craft.”
The year the school was founded,
1852, and the word “Gordon” are also
included on the patch.
“I’m proud of it,” Lane said. “There is
a lot of detail in it for such a small space.”
32 | President’s Report
Campus News
NEW COLLEGE SEAL A MIX
OF THE OLD AND THE NEW
The new Gordon State College
Seal was officially revealed in
April to alumni gathered for
Alumni Weekend 2014.
Central to the redesigned seal
is the columned arch that is a
replica of the portico of Lambdin
Hall. The title of the book penned
by beloved former faculty member
Miss Marion Bush, Character,
Culture and Scholarship, forms a
drape over the columns.
The new seal came about as
part of the recently completed
strategic planning process. During
the process the strategic planning committee which was made
up of faculty, staff, alumni and
community members discussed
the need to protect and honor the
history and heritage of Gordon
State College. So the seal was
redesigned to better recognize
the present Gordon State College
while linking to the college’s past.
The Claymore Garners Seven Awards
The Gordon State College
student newspaper, The Claymore, won seven awards in the
2013 Georgia College Press
Association contest this year.
The annual contest honors
outstanding work published by
student newspapers at two-and
four-year colleges and universities in the state.
The Claymore, launched in
fall semester 2013 with a new staff
and new advisers, was the overall
winner among papers in the
two-year division in two categories: first place for Improvement,
an award for enhanced quality of
content and appearance; and first
place for General Advertising,
THE MAN BEHIND THE MASCOT
The Gordon State College
Foundation, alumni advisory
board, staff and faculty all
approved the new design. The
new seal was also approved by
the University System Board of
Regents.
It will now be featured on all
official documents and made its
debut May 9 on diplomas that
were awarded to spring graduates.
which recognizes effective and
attractive content and design.
The newspaper won third
place in General Excellence,
the highest level of competition,
second place in Best Campus
Community Service-Features and
third place in Layout/Design.
Two editors won individual
awards: Reba Williams, second
place, Best Feature Story, for a
piece about disability services
at the college; and Sharri-Ann
Solomon, third place, Best News
Article-Objective Reporting, for a
profile of music faculty member
James Wallace and his reflections
on civil rights.
Gordon State College student Steven Lisius may be the biggest
cheerleader the school has.
The theater major took it upon himself to provide the campus
with its very own Highlander mascot and for the past year he has
attended athletic events in an effort to stir up team spirit.
Lisius was inspired when he heard several of his friends who play
sports discussing the need for more school spirit and that Gordon
State didn’t have a live mascot at any sports events.
“I thought, ‘Well, I could do that,’” said Lisius, “So I went out and
bought a costume and started going to the games and stirring up
the crowd.”
Lisius has spent nearly $300 on his mascot attire which includes
a kilt, a sash, a wig, and a homemade beard.
“I found a store in Atlanta that specialized in kilts and other
Scottish attire,” he said.
He was adopted as the official mascot for Gordon State athletics.
“I never planned on that,” Lisuis said. “I was just there because I
am a big believer in school spirit. I believe we should support everything on campus, whether it’s a soccer game or a school play.”
Gordon’s ’14-’15 Theater Season
The Gordon State College Theatre
presented
Christopher
Durang’s
The Actor’s Nightmare as its season
opener on Sept. 10.
On Nov. 5-9, the Gordon Theatre
presents The Gifts of the Magi. Based
on two short stories by O. Henry,
two young lovers sacrifice treasured
personal items to buy Christmas gifts
for one another, and a bum tries to get
arrested so he can spend Christmas
out of the cold and wet. The New York
Tribune called it a “bright and beguiling
musical” with laughs and tears.
Doubt, A Parable comes to
Gordon on Feb. 11-15. “In this
brilliant and powerful drama, Sister
Aloysius, a Bronx school principal,
takes matters into her own hands
when she suspects the young Father
Flynn of improper relations with one
of the male students.”
The season ends with An Evening
of Original One Acts on Apr. 8-12.
Students in Laura King’s colloquium
will produce and perform their original works.
All shows run Wednesday through
Sunday. Wednesday through Saturday
shows start at 7:30 p.m. Sunday shows
start at 2 p.m.
Tickets for all performances are available at the door of the Fine Arts Theater
and are $7 for adults, $6 for senior
citizens, $5 for non-Gordon students, $4
each for groups of 10 or more.
Melanie Peace (left), Jenna
Snidemiller and Shannon
Baskin starred in the fall 2013
production of The Crucible.
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 33
Campus News
Alumni News
ALUMNI WEEKEND 2014
&GOODBYES
Gordon State College
Pumped $141 Million into the
Regional Economy in FY 12
Gordon State College contributed more
than $141 million to the regional economy
and provided 1,418 jobs in fiscal year 2012,
according to an annual report by the University System of Georgia.
Of the jobs provided, 374 are on-campus
while 1,044 are off-campus jobs that exist due
to institution-related spending.
The report also revealed that spending
by Gordon State students accounted for $80
million of the total $141 million contributed to
the local economy.
“These numbers show that Gordon State
College continues to drive the local economy
and contributes greatly to the regional
economy while providing, most importantly, a
quality education to thousands of students,”
said Gordon State College President Max
Burns. “Gordon State College is ranked
fourth among the state’s 14 state colleges in
economic impact and jobs provided.”
To calculate the economic impact for
FY12, the Selig Center for Economic Growth
in the University of Georgia’s Terry College of
Business analyzed data collected between July
1, 2011, and June 30, 2012. The annual study is
conducted on behalf of the Board of Regents.
“We have been analyzing the University
System’s economic impact for a number of
years and what is clear is the importance of
these colleges and universities on local and
state economies and from just about every
variable: direct spending, income, production
of goods and services and jobs,” said Jeffrey
Humphreys, director of the Selig Center.
“Of course, our studies focus on spending
and its economic impact, but do not attempt
to measure the value the University System
adds in terms of quality of life, the creation
of a highly educated workforce to meet the
needs of businesses, government and communities, or the overall health of communities,”
Humphries said.
34 | President’s Report
HELLOS
Oluwole ACCEPTED TO PRESTIGIOUS PROGRAM
Gordon State College junior Ornella Oluwole was accepted into
the prestigious 2014 Summer Educational Enrichment Program
(SEEP) at Georgia Regents University.
Her time there was spent working at the Medical College of
Georgia, which is part of Georgia Regents, to prepare for the MCAT
(Medical College Admission Test) and learning more about the
medical profession.
The program offers an opportunity for students to focus on
pre-med classes, to shadow professionals in a clinical setting and
to network while earning college credit toward a degree in biology
at Gordon State.
Oluwole praises the support she has received from faculty.
“Dr. Lynn Rumfelt told me about the program,” Oluwole said.
“Dr. Mustapha Durojaiye has been a mentor to me, and Dr. Gregory
Hartman wrote a recommendation letter to the program. They have
been very helpful.”
Oluwole intends to apply for medical school by the end of
summer.
“I’m looking at the University of Southern California and
Emory University, but my real hope is for UCLA. I had the opportunity to visit there recently.”
The highly competitive seven-week SEEP is intended to help
students focus and gain practical knowledge toward their career
goals in the medical field. Oluwole was granted access to the
advanced college area of study, the most prestigious and competitive within the program.
“Medical school has always been my goal,” Oluwole said. “I
want to heal people, help people to be healthy. It’s not just about
the money.”
A
lumni Weekends at Gordon State College often
are a mix of several stories, and because of this,
it can be tough figuring out what the lead to the
story might be.
This year, the lead could very well be Midgie McCoy
Coddington talking about all the “way we were” photographs scattered on the memory table at the 50th reunion
dinner for the High School Class of 1964. She was on the
Taps yearbook staff in her senior year and was in charge
of collecting and keeping photos of seniors as children.
One photo was of a little boy sitting by himself in his family’s living room and another was of a little girl posing in a
swimsuit. Some were comical like the 1-year-old drowning
in a pair of too-large bib overalls and some were sad like
the baby crying to get out of his crib. But all of them were
stark reminders. When these photographs were published
in the 1964 Taps, the cadets and coeds were closer in
age to their childhood selves than they would be to the
selves celebrating their 50th reunion on the fourth floor
of Gordon State College’s Instructional Complex Building.
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 35
Alumni News
Alumni News
For a couple of years, the Bush
sisters have been wanting to have
their own reunion during Alumni
Weekend, and this year they pulled
it off. They topped off their reunion
weekend with a trip to Florida.
“What happens in Mexico Beach,”
they joked, “stays in Mexico Beach.”
(Left to right) Janice Henson; Bob and Terry Rooke; Gordon athletic director Todd Davis and
Kike Seda; and Nancy Jackson Thomas, Holland Jackson and Professor Richard Schmude.
Midgie had saved all of them, tags with instructions
for the printer still fixed to each picture, because she
knew the day would come for a reunion. She was going
to be ready, and she was.
The lead for this year’s Alumni Weekend might also
be Mercer Bush expressing his gratitude for his commandant, Lt. Ed Legge, even though Legge took a paddle to
him numerous times.
“You could be expelled from Gordon if you had too
many demerits,” Bush said, “and one way you could
reduce them would be to pay a visit to Ed Legge’s office.
For every whack, two demerits would be erased.”
This was a significant benefit, Bush said, because
if a cadet accumulated too many demerits, he could be
expelled. Still, the benefit had some drawbacks, especially if a cadet had 10 demerits he needed to shed in
a hurry. Taking five whacks on the bottom was out of
the question when even two could make sitting in class
uncomfortable.
And this is where Bush’s gratitude comes in. He said
Legge had a way of confusing his mathematics so that
more demerits were subtracted from the cadet than were
merited by the number of whacks Legge gave. What’s
more, Legge didn’t lay into his swing as hard as he was
capable of.
Bob Lovein, the master of ceremonies for the Class of
‘64’s reunion, spoke before supper of a different commandant who once caught him and his roommate staying up
after hours in their room watching late night television.
He came into their darkened room from the fire escape.
Even though they were in bed and the lights were out, the
evidence against them was certain. Televisions in those
36 | President’s Report
days kept a halo of light on their screens minutes after
being turned off. Their own TV busted them.
Lovein’s story got a chuckle out of the audience but
something even more. Just remembering this characteristic of the old TV sets brought everyone in the room
closer together, a shared experience of daily life long
past.
He brought his classmates’ attention to a poster in
clear view of everyone seated around their dinner tables,
a poster with the yearbook pictures of 35 classmates who
had died. Lovein solemnly named every one of them. He
said that they and everyone on the room made life at
Gordon “super.”
“We often did foolish things, and sometimes flat out
against-the-law things,” he said. “We are not only Gordon
survivors, but after 50 years, we are just survivors.”
The next morning, John Boesch (HS ’57), John
Campbell (C ’69), Powell Cotter (C ’61) and George
McMath (HS ’64) grabbed their golf clubs and joined
Gordon College President Max Burns and Gordon State
College Alumni Association Chair Kevin Blosser at the
Morgan Dairy Golf Club.
Alumni House opened at 9 a.m. for registration,
coffee and meeting fellow reunion goers. The college
bookstore was open for those wanting Gordon State
apparel, and at 10 a.m. former Gordon librarian Louise
Jackson was honored for her donation of her rock and
mineral collection to Gordon’s physical sciences department in the Instructional Complex Building.
Jackson, who died at age 107 in December 2013,
was represented by her son Holland and daughter Nancy
Jackson Thomas.
From left to right: Nancy Bush
Shugart HS ’61, Kathy Bush Keadle
HS ’65, standing, Barbara Bush
Etheridge HS ’59, Becky Bush Wilson
HS ’68 and Carol Bush HS ’65.
After a lunch of pulled pork sliders, beef kabobs,
roasted potatoes and other dishes served in the courtyard of Alumni House, alumni had several choices of
activities. They could attend a baseball game between
Gordon and Georgia Highlands College and watch George
Bugg (C ’55) throw out the first pitch. They could attend
the Military Memorial update in the courtyard, visit the
historical collections and archives in the Hightower
Library, go on a campus tour, or be on their own.
The afternoon went by quickly and before long people
were returning to the courtyard at Alumni House for
dinner at 5:30. Before giving the blessing, President Max
Burns thanked the college staff who organized Alumni
Weekend 2014: Natalie Rischbieter, Skipper Burns,
Candi Babcock and Rhonda Toon. He also thanked the
college’s food service provider Sodexo whose head chef
Bill Littiken served up a menu of Bourbon Street chicken
thighs, shrimp and sausage gumbo, Cajun beans and rice
and assorted cobbler desserts.
The band Junkshun played rock ’n’ roll and blues on
the deck during the meal, and then got diners up on their
feet to have some fun on the dance floor. Every now and
then, Junkshun’s lead singer Creché Navarro waded into
the audience for a little sing-along or to rouse people to
dance. The evening ended when the band finished its last
set at 9 p.m.
When breakfast in Highlander Hall ended the next
morning, another alumni weekend came to a successful
end. Not with dancing and rock music like the night
before, but with many extended goodbyes from classmates, and many promises to stay in touch.
SAVE THE DATE.
Join Us for Gordon State College
Alumni Week 2015
April 11-19
Alumni Weekend will grow from a weekend
to a full week in 2015 with special events on
campus and the addition of a family fun day.
Our traditional Alumni Weekend festivities
will take place April 17-19.
Come join us for a time of renewing
friendships, making new friends, reminiscing,
good food and drink, and fun.
Have a idea for an event at next year’s reunion?
Have a question about lodging, travel or plans?
Contact Natalie Rischbieter at
natalier@gordonstate.edu or call her
at 678-359-5073.
We can also be reached via the U.S. Postal
Service: Gordon College, Alumni Relations
Office, 419 College Drive, Barnesville, GA 30204.
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 37
Alumni News
Alumni News
y
ar
e
Moving the Military Memorial
To
Shade tree
The New Site Will Be Where North Barracks Once Stood
Alumni Weekend 2014 had one serious business
item to address and that was the status of the Military
Memorial. On the Saturday of the Weekend, members
of the 350 and other alumni sat down for an afternoon
meeting in the courtyard of Alumni House to listen to an
update by the college’s vice president of advancement,
Rhonda Toon.
The original plan for the Memorial, drawn up five
years ago, called for a fund raising campaign to raise
$350,000 to build the Memorial in conjunction with the
building of Gordon State College’s new student center.
That center has been under construction since the
beginning of the 2014 New Year.
Toon told her audience that the original plan which
included a memorial wall, a fountain and a portico modeled
after the old Lambdin Hall portico had to be altered for
several reasons, the primary reason being funding.
Despite a final push, the campaign did not reach the
$350,000 mark, but at the time of this issue’s printing, it
did result in gifts exceeding $210,000, including pledges,
from 517 gifts, according to Toon.
“All of you told me from the beginning that you
wanted something big enough that some future president
can’t come along and tear down later,” she said, adding
that the money raised should be sufficient to the task.
The task, however, would be minus the fountain.
When it became clear in the fall of 2013 that the 350
campaign might fall short, Toon sent out a letter and
survey to those who contributed or pledged to the Memorial. She informed donors of the likely shortfall and asked
them that if something had to be cut, what would it be:
the portico, the wall or the fountain? The majority of
respondents said the fountain should be excluded.
38 | President’s Report
Another reason for altering the Memorial’s plan lay
in the original plan for the new student center. As first
conceived, the building would be a multi-story structure,
but when the college’s administration realized it could
get more for the same amount of money, a single-story
structure was approved. What this meant was there was
less room for the Memorial since the footprint of the
student center was greatly enlarged.
One of the 350, John Boesch, asked if the Memorial
shouldn’t be relocated. Toon thanked him for bringing up
the issue of relocation and said that campus officials had
studied two possibilities. The first was to keep the Memorial alongside the new student center; the second was to
move the Memorial to a spot between Lambdin Hall and
the library, along a walkway that already existed.
Another 350 member, Robert Melvin, expressed
an opinion that many at the meeting felt. To keep the
Memorial alongside the student center would diminish
its impact because it would be like a narrow valley
between the new student center and Alumni Memorial
Hall gymnasium.
Toon told her audience that the location between
Lambdin and the library had several benefits. It was
already a trafficked walkway; there were few, if any,
electrical, gas or water conduits to work around; and it
was on the side of campus that most alumni consider the
original campus. Furthermore it would be visible to car
and foot traffic along College Drive.
After a visit to the site, all in attendance agreed that
the new site near Lambdin was preferable. Toon later
sent out a letter to 350 members and other donors asking
for their input. All responses indicated a preference for
the new site.
th
r
lib
Cannon
To the amphitheater
Cannon
President Burns, Lee Fruitticher, vice president
of finance and administration, and Toon met with
architect Bob Smith in the summer of 2014 and the
rendering that is included in this article is a result of his
work. Construction on the Memorial is expected to be
completed by Alumni Week in 2015. Plans are underway
for a dedication ceremony to be held on the afternoon
of April 18.
The original group of alumni who met with the
architect when the idea was first conceived is assisting in
the plans for the ceremony. They are Rick Hahn, Oliver
Halle, Danks Seel, Kike Seda and Don Neuner. Others who
have ideas for this event are encouraged to email Toon at
rhondat@gordonstate.edu. Help is also needed to make
sure that all the names of the deceased are included on the
wall of honor. Please check the Military Memorial website
page http://www2.gordonstate.edu/militarymemorial/ to
see if the name of your classmate or family member is
included on the list.
“This memorial is something that has been talked
about for a very long time. Far into the future Gordon
students and alumni will walk through the columned
portico and read the names on the wall. They will
know that we valued the sacrifice these students and
faculty made. They will understand that Gordon’s
history as an honor Army ROTC school was part of
the heritage and foundation of the institution. I think
we can all celebrate the completion of this project and
hope we will have a wonderful turnout for the event
next April,” said Toon.
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 39
Alumni News
Alumni News
Gordon Gave Me
FRIENDS AND FAMILY
Gordon State College Graduate Jieun Kim
by Peter Boltz
It takes a strong person, a committed person, to make
dreams, especially big ones, come true and Gordon State
College alumna Jieun Kim is one of them.
A citizen of South Korea, Kim came to the United
States in early 2006 to study English for two months at
Georgia Southwestern University in Americus, Ga. This
was after she spent 10 months taking English courses in
the Philippines, and before that, studying English in her
homeland.
“A lot of Koreans are well educated,” she said. “Ninety
percent of my friends have college degrees.”
She explained that Koreans who speak English are
considered to be “so much smarter” than others, and
because English is so valued, many Koreans speak at least
a little of it.
“English is key to education,” she said, “but it is hard
to practice your English everyday in Korea.”
“Most Koreans go to California or New York City to
study English, but I went to Americus because I heard
that Georgia Southwestern had a good ESL program. I
had never heard of Georgia or about the states in general,
period. All I knew of the United States was what I had
seen on TV or in the movies. I watched shows like CSI,
which I knew was in Las Vegas. My impression of the
United States was that it was about the same as Korea
infrastructure-wise.”
She came to Gordon in August 2006 and enrolled in
the ASN (associate of science in nursing) program.
“I chose Gordon because the school was well-known for
its nursing program. It was the best and still is,” she said.
“My first impression of Gordon was that it was so
pretty. This was shortly after the first or second Harry
Potter movie, and I thought the campus between Smith
and the IC Building was like a scene out of the movie.”
She was first to her dorm assignment in Watson Hall,
and since a friend had advised her to do so, she laid claim
to the lower bunk and the desk by the window. Her roommate, Angela Ellis, showed up while Jieun was getting something to eat with a friend. Later Jieun learned that Angela’s
boyfriend, seeing that the bottom bunk had been claimed,
said, “See, I told you we should have gotten here early.”
Jieun’s father Chasoo Kim
and mother Myoung-yi Kang.
Jieun is standing in front of
her mother, and her sister,
Minji Kim, is being held by
her father.
(Facing page top) Jieun
with her mother in Korea.
(Bottom) Jieun with three of
her professors, Drs. Christina
Quinn, Cris Fermin-Ennis and
Jeremy Richards.
When she was at Spalding Regional as a student, she saw firsthand the value of CPOE (computerized physician order entry
system) in health care and decided she wanted to be someone
who helped health care providers start using the new technology.
40 | President’s Report
Unperturbed, Angela left a note for Jieun before
leaving for something to eat herself: “Hi roomie. My name
is Angie, and I’m going to be your roommate. I hope we
have a nice semester together.”
This made quite the impression on Jieun who still
remembers how thoughtful and touching this was of
Angie. One of the first things they did together when they
finally did meet was walk around the campus at night.
Both of them talked about how nice the campus looked
in lamplight and how quiet the campus and the city of
Barnesville were.
In the fall of 2007, she began that part of the ASN
program that is very much hands-on – the clinicals. In
this part of the program students practice their skills
like taking the vital signs of real patients in hospitals and
clinics. Students cycle through ob-gyn, pediatrics and
then psychiatry, working five clinicals for each specialty.
She graduated in May 2009, and through a school
program she went to work as a registered nurse on the
surgical floor of Upson Regional Medical Center. When
she finished the program in May of 2010, she faced a big
decision. Because of visa restrictions, she either had to
return to her home in Busan, Korea, or go back to school.
As it turned out, Gordon had just started a bachelor
of science in nursing program, and Jieun decided to enroll
in the fall of 2010. The decision was a turning point in her
career goals.
Jieun didn’t come to the United States just to learn
English. Her bigger goal was to become a physician, but
her sister Minji’s experience in becoming a physician in
Korea and her own experience from nursing school led
her to rethink her plans for the future. She remained
interested in medicine but not in the role of a doctor or
nurse. Her interest turned to informatics.
“The BSN (bachelor of science in nursing) at Gordon
requires a lot of research,” she said, “and I did my
research papers on informatics. This fit nicely with my
bachelor’s degree in multimedia engineering in 2004
from Dongseo University in Busan.”
According to Gordon’s nursing website, informatics
“focuses on health care data and the management of
health care information resources. It addresses the
nature, structure, and translation of data into usable
forms of information for the advancement of health and
health care of individuals and populations.”
In her last semester, she was working 19 hours a
week as a tutor in Gordon’s Student Success Center,
enrolled in six courses, and worrying about how she
was going to manage her clinicals. Jieun could not
see how she would be able to do them in informatics
because she had to do them someplace near, and no
such place existed that she knew of. On top of that, she
was strapped for time.
When she met with her program coordinator Professor
Christina Quinn, Jieun told her she would have to choose
a site for her clinicals which would suit her time and
distance constraints rather than her interest in inforFall 2014, Volume 12 | 41
Alumni News
Alumni News
(Below) Jieun with her fiancé Rajinikanth Seshan on Jeju Island, South Korea. (Facing page top to bottom)
Jieun at Kyoung-bock Palace in Seoul, South Korea. Jieun’s marriage to Rajinikanth Seshan in 2014. Jieun
with her first roommate at Gordon, Angela Ellis.
matics. Quinn assured her that she could find a site for her,
and that she knew Jieun could handle the time constraints.
Dr. Quinn knew the director of information management at Spalding Regional Medical Center in nearby
Griffin, and so found Jieun the perfect fit.
“She thrived in this environment and had very positive feedback from the director who was her preceptor
[instructor] for the experience,” Quinn said.
After she graduated in May 2012, she stayed on at
Spalding Regional for two months as a member of the
team implementing the hospital’s new CPOE (computerized physician order entry) system.
By then, she had already made a decision that seems
counterintuitive – she decided to enroll in Georgia State
University’s MBA program.
She explained that when she was at Spalding Regional
as a student, she saw firsthand the value of CPOE in health
care and decided she wanted to be someone who helped
health care providers start using the new technology. To
be this person, this “guide” as she put it, she needed an
MBA.
“About 80 to 90 percent of American health organizations have some sort of informatics system, only a few
do not,” she said. “These organizations are making meaningful use of the technology, but there is still quite a bit of
work to be done in implementation.”
It has taken her eight years, but with her background
in nursing and informatics, and a master’s in business
administration, Jieun has positioned herself at the front
end of the medical informatics industry, an enviable position to be in.
Jieun will be the first person to tell you that she did
not accomplish her dreams alone.
“My mother, Myoung-yi Kang, has been my strongest
supporter of my dreams,” Jieun said. “She did all the
research for my coming to the United States.”
And while Jieun has only been back to Korea three
times in the last eight years, her mother, a widow since
2006, has come to see her daughter every single year.
42 | President’s Report
Asked about her professors at
Gordon State, theirs names are
foremost in her mind: Dr. Anne
Purvis, Dr. Christina Quinn, Dr.
Joe Mayo, Dr. Jeremy Richards, Dr.
Beike Jia, Dr. Cris Fermin-Ennis
and Professor Peter Higgins.
“I loved learning from Dr. Purvis,”
Jieun said. “I started recording her
lectures after I realized I wasn’t
getting all she said in class.”
For her part, Dr. Purvis thinks
Jieun is “one of the smartest people”
she’s ever known. “She picked up on
things quickly, always doing what she
had to do, and more.”
Dr. Mayo remembers her for her
dedication.
“Some years ago,” he said, “Jieun
completed my introductory lifespan
development course with the highest
A grade average in her class, only to
re-enroll in the very same class the
following semester as an auditing
student.”
When he asked her about this,
she told him she wanted to learn
everything she might have missed the
first time around.
“I recall that she faithfully
attended the audited class, both
actively taking notes and asking
probing questions. This is the only
time in my 25 years at Gordon that
I’ve seen a student possess this level
of dedication to excellence and
intrinsic motivation to learn for its
own sake.”
Her history professor Dr. Richards said, “She is absolutely brilliant,
though she never believes herself to
be as brilliant as she really is.”
Dr. Fermin-Ennis, a professor
of chemistry at Gordon, said she
remembers having a class of overachievers four years ago, the strongest class she had ever had.
“Jieun was the mother hen of
that class. She decided that everyone
in it should pass the course, so she
gathered all the other students for
study sessions every day. Needless
to say, my grade distribution was not
very good. I had the most A’s and B’s
that semester, and no D’s or F’s. Not
one student withdrew either.”
Ennis gave some insight into
the kind of tutor Jieun was at the
College’s Student Success Center,
although the Center was not the only
place Jieun tutored.
Ennis said, “She demands the
best and expects the best from fellow
students who seek her help. If you
want her to help you out, you had
better give it your best shot because
she won’t take anything less. She is
very frank but never condescending.”
Jieun herself sees her professors
and fellow students at Gordon a little
bit differently.
“Gordon gave me friends and
family,” she said. “This is what
Gordon gave me,”
There is one final thing to tell
about Jieun’s dream, and while it
wasn’t about getting a degree or
establishing a career path, her education put her in the right place at the
right time.
Jieun fell in love, and in the
summer of 2014 married Dr.
Rajinikanth Seshan, a kidney
specialist. Furthermore, because she
worked while in school, won scholarships and had the support of her
family, she was married without a
dime’s worth of student debt.
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 43
Alumni News
Love,
FIRST
COMES
THEN COMES
COLLEGE
Lee and Donna Brown chose to return
to school a little later in life, and chose to
do it together.
Often mistaken as parents of a
student or even as faculty members
the couple, who have been married 27
years, decided to return to school spring
semester 2012. And so far, they have taken
every class together, often walking hand in
hand across campus, book bags in tow.
Lee attended Gordon College
following his graduation from Upson Lee
High School, and Donna attended the
University of Georgia, after graduating
from Lamar County High. They met the
Lee and Donna Brown.
next summer, fell in love and married the
following February.
“We had every intention of returning
to school, but we both decided at the time
to work full time for a while in order to
establish our new home,” said Lee.
A few years later, after the birth of
their first daughter, the Browns returned to
school, Lee back at Gordon and Donna at
Southern Crescent Technical College, then
known as Flint Technical College. Both were
pursuing degrees in computer science.
“I was almost finished with my degree
when the program got canceled,” said
Donna. “Lee completed a few courses at
Gordon. We were not able to complete
what we had originally set out to accomplish because of timing.”
The Browns focused on raising their
two daughters, Debbie, 22, and Sarah, 16.
Lee worked as a firefighter for the Thomaston Fire Department, where he has
served for 30 years, and Donna worked as
a secretary and also operated an in-home
day care.
“I lost my job due to cut-backs,” said
Donna. “Our daughters are older, so Lee
and I felt it was the perfect time to return
to school. We decided to do it together in
an effort to have time with one another
and we also knew that we could help each
other with the school work.”
This time, the Browns returned to
school to pursue a degree in music. Donna
has served as a church choir director at
two different churches and both she and
her husband are seasoned performers.
“We decided on music in an effort
to sharpen our skills and hopefully have
more opportunities to entertain together
in the future. I am very impressed with the
music program. Gordon State holds itself
to a very high standard and we are challenged and better for it,” said Lee.
Both are members of the Gordon
State Chorus as well as the Vocal
Ensemble.
But returning to college classrooms
full of students half their age did pose
some challenges.
“At first I felt a bit intimidated sitting
in class with students so much younger
than me,” said Donna. “We both felt like
we had forgotten more than we could
remember. We were encouraged when we
attended a session for adult learners and
learned that there were more than 1,000
adult learners attending Gordon. During
the meeting, we were given some tips and
tools to use to make our transition back
into school easier. It was a comfort.”
The decision to return to Gordon has
proved to be very rewarding for both Lee
and Donna.
“It’s been fun,” said Lee. “We are able
to discuss and compare notes and it has
been something we can share. I also really
enjoy the campus. I enjoy the facilities that
the Student Center offers and the professors here really go out of their way to help
students.”
Donna agrees.
“Attending Gordon State alongside
my husband is a very special opportunity
for me. It has brought our family closer
together because it has given us the
chance to share so many more experiences together. It’s one thing to watch your
spouse succeed at something, but being
able to go on the journey with him and
come out on the other side of it together
makes all the difference in the world.”
44 | President’s Report
A
RETIRING
JUDGE
Alumni News
by Peter Boltz
In 2011, James Bodiford went for a heart screening.
He thought it would be a nice Valentine’s Day gift for his
wife, Nancy. As it turned out, it was a nice gift for the
both of them because doctors were able to detect, then
correct, serious blockages with quadruple bypass surgery.
He would later report to the Marietta Daily Journal that
the surgery left him with more energy.
This is a good thing because he has things to do,
like retire from his job as a Cobb County Superior Court
judge at the end of 2014. His retirement will mark the
end of a career that saw him preside over some of the
most infamous criminal cases in the history of Georgia.
Brian Nichols is such a case.
He is the man convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment by Bodiford for the murder of four people in
2005. After a rampage inside the Fulton County Courthouse where he killed a judge, a court reporter, and a
sheriff’s deputy, Nichols murdered yet another man who
was a federal law enforcement officer after escaping the
courthouse.
Only 33 miles away, and on the day Bodiford
was interviewed for this story, a heavily armed man
attempted to storm the Forsyth County Courthouse and
take hostages.
While a comparison with the Brian Nichols’ rampage
is a chilling reminder of how dangerous it can be to be a
judge, Jim Bodiford is warm and inviting as is his corner
office on the sixth floor of the Cobb County Superior
Courthouse. He likes to say it offers the best view of any
government office in Marietta because Kennesaw Mountain is off in the distance and a nice view of the city is
spread out below.
He smiles easily and doesn’t seem at all the man
sometimes described in the press as “no-nonsense,” at
Kennesaw Mountain is in the distance behind Judge Bodiford’s left shoulder.
least not outside of the courtroom and when talking
about his two years at Gordon Military High School. In
fact, it’s possible to see a bit of mischief in the eyes of
Jim the cadet who comes to life when Bodiford the judge
remembers those days.
“My dad sent me to Gordon,” he said. “In those days
it was not uncommon for kids to go to military school,
and my father, an aeronautics engineer with Lockheed,
was familiar with a number of them. He knew that Sen.
Richard Russell had gone to Gordon.”
He doesn’t recall a pre-school year meeting with
Gordon’s president, Col. Woodrow Light, as was the practice of Light’s predecessor, Col. C.T.B. Harris, but Jim did
come down to Barnesville before the school year started
to buy his uniforms.
“My memory of Gordon was that my fellow cadets
were more worldly than I,” Jim said. “Other cadets
seemed to have a greater knowledge of the world than I.
They understood the world better.
“A good friend’s dad was an Air Force officer, and so
he had lived around the world, like Okinawa, whereas I
had only been to the New York World’s Fair in 1964 and
visited relatives in Maine.”
He said he had a lot of fun at Gordon and enjoyed
the camaraderie of fellow boarding students. The nature
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 45
Alumni News
of this camaraderie is illustrated by a story he likes to
tell about taking a leadership group down to the Georgia
Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson.
“While we were there, I discovered that the assistant
warden was someone I went to Gordon with. He sees me
and says, ‘Jimmy, I never thought you’d be a judge,” and
for once I had a quick comeback and said, ‘And I never
thought you’d be in prison.’”
Bodiford didn’t say what kind of fun he had as a
Gordon cadet, but he did say it was a bit of cadet fun
that brought him before the commandant, Col. John F.
Schmelzer, for “one of the most important lessons” he
ever learned.
He was involved in some sort of prank with a number
of other cadets, but he was the only one who came to
Schmelzer’s attention. When Schmelzer pronounced his
punishment, Jim objected that he wasn’t the only one at
fault and so shouldn’t be the only one paying the price.
“I’m sending them a message through you,” the
commandant said, and to this day his message is still
clear. Making an example of one will suffice as a lesson
to many.
Of his teachers, his favorite was Mrs. Bobbie Rainey,
his mathematics teacher.
“She got me,” he said. And she was kind to him. He
doesn’t really know why, although he guesses that there
might have been a “Cobb connection,” but then again,
it might just be because she saw through his teenage
posturing.
When he graduated, he was aware of the quality of his
education, but it made him overconfident about his first
year at the University of West Georgia. He let his discipline slide and he made a poor academic showing. Giving
up on academics at the time, he joined the Marines and
served in the reserves. And when his time was up with
the Marines, he took stock.
“I thought to myself, I really need to make something
of myself and stop playing around,” he said.
So he went back to school, Mercer this time, “buckled
down” and earned his bachelor’s and then went on to the
John Marshall Law School in Atlanta. From then on he
made his steady climb to superior judge.
46 | President’s Report
Alumni News
Before becoming a judge, he was in private practice
in Marietta, and then a prosecutor for the Cobb County
district attorney’s office.
Becoming the chief magistrate judge for Cobb County
in 1985, he also served as a Powder Springs municipal
judge several nights a month.
In 1994 he was elected as superior court judge,
re-elected in 1998, and again in 2002, 2006 and 2010.
He said that he will see this last term to the end,
which will enable those “who are interested to run for an
open seat like I did 20 years ago.”
In addition to the Brian Nichols case, Bodiford
presided over the high-profile cases of Fred Tokars, Lynn
Turner and Ray Brent Marsh.
Tokars hired Curtis Rower in 1992, to murder his
wife, Sara, which he did with a shotgun in front of their
two young children. A jury convicted Tokars of murder
and Judge Bodiford sentenced him to life.
Turner was found guilty in 2001 for murdering her
first husband and later a boyfriend with antifreeze.
Marsh was brought to trial in 2002 for failing to properly dispose of more than 300 bodies sent to his business,
Tri-State Crematory in Noble, Ga.
Retirement means he will have happier occasions
ahead of him although he hasn’t quite sorted out the
thousand different things he wants to do except for
perhaps two.
(Facing page) As vice president
of his senior class in 1967, he
participated in a gag demonstration for the yearbook. His
placard calls for “the Fifth
Freedom.” (This page) Cadet
Bodiford in 1966, left, and “at
work” as senior vice president.
The first thing isn’t much of a surprise since it ends
up on many a retiree’s list. He wants to travel. More
specifically, he wants to drive Florida’s A1A Highway
without having to worry about a schedule.
“I don’t want to be in a hurry,” Bodiford said. “If we
see someplace interesting to visit or someplace where we
want to eat, we will just stop.”
The second thing he wants to do is something he’s
been working on since 2012 when his father died at the
age of 91.
“My dad’s home in Powder Springs is a historical
home, more than 100 years old,” he said. “I sold it to the
city for their museum but I have not as of yet cleaned out
all of dad’s stuff.”
That stuff, in particular, is an amazing amount of paper,
including blue books from his undergraduate days at the
University of Cincinnati. He said that whereas he can expect
his wife to join him in traveling the A1A, he is likely to be on
his own in clearing out all of his dad’s papers.
In addition to these more family-oriented retirement
plans, Bodiford is hoping to continue his professional
work but not in such a “regimented” way as he has been
doing the last 29 years on the bench.
One such goal is to be appointed to Georgia’s senior
judge program by Gov. Nathan Deal. As a senior judge,
Bodiford could expect to be invited to preside over cases
where all available judges had conflicts of interest or
when a jurisdiction’s caseload has grown too large and
needs to be expedited.
Mediation is also of professional interest to him after
his retirement from the Superior Court. As a mediator
of civil cases, he would help opposing parties reach
their own solution to their conflict rather than have one
imposed on them in court by a judge.
“I see it all the time,” he said. “People expect me as
the judge to resolve their conflict the way they think it
should be resolved. They come into court expecting it to
be the best day of their lives, but it doesn’t happen that
way. Even when someone wins a case, he or she may still
end up unhappy as in the case when attorney’s fees are
not awarded.”
He said he would like to bring people together in
mediation and be able to say to themselves that they can
live with a solution of their own making.
“They won’t resolve to the point of high-fiving, but
at least they could say, ‘It’s over.’ I would get personal
satisfaction over this.”
A final professional interest he would like to pursue
in retirement is case evaluation, a job he’s especially
qualified to do because case evaluators have to be able to
think like judges.
“I would be able to tell people how a judge would
decide their cases without them actually having to go to
court and face a legally binding judgment,” Bodiford said.
The benefit for the clients is that they then can decide if
they really want to go to court.
The benefit for the soon-to-be-retired Cobb County
Superior Court Judge is that he gets to wish them good
luck and return to one of the thousand different things he
wants to do in retirement.
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 47
CLASS
NOTES
CLASS NOTES
Peter Banks, ’58, traveled on his third
mission trip to Honduras, which he
described as an uplifting experience. The
purpose of the trip was to pour concrete
floors to improve the living conditions in
village houses. Banks was traveling with
the First United Methodist Church of
Barnesville, Ga.
John Wise, ’62, was recently awarded
the “Legend” award for 47 years of “Trusted, Loyal Service” at Love Automotive of
Cayce, S.C. Since 1996, Wise has been
the executive manager of the company.
Wise’s interests are Harley Davidson
motorcycles, and he is a regular in the
Harley Club monthly meetings. Wise holds
a seat on the Board of Greater Columbia
(S.C.) Landscaping Association, and he is
also the secretary-treasurer of the new car
dealers of Columbia and Lexington, S.C.
William (Billy) F. Sanders, ’64, is
engaged to marry Janet Cain this year.
Sanders is the district manager of Jackson
Electric Membership Corporation and a
member of the Gainesville Rotary Club.
He enjoys antique cars, house boating,
waterskiing, engine repairs, dancing and
listening to fine music. Sanders has two
daughters, Candice and Joanna, and two
granddaughters, Abby and Lexi.
George Scott, ’68, competed in the
Golden Olympics and captured three of
the top awards, prevailing in the discus,
shot put and hammer.
Doug Tuttle, ’71, chief operating officer
of United Bank, retired with 36 years of
service and was honored with a reception
at the Barnesville bank. Tuttle joined the
bank in 1977 and served in an array of
leadership roles including assistant vice
president, vice president, senior loan
officer, president, and was the first chief
operating officer. Tuttle will continue to
serve on the bank’s profit sharing, trust
and investment and credit committees,
and the Barnesville/Lamar County Industrial Development Authority.
48 | President’s Report
Wesley (Wes) Williamson, ’80, won
Northrop Grumman’s 2014 Aerospace
Systems President’s Award in the Innovation Excellence category for research and
development of Advanced Metamaterials.
Aerospace Systems President Tom Vice
wrote Williamson that he should “feel
a special sense of satisfaction” for his
“visionary ideas, tireless dedication, and
drive to excellence.”
Mike O’Quinn, ’81, was an art major at
Gordon who wanted to be a rock star.
O’Quinn makes his living singing and
playing the piano, performing in Atlanta, Memphis, Nashville, Europe and the
Caribbean. For the last 20 years O’Quinn
has worked on and off for Carnival Cruise
Lines, as well as clubs and concerts. In
addition to hundreds of songs he has
written, O’Quinn has written three novels
and several comic books. O’Quinn and his
wife have moved back to Jackson and he
works regularly in Macon and Atlanta.
Scott Camp, ’82, was inducted into the
Coweta Sports Hall of Fame on Feb. 8,
2014. Camp went on to Valdosta State
from Gordon to play in the Division II World
Series and later signed as a free agent
with the Astros in 1985. Camp works for
Delta Air Lines and resides in Fayetteville with his wife Jennifer and their two
daughters.
Glenn Polk, ’89, was promoted by
Spalding County to deputy chief of administration. Deputy Chief Polk is a lifelong
resident of Spalding County, has an
associate of science degree from Gordon
in business administration, a bachelor
of business administration from Clayton
State College, and a master of public
administration from Walden University.
Dexter Williams, ’91, is a family service
worker for the LaGrange Head Start
program. Williams served on the Greenville city council from 1998 to 2006 and
also served as mayor pro-tem from 2004
to 2006. Williams graduated from the
University of West Georgia in 1995 with a
B.A. in mass communication and he also
earned a master’s in public administration
from Troy University.
pleting his master’s degree this year in
special education at Piedmont College.
Sara L. Lewis, ’93, graduated from
Griffin High in 1960. Lewis retired from
the State of Georgia in 1999. Lewis later
went back to school obtain her bachelor’s
degree in 2004 from Columbus State
University in criminal justice.
Stephen Hammock, ’09, is the new
head of the Upson-Lee High School
softball program in Thomaston, Ga.
Hammock earned his associate degree in
secondary education from Gordon State
and then graduated with a B.S. in history
and secondary education from Columbus
State University.
Patty Cole, ’95, a healthcare science
technology teacher at Jasper County High
School in Monticello, Ga., was recently
recognized by the Georgia Department of
Education for her exemplary work in constructing a model lesson. Her lesson, “Life
Stages in Healthcare” was selected for
publication on a national literacy web site
to be accessed by teachers all over the
country. Cole has worked in the hospital
setting for 10 years as a nurse and also as
the assistant director of nursing at a local
nursing home.
Jessica Bottoms Evans, ’01, was
named head coach of the Lamar County
High School, Ga., Lady Trojans Varsity
softball team. Evans returned to Barnesville after graduating from Columbus State
University and took a job at L.C.H.S. as a
biology teacher and assisted Ally Carter-Hatterman coach softball at Gordon.
She now teaches health and physical
education at Lamar County Primary
School and is an assistant varsity basketball coach.
James Davis, ’01, published his first
book titled Haunted Asylums, Prisons,
and Sanatoriums. Davis explores frightening ghost stories and true paranormal
encounters at 10 well-known, haunted
institutions across the United States. This
unique collection of investigations is filled
with terrifying photos, spooky highlights
from on-site tours, and historical information about each location.
Joel Griffin, ’06, is now the head
baseball coach at Berkmar High School
in Lilburn, Ga. Griffin spent the past four
seasons as pitching coach at Archer High
School in Lawrenceville, Ga. He is com-
Landon Anderson, ’12, is the newest
member to join the coaching staff at
Georgia State University in Atlanta, Ga.
Anderson will graduate from Georgia
State with a degree in sociology this year.
Amanda Grace Etheridge, ’12, became the bride of Jesus Gregorio Gamez
of High Falls on July 7, 2013. Mr. and
Mrs. Gamez reside in Barnesville.
Jennifer Rodman, ’12, was recognized
by Sylvan Grove Hospital for her knowledge on F.A.S.T signs to make a call for a
code stroke. Her actions proved life-saving for a patient from Griffin.
John Wirsu, ’12, was drafted by the St.
Louis Cardinals. He was a pitcher for the
Gordon State College baseball team that
advanced to the Junior College World
Series in 2011.
Kayla Bowlden, ’13, received the 2013
Daisy Award for Extraordinary Nurses at
Sylvan Grove Hospital in Jackson, Ga.
Bowlden has been employed at Sylvan
Grove Hospital in the swing bed unit for
two years, working with rehabilitation
patients.
Jordan Taylor Mason, ’14, was
recently engaged to Dane Noble Hardin
of McDonough, Ga. Jordan is a recent
graduate from Gordon State earning her
associate of science in nursing. Hardin
also attended Gordon. An October 2014
wedding is planned.
Thinh Nguyen, ’14, completed his
internship in elementary education at
Flippen Elementary in McDonough, Ga.
Nguyen graduated from Gordon State
with a B.S. in education.
A Sought After
Muralist
Even
though
Andrew
Henry
graduated in May 2014 with an
associate in arts, he was already
a practicing artist. Visitors to
Barnesville have been enjoying one
of his most recent works on the
northwest corner of Main and Market
Streets. Two other artists, Mark Fair
and John Byrd, collaborated with
Henry to create a mural of the Nancy
Hanks II, a train named after a race
horse that was named after Abraham
Lincoln’s mother.
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 49
CLASS
NOTES
CLASS
NOTES
Remembering America’s Fallen
What’s New with You?
Class notes are a great way for you
to let your classmates stay informed
about what’s new with you and your
personal and professional activities.
Camilo Caballero.
Three Gordon Graduates of Note
Laura West, Camilo Caballero and Chris Childress
In 2004 Laura West was a sixth grader at Lamar County Middle School
who visited Gordon State College as part of then President Lawrence
Weill’s program, “I’m Going to College.” As part of the program, each of
the hundred students received a small gift from Weill, shook his hand and
promised him that one day they would attend college.
The small gift was a little rectangle of plastic that read, “Turn Over
to See a Future Gordon College Graduate.” The flip side of the rectangle
was a mirror, and West saw herself going to Gordon.
On May 9, 2014, she graduated, magna cum laude, with a Bachelor of
Science in biology.
She is currently in the marine biology program – on a full-ride
fellowship – at the University of South Alabama in Mobile to study at its
Dauphin Island Sea Lab en route to earning a Ph.D.
Camilo Caballero, AS ’12, has been selected as a Thomas R. Pickering
Fellow by the U.S. Department of State and the National Woodrow Wilson
Foundation. After Gordon, Caballero continued his education at Georgia
Tech majoring in international studies and graduated spring 2014. After
graduate school – the cost of which will be covered by his fellowship – he
will begin work at the Department of State as a foreign service officer
under a five-year contract. Caballero calls the position his “dream job.”
Chris Childress, BS ’14, will enter Mercer University School of Law
in the fall. He hopes to eventually open a law office in his home county of
Pike in central Georgia.
50 | President’s Report
And it’s easy to do. Just send your
name, the years you attended
Gordon, and what you would like
to include in your class note to
Natalie Rischbieter, Gordon’s alumni
coordinator, and we’ll be happy
to share your news in next year’s
President’s Report.
You can mail your items to Natalie
Rischbieter, Alumni Relations Office,
Gordon College, 419 College Drive,
Barnesville, Ga., 30204, e-mail her at
natalier@gordonstate.edu or call her
at 678-359-5073. You may also fax
your class note to 678-359-5738.
Five hundred miniature American flags lined the walkways crisscrossing Lambdin Green for several days last
November for the second annual National Roll Call event.
Of the flags, 400 had special messages written by
students attached to them. One hundred of the flags
honored local soldiers killed in service to their country.
Special guest for the event was Dan Rainey, a 1961
graduate of Gordon Military High School and retired
captain in the U.S. Navy.
Rainey noted that “we owe so much to the families
who have lost loved ones, especially gold star mothers
who have lost sons to war.” Rainey also reminded those
in the audience that the event was the 40th anniversary
of the negotiated release of American prisoners of war
from North Vietnam.
The National Roll Call project began on Nov. 11,
2011, when students, faculty, staff and community
members at more than 180 colleges and universities
nationwide came together and demonstrated their
commitment to remembering those who, as President
Lincoln described, “gave their last full measure of devotion” while serving our country.
We want to know your news!
Also speaking at this year’s event was James Watts,
an officer with the Gordon State College Police Department and a veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq.
He emotionally recalled how his father, a World War II
veteran, rarely talked about his service. Watts said they
were watching a “war movie,” something the elder Watts
would rarely do, one afternoon when his father finally
opened up. The elder Watts told his son that he fibbed
about his age so he could join the Army even though
he was only 16 and how he was wounded while fighting
Japanese soldiers.
“A veteran can be anybody,” Watts said. “But he is
always someone who has sworn to defend their country
with their life. I am honored today to be in the presence
of veterans who have served in World War II, Korea,
Vietnam and other wars. I thank you for your service.”
The Lamar County High School ROTC presented
the colors while the Gordon State College Chorus
performed and taps was bugled by music major Ryan
Augsten.
Plans call for the flags that lined Lambdin Green to
be used again next year, according to Carey Lisk, president of the Student Veterans Association and coordinator of the event.
“We hope to eventually have enough flags to cover
the grassy areas of Lambdin Green,” Lisk said. “But we
hope all the additional flags are those of thanks, not flags
remembering someone who was lost to a war.”
Police Lt. James Watts, left,
Capt. Dan Rainey (USN, Ret.), Carey
Lisk and President Max Burns.
Paste the following link into your
browser’s address bar, and friend us
on Facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/home.
php?sk=group_201600795594.
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 51
CLASS
NOTES
DONORS
Making His Mark in Thomaston
John D. Stallings, like many
who graduated from Upson-Lee
High School in Thomaston, Ga.,
attended Gordon College because
it was nearby, inexpensive and
provided an education equal to
any of its sister institutions in the
University System of Georgia.
He graduated with an associate
degree in business administration
in 1997 and said he probably would
have gotten his bachelor’s had
Gordon been a four-year college.
He said he really enjoyed his time
at Gordon remembering his English
professor, Dr. Bill Day, and his history
professor, Dr. Hutch Johnson.
“I’ve always enjoyed history,”
Stallings said, “particularly religious history, American history
and world history.”
After graduation he went to
work for the Georgia Department
of Transportation and is today a
right of way specialist whose job
it is to purchase property when
roads need to be built.
Stallings sits on the Thomaston
City Council, representing the
city’s 3rd District, and is a member
of the Georgia Republican Party
State Committee. He is also state
president of the Georgia Department of Transportation Engineers’
Association and a deacon at Trinity
Baptist Church in Thomaston.
FUTRAL ROAD ELEMENTARY SCHOOL’S NEW PRINCIPAL
Ben Steele, AS ‘00, moved from his current position as
assistant principal and assistant principal of instruction at
Kennedy Road Middle School to his new position of principal of
Futral Road Elementary School. Both schools part of the GriffinSpalding County School System.
Steele earned his associate of science degree from Gordon
and then his bachelor’s in health and physical education from the
University of West Georgia. His master’s, from Troy State University, is in instructional technology.
He started his professional life as a health and physical
education teacher at Luella Middle School in the Henry County
School System. From there he became an intervention specialist
and assistant principal of Cowan Road Elementary.
“I enjoyed my time at Gordon,” he said. “I would have stayed
on four years, but at the time, Gordon just had two-year degrees
and was on the quarter system.”
52 | President’s Report
Giving the Opportunity to Succeed
Alan and Angela Giles Give Generously
by Peter Boltz
T
he two of them are sitting in their living room 15 stories above Peachtree
Road in Atlanta. Alan and Angela Giles have been married for 39 years
“and some odd months,” and they are thinking about how they got
there.
No, they are not thinking about how they got to their living room, although
Alan has a sense of humor that could make a joke about “how they got there.”
Instead, he and Angela are talking about how they built the life they now
enjoy in retirement. They are talking about giving back, in particular to Gordon
State College, in the form of a legacy gift.
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 53
DONORS
DONORS
Angela grew up with five brothers in Metter, Ga., and
after high school went to work in the mid ’60s at The
Trust Company of Georgia now called Sun Trust. Angela
attended night classes at Georgia State College and made
$245 a month at the bank. Even though she had no
car and rode the bus, she was always about $50 short.
Fortunately, her older brothers helped her out. Leaving
the banking business, she went to work in the financial
markets which increased her income.
She learned the business so well after getting all her
required registrations that when the branch manager with
whom she worked left for New York City, she took over
his book of institutional accounts. This sales manager
later persuaded her to leave Georgia to work with him
in New York City. There she worked by day and went to
night school, earning her B.S. in finance from the New
York Institute of Finance.
And so was launched her career as a fixed income
saleswoman. In a decade when women’s libbers were
burning their bras, Angela was breaking one glass ceiling
after another but not easily. Often enough, she had men
stand in her way, literally.
“Once when I was about 24 or 25, I was covering
institutional accounts,” she said. “I had an appointment
with the treasurer of the state of North Carolina, and we
planned to meet at an exclusive restaurant in Manhattan.
When I arrived at the restaurant, I was stopped at the
door and told no women were allowed to go in.”
She displayed no outrage at this point in her story; in
fact she just smiled and said it was all eventually sorted
out. She was taken up a service elevator in the kitchen to
a private dining room for her luncheon appointment.
Alan didn’t grow up with any siblings, nor did he have
a male role model. Instead of living with his mother and
stepfather, he lived with his grandmother from the age of
3 months in her Atlanta, boarding house that she owned.
His grandmother was a teacher with a master’s degree
from Emory.
When his grandmother died, Alan was sent to
Gordon Military High School at age 13. His mother sold
the boarding house and used the money to send him
54 | President’s Report
to Gordon. Even with the money from the sale, he still
worked at Dairy Queen during summer breaks to raise
the money needed to buy his uniforms.
The two of them have something akin to a formula
for success, although they wouldn’t call it a formula. But
if they did, it would probably be along the line of hustle +
education = success.
Alan remembers working for the U.S. Postal Service
after he served his time in the Army in the Military Police.
He was in Atlanta and unloaded trucks jammed so tight
with bags of mail that he had to struggle to free them. In
particular, he remembers doing this in the summer heat
and humidity.
One day when he was being evaluated by his supervisor,
he was asked what his goals were. His answer took his supervisor aback since Alan’s answer was to ask him what his
goals were. Asked to explain, Alan said that his goals were
whatever his supervisor’s goals were. Such a response and
then acting on it cleared a path upward for Alan.
Angela’s attitude was very much similar except she
was trying to break through a glass ceiling while Alan was
trying to break mail sacks free from a tractor trailer.
“Being in a man’s world in the 1960s, I had to prove
myself,” she said. “And even though I had a degree, what got
me accepted into that world was that I could do the work.”
This is the kind of attitude that got her ahead in her
field, but she noticed that hustle wasn’t enough. When
she looked around at the other brokers she worked with,
she saw men and women with college degrees, some with
advanced degrees. And she saw that their education gave
them an added edge in their ambitions.
It wasn’t so much that these colleagues had a piece of
paper with the name of a school and a degree on; it’s what
that piece of paper represented.
Alan, as a graduate of Gordon Military College and
Reinhardt College, knows what’s behind his piece of
paper: stability, discipline, role models, friendships and,
of course, an education.
Discipline worked hand in hand with stability at
Gordon. Cadets like Alan were expected to behave in
certain ways, and these ways didn’t change a great deal,
especially reveille in the morning and taps at night. Discipline not only helped create a stable environment, but
also a secure one.
“I was looking for role models on how to be a man,
and I got that from men with military experience and
teachers without military experience,” he said. “Some of
the military men fought in World War II and they let us
know what combat was all about. Other men like Capt.
W.T. Buchan were just good teachers. Then there was our
commandant, Ed Legge. I saw how he handled himself
and I learned.”
The friendships Alan made at Gordon with men like
Ray Valdivieso, Bobby Wines and Art Roberts have been
significant friendships throughout his life. He didn’t have
to go to Gordon to make friends, but he had to go to
Gordon to make these kinds of relationships.
Like other Gordon Military graduates, Alan praises
the education he received from such figures as chemistry
teacher Capt. Buchan, history teacher Miss Ora Lee
Howard and English teacher Mrs. T. A. Witcher.
“I may not be able to tell you what poem a quote from
Keats comes from,” he said, “but I will be able to appreciate it and know its meaning well enough to use it in a
speech. I would not have even known who Keats was had
it not been for Gordon.”
As children, they learned what poor was and saw no
virtue in it. Maybe this is why neither of them is shy about
saying they worked hard to make money. And now that
they have the money, they are looking to do something
meaningful with it.
“It’s a no-brainer to leave everything to your kids,”
Alan said, “but ever since our only child, Tad, died, we
have been thinking about changing our wills.”
In fact, they have changed their wills, and they made
Gordon State College a beneficiary.
Alan makes light of it saying that he and Angela would
rather help a Gordon student or the College in some other
way instead of leaving money to particular people.
Then he got serious, wondering aloud why so many
Gordon alumni haven’t given to the College. They, like
him, were given a strong foundation of education, disci-
pline, role models and friendship at Gordon, and many of
them, like him, went on to build successful careers.
Perhaps, he said, they should remember something
they were taught to say at Gordon about making excuses:
“The only excuse is no excuse, sir.”
To learn how you can follow Alan and Angela’s
generous example and give to Gordon State
College, contact Rhonda Toon at 678-359-5124 or
rhondat@gordonstate.edu.
Alan and Angela Giles, Christmas 1995, in Dunwoody, Ga.
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 55
DONORS ROLL
“Rock Hound’s” Collection
Finds a New Home
Several Gordon State College academic departments
are benefiting from alumna Louise Jackson’s special hobby.
Jackson, who died at age 107 in December 2013,
was a self-proclaimed “rock hound” and former Gordon
Military College librarian. She collected rocks and amassed
an amazing collection, asking friends to bring her rocks
from the places they traveled to around the world.
The collection totals some 300 rock and mineral
specimens and is as good as a gold mine to the College.
Some of the rocks include peridot, quartz, amethyst,
geodes, rubies, a few fossils and even a tray of spear- and
arrowheads.
Everything was donated to the College by Louise’s
daughter, Nancy Jackson Thomas, a 1957 Gordon Military
High School graduate, along with a vest worn by Louise
bearing a “rock hound” patch.
“We can use these specimens in our history, chemistry and natural science departments,” said Richard
Schmude, professor of chemistry. “It would take a college
many years to acquire what we received in this one
fantastic donation.”
Alumni Relations Coordinator Natalie Rischbieter,
Professor Richard Schmude and geology adjunct professor
Claudia Sliwinski assess Louise Jackson’s collection.
56 | President’s Report
Benefactors
($50,000 +)
Community Foundation of Central Georgia
Steve Keadle
MOTHER/DAUGHTER SCHOLARS
They are more than mother and daughter, these two.
Nancy Walraven and her daughter Cody share
the rare distinction of being scholarship recipients at
Gordon State College. For the 2014-2015 academic year,
Nancy holds the Rotary Club of Griffin scholarship and
Cody the David Bishop scholarship.
Nancy graduated cum laude from Gordon’s associate of science nursing program in May 2014 and is
now enrolled in Gordon’s bachelor of science nursing
program.
Nursing is what she has been called to do, and so
she’s answering the call.
“I’ve had many experiences with nurses,” Nancy
said, “and I know what a huge difference a good nurse
can make. A good nurse not only has the skills to take
care of you physically but to minister to you emotionally
and spiritually.”
Daughter Cody is in Gordon’s bachelor of arts
English program because of her love of writing and literature. Her goal is to be able to support herself as a writer.
“J.K. Rowling is one of my role models. Her story
of how she made it as a writer is so inspiring, and it
reminds me to never give up. I don’t intend to become
super rich with my writing, but if it actually gets to the
point where I can quit my day job, that would be nice,”
she said.
Cody also said she would like to see the world so
she has her eyes on study abroad opportunities like
Gordon’s Chafin Smith Study Abroad scholarship. This
scholarship was established by Claudette Smith in
memory of the many travels she shared with her late
husband Chafin.
Students interested in applying for one of the many
Gordon State College Foundation scholarships should
go to www2.gordonstate.edu/fndscholarships where the
application process is explained. The deadline for all
scholarships is March 1, which is strictly adhered to, so
start early.
President’s Club
($6,000-$15,000)
Estate of Carolyn Black
The Edward Colston Foundation, Inc.
Community Enterprises, Inc.
Laura and Jim Edwards
Pat and Joe Edwards
John W. Edwards, Jr.
Five Star Food Service, Inc.
George H. Hightower, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. Edward C. Mitchell, Jr.
Frances Wood Wilson Foundation, Inc.
Founders Club
($1,000-$5,999)
Akins Farm & Home
Linda and Bruce Akins
Col. Wm. Mike Alexander, USA RET.
Jonathan D. Andrews
Betty Anne and Billy Avery
Julie and Bill Bazemore
Dr. Pamela T. Bell and H. Phillip Bell, IV
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Betkowski
David L. Black
Lydia and John C. Boesch, III
Patricia Ann Bolton
Frances Bray
Anna and Skipper Burns
Lora and Max Burns
Mercer Bush
Dan T. Cathy
Chick-fil-A, Inc.
Coca Cola Refreshments
Coggins Funeral Home, Inc.
Mr. and Mrs. Kenny Coggins
Mr. and Mrs. Alan W. Connell
Yvonne Woodward Culpepper
Lucinda Dallas
Dr. and Mrs. William M. Dallas, Jr.
Floyd L.O. Davis, M.D.
Representative and Mrs. Robert L. Dickey, III
John W. Edwards
Estate of Florence Thomas
James (Jim) E. Ethridge, Sr.
Judge William A. Fears
Fredonia Congregational Methodist Church
Judge James G. Bodiford
Laura and Walter Geiger
Georgia Power Foundation, Inc.
Ellen (Middlebrooks) and Jim Granum
Victoria Graves
Griffin Rotary Club
Drs. Joan and Warren Griffin
Michael R. Hanville
Frances A. Harden
Charles W. Henson
Wanda (Webster) and Glenn H. Hewitt
Mr. and Mrs. Calvin S. Hopkins, III
Ann Joyner
Peyton H. Keaton, III
Law Office of Alan W. Connell
Lauren and Derrick Lewis
Ann and Pete Malone
Haley and Jeff Manley
Kathy and Jimmy Matthews
George A. McMath
Monroe County Bank
George Fleming and Janice (Ball) Moore
Carrie Nelle Moye
Karen and Donald F. Neuner
Norfolk Southern Foundation
McKee Nunnally
LTC (R) Charles Olson
Steve F. V. Ostran
Oxford Family Trust
Dr. and Mrs. William (Mike) Oxford
Manchester C. (Sonny) Paget
Penny and Joe Penley
Petrosouth, Inc.
Janet Pharo
James C. Quick
Drs. Christina and John Quinn
Art and Roselee Roberts
Mr. and Mrs. Jesse E. (Eddie) Rogers, Jr.
S.E.D.A., Inc. (dba A-1 Postage Meters)
Eugenio (Kike) Seda
Mr. and Mrs. David E. Sellers, III
William C. Shelor
Dr. Albert E. Simmons
Spalding Regional Hospital
The Rock Ranch
The Women’s Center, PC
Rhonda and John Toon
Town of Aldora
United Bank – Barnesville
University System of GA Foundation
Carol and Luke Weaver
Malinda and Tony Watts
West Central Georgia Bank
Jennie Woodlee
Gordon Club
($500-$999)
Donna and Frank Abbott
Barnesville Women’s League
Ashley J. Beavers
Ray M. Bone
Jane S. Brook
Dr. and Mrs. Alan N. Burstein
Dianne and Andy Bush
Paulette and George Butler
Dr. Dennis Chamberlain
Dr. Charlie B. Christian, Jr.
Lewis E. Covin
Daughtry Foundation
Edward Jones Investments
GEICO
Georgia Rural Water Association
Gordon Gives (GSC Staff Council)
GSC Student Veterans Association
David B. Haire, III
W.J. Hardwick
Carol and Curtis Jenkins
Senator and Mrs. Burt Jones
Dee Bankston Kitchings
Donna and John Kressaty
Lindavid, Inc. DBA C&C Fence Company
Dr. Mike Mahan
Robert P. Melvin
John T. (Sonny) Middlebrooks
Neuner Solutions, Inc.
Quail Country Customs, Inc.
Daniel L. Rainey, Jr. and Linda B. Rainey
Rightway Drywall, Inc.
Ross’s Rookies
Nancy C. Shugart
Nancy L. Thomas
Century Club
($100-$499)
Charlotte Burns Adams
Darla and Roy Adams
Amos Realty Group, LLC
Nancy D. Anderson
Candi Babcock
Van R. Baker
Peter L. Banks
Nancy and Ronald Barfield
Dr. John P. Barnard
Michael G. Barron
Tammy Barton
Dr. Richard Baskin
Gene Bell
Goebel D. Berry
Brenda and Ronny Blackstock
Tamara and Lanier Boatwright
Dr. Peter Boltz
Laura Bowen
Gordon E. Brown
Arthur J. Buffington
Dr. Jarrett Burch
Dwayne C. Burge
Allen Byars
Kristi and Sean Cain
Valerie and Ric Calhoun
Jacqueline B. Carter
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 57
DONOR ROLL
The Annual Donor Roll includes the names of those whose gifts were received
between July 1, 2013, and June 30, 2014. In preparing this document every
effort has been made to ensure accuracy and completeness. If a mistake was
made in the way a donor is identified or if a donor’s name was omitted from a
gift list, we sincerely apologize. Please report any corrections to the Office of
Advancement at 678-359-5124 or rhondat@gordonstate.edu. Thank you.
hen Joseph P. Bray came to Gordon Military
College for a job interview in 1962, he liked
what he saw. A year later, he brought his new bride,
Frances, to Gordon. She also liked what she saw.
“Joe and I were on the same page about
Gordon,” Frances said. “He absolutely fell in love
with Gordon when he visited for his interview.
Something touched him.”
She explained that the milieu of Gordon was that
of “one big family” where everyone, faculty, staff,
students and students’ families enjoyed a unique
camaraderie.
“Families sacrificed for their children’s education, and the faculty had a real heart in what they
did,” she said. “They were close to their students,
they were totally dedicated.”
The Joseph P. and Frances Bray Scholarship
‘‘
JOE AND I WERE ON THE SAME PAGE
ABOUT GORDON,” FRANCES SAID.
“HE ABSOLUTELY FELL IN LOVE WITH
GORDON WHEN HE VISITED FOR HIS
INTERVIEW. SOMETHING TOUCHED HIM.”
Bray, who was Gordon Military College’s last
president before the college became part of the
University System of Georgia, died five years ago.
“Joe was in the Navy during World War II, and
after the war he was able to go to college with the
help of the GI Bill,” she said. “His attitude was that
he was going to go to college whether or not there
was a GI Bill, but he was grateful to have it.”
Frances said her husband wished he could help
lift his students’ financial burdens, and today, even
though he has passed away, his wish will be fulfilled
through his wife’s endowment of the Joseph P. and
Frances Bray Scholarship.
For her, the endowment is about the importance
of education, and more. She and President Bray
joined a vibrant academic community in 1962 that
sincerely cared for the well-being of its students. The
Bray scholarship for her is a matter of continuing
Gordon’s heritage.
It appears the two of them are still on the same page.
58 | President’s Report
Century Club
($100-$499)
Continued
Brandy and Clint Chastain
David Cherry
Geoff Clement
Deborah V. Cole
Tonya Coleman
Lester (Rusty) Collins
Robert Powell Cotter, Jr.
Dr. Gary P. Cox
Karen and Hayward Cox
Nanci Cross
Cecil Culverhouse
Dr. Sherman R. Day
Delta Airlines Foundation
Toni and Norman Donati
Mary Anne Reeves Driver
Major John P. Eddy (Ret)
Gretchen Favors
Bennett C. Ferguson
Patricia Carter Fountain
Jennifer and Lee Fruitticher
Byrd Garland
Michael S. Gassmann
Sue Gilpin
Irwin F. Goodman
Janet and Jim Graham
Ellen P. Granum
Laura H. Gray
Vernon S. Gray ’64 and ‘66
David M. Haisten
Benson Ham
Sterling Harris
Kristi and Jeff Hayes
Charles Head
Harry F. Heaton
Robert F. Helget
Daniel G. Henderson
Shelly and Mark Hendrick
and family
Patricia Hendricks
Peter Higgins
Diane Hollingsworth
Susan J. Houston
Richard (Dick) Hyatt
Legrande P. Hyde, III
Cheryl and Chase Idol
Thomas (Tom) C. Ivey
Jackson Automotive Group, Inc.
Dr. and Mrs. Daniel J. Jackson
Dr. James Holland Jackson, Jr.
Dr. Edward C. Jacobs
Dr. Brenda E. Johnson
Tonya Johnson
Paul H. Jossey, Jr.
Missy Kendrick
KIA of Lagrange
Stanley E. King
Marcia J. Knight
Dr. Jeff Knighton
Britt Lifsey
William (Bill) Littiken
Nat Daniel Livingston
Jackie and Clay Lovejoy
Jeff Mason
Dr. Joe Mayo
Ann and Mack A. McDaniel
Daniel McKinley
Brenda and Larry Mitcham
Mitch’s Automotive, Inc.
Joe Mitchell
Roy (Fred) Morris
Allison and Kevin Napier
Newscorp, Inc. dba The Herald
Gazette
Dr. and Mrs. Stephens W. Nunnally
Patrick (Pat) M. O’Donnell
Dr. Andrew Osborne
Alan Parker
Laura Parks
Larry N. Pope
Dr. Carol Anne Purvis
Beth Pye
Dr. Steve Raynie
Tom T. Richardson
Natalie and Mark Rischbieter
Kenny Roberts
Robbie Robertson
Dr. Lynn Rumfelt
Brenda Rutherford
SC Johnson Fund
Cheryl Sanders
Dr. Richard Schmude
SG Contracting, Inc.
Florence Simmons
David N. Smith
St. George’s Episcopal School
Dr. Theresa Rebello Stanley
Thelma C. Steele
William B. Steele
William G. Strickland
John and Mallie Talley and family
Lucian L. Tatum, III
Chancharas S. Taylor
Wallace G. Temple
Dr. and Mrs. Marvin Thomas
Richard V. Tieken
Doris and Ronald Tomlin
Alice S. Turner
Upson Orthopaedic Clinic PC
Upson Regional Medical Center
Rafael Valdivieso
Dr. Margaret Venable
Richard Vereen
Kay Waddell
Dr. James Wallace
Larry Waller
Mr. and Mrs. Larry Watts
Marilyn and Tom Webb
James R. Westbury, Sr.
Dr. and Mrs. Ed Wheeler
Kimberly White-Fredette
Paula Reeves Wilde
Arthur (Art) C. Williams, Jr.
Karen and Derek Williams
Thomas H. Wilson
Betty Gale Lyles Wimpy
Sherrilyn Wright
Honor Roll
($1-$99)
Bernard A. Anderson
Antebellum Oaks B&B
Janet Barras
Leila G. Bass
Dolores and Gary Bell
Samantha Bishop
Sandra Blythe
Dr. and Mrs. S.A. Brewton, Jr.
Clarice and Steve Brodie
Faye and Ben Brown
Pat and Doug Brown
Nora Bruce
Dr. Donald Butts
Dawn Byous
John T. Campbell
Brenda and John C. Cannafax
Brent Carper
Ally Carter-Hattermann
Crystal Cato
Dianne and Tony Chastain
Colley Living Trust
Ray Corley and family
Hazel C. Cotney
Susan Crosby
Col. John H. Dame
Todd Davis
Delta Kappa Gamma
Doctors Memorial Hospital
Wilbur J. Doyal
Donald E. Dozier
Jessica Eanes
Nancy Wilder Echols
Beverly Eskridge
Lori Fields
Dr. Allan A. Gahr
Jennifer Gardner
Dr. John C. George
Georgia Power Metro South Ambassadors Club
Joanna Gibson
Alexis Rae Giddens
Marlin D. Gilbert
Jack A. Grant
Gay Upton Grubbs
H. Phillip Hancock
Sterling Harris
Ann J. Haygood
Melna and Jim Henderson
Dr. Lydia Herndon
Rori Herriage
Harold L. Hess
Dr. Anna Higgins
Alan W. Hittepole
Joe Holmes
Ann Howard
Mrs. Fred (Marguerite) Huff
Dr. Linda L. Hyde
Jeff Ivey
Barbara and Bill Johnston
Dr. Satyajit Karmakar
Homer Haygood Keadle, Jr.
Elizabeth and John Kelly
Jill and George Laganas
Wayne F. Leverett
Sara Lou Pittman Lewis
Linda Littiken
Dr. Marie LoMonaco
Kristi Lovelace
Sandra and Jed Lyles
Rebecca Macomber
Ollie Collins Manry
Dolie McCarthy
Doris and Donald Meadows
Shirley Meeks
Ed Miller
Lisa Millican
Terry Moody
Carol Morgan
Lynn and B.D. Murphy III
Beckie Pierson Nichols
Alice R. North
Darlene O’Baner
Sue O’Neal
Dr. Sheryl O’Sullivan
Pasley Farm Cutting Horses
William H. Patterson
Donald Peppers
Emmitt R. Pharr
Dian Pitts
Carlous Plummer
Sylvia L. Prout
Joyce Raines
Keisha Raines
Chris Reynolds
Kay and Jimmy Robinson
Elizabeth Rogers
Sharon Elaine Rogers
George S. Ruff
Autumn Schaffer
Laura Shadrick
Robert (Bob) F. Sharp
Belinda Shaw
LTC Ret. Frank S. Shier
Betty B. Smith
Farrie Smith
Tabitha Smith
Karen Stigura
Laura Stout
Troy Stout
Dr. Daniel Swetman
The Burns Company
Teresa Thompson
Lisa Thornberry
W. Mac Thornton, Jr.
Ashley Travis
Connie Wade
William (Bill) J. Waller
Maureen and John Webster
Justin White
Dr. Ed Whitelock
Dr. Rhonda V. Wilcox
Nicole Williams
Kelly G. Wilson
Marguerite (Margie) Wright
Jessica Yarbrough
Farris (Bud) F. Yates
Dr. Marwan Zabdawi
Joan Weldon Zeerip
Gifts were given
in memory of
Aline and Clifford Alexander
Barbara M. Beasley
Dwaine T. Bell
Hayden Blanchard
Fall 2014, Volume 12 | 59
DONORS
DONORS
W
60 | President’s Report
DONORS
Ida and L.V. Pharr
Faith Porch
Jewell Prout and W. A. Prout
Dr. James (Jim) O. Richards
Chessie Rogers
Jesse E. Rogers, Sr.
Clarence J. Rutherford
Haywood Shaw
Chunky Shiver
William Henry Shugart
Phillip E. Simmons, Sr.
Earle T. Smith
Louise F. Speir
David Sutter
Richard Sutter
William (Billy) Logan Tate
Doris Watson
LTC John E. Watts
Vera D. Watts
Estelle Webster
Eugene Williams
Jesse D. Woodward
John T. Zellner, Jr.
Gifts were given
in honor of
Arthur Buffington
Clint K. Chastain
Class of 1957
Dr. Allan Gahr
Anna North Hogan
Dr. Hutch Johnson
Leila E. Morgan
Benjamin North
Louise J. and Sherm Poppen
Sylvia L. Prout
Elizabeth Rogers
Theresa R. Stanley
William J. Webster
SGM Richard Davis
Gifts in Kind 2014
Mary and Joe Allen
Peter L. Banks
Dennis Bonin
James Harris
Laura (Harris) Harrison
Jan McPhail
William C. Mizell
Angie Spangenberg
Nancy Jackson Thomas
Rhonda L. Toon
Larry D. Waller
Mr. and Mrs. Forrest A. Watson, Jr.
Robert (Bobby) L. Wines
Gifts given in support of
the 350 Project to build
a Gordon military memorial
Kike Seda (A-1 Postage Meters)
Gordon Military Survivors, Inc.
Peter L. Banks
Joe Boggs
Thornton Burns
Rick Hahn
Zack Hinton
Charlie Christian
Jimmy and Kathryn (Butler)
Matthews
Wayne Leverett
Keith Abernathy
Class of 1949
Rhonda Toon
Don Neuner
Tommy Torbert
Manchester C. Paget
Oliver G. Halle
Van R. Baker
Mary Ann Congleton Lewis
John D. Burnette
Charles H. Van Rysselberge
Goebel, Edmund, and George
Berry
Clinton Dale Melton
Margaret R. Melton
James E. Ethridge, Sr.
Jackie L. Daniel and Frances
P. Daniel
Col. William Michael Alexander,
USA Ret.
Stonie B. Carter
Dick Tieken
Lewis Covin
Betty Smith Crawford
J. Henry Wisebram
John and Elizabeth Kelly
Angela and Alan Giles
Warren O’Brien
Bobby Lee Cook
Charles P. Boltz
James S.W. Harris
Laura Harris Harrison
Philip Beamer
Richard Noxon
Archie Ray
Jim Graham
Marcia Whittington Knight
Jennie Woodlee
Joe I. White, Jr.
George Bugg
John Boatwright
LTC Arthur C. ‘Skip’ Williams, Jr.,
US Army Ret.
F. Porter Caughman, III
Sue Conger Caughman
Tony Watts
Dr. Brenda Johnson
David L. Black
Bobby Wines
Charles Covin
Keith Predmore
Robert P. Melvin
Charles Henson
McKee Nunnally
Glen Mohler
Daniel G. Henderson
Monk Antonio
Ellen Middlebrooks Granum
John T. Middlebrooks, Jr.
John T. ‘Sonny’ Middlebrooks, III
Randy and Lynn Wilson
Danny Abbott
High School Class of 1964
Robert Lovein
Ray W. Brinkley
William H. Mitchell
Richard J. Baker
David N. Smith
Ray Bone
Howard Bush
Bob White
John and Maureen Webster
William F. Sanders
Gordon Mohler
J.C. and Bobbie Carol (Burousas)
Waller
Jimmie and Bobbie Louise (Dorsey)
Burousas, Sr.
Jonathan Hardwick
Jacolyn Bush Perrone
Neil and Jane Shelor
Glenn and Wanda (Webster) Hewitt
Rafael Valdivieso
Art Roberts
Dr. Alva G. ‘Skeet’ Burris
Ed and Karen Jacobs
Jim Russell
Art and Letetia (May) Mercier
Skip Seda
Floyd L.O. Davis, MD
Michael R. Hanville
Town of Aldora
Bill and Martha McKoy
Class of 1956
Gail Pennington Taylor
Joan Webster Fordham
Nancy Bush Shugart
Dr. Richard W. Schmude, Jr.
John C. Boesch, III
Dr. and Mrs. J.H. Jackson, Sr.
Sgt. and Mrs. Robert H. Steele
Cyril Jean Liberty
Frank and Donna Abbott
Betty Gayle Lyles Wimpy
John Wise
The Peter Banks Family
High School Class of 1963
Richard and Fran Boggs
GSC Student Veterans Association
Frank H. Bone
David B. Haire, III
Thomas C. Bolton
Victoria Graves
SGM Richard S. Davis
Fredonia Congregational
Methodist Church
Joe and Pat Edwards
Joseph P. ‘Joe’ Bray
The Family of John R. Cook
James and Barbara Quick
Mercer Bush
Clifford and Aline Alexander
George Fleming Moore and
Janice Ball Moore
Ann Butler Harden and Jack C.
Harden
The Family of 1st Sgt. Jesse D.
Woodward
John C. Boesch, Jr.
George R. Boesch
Dr. Jerry Beavers
Judge Jim Bodiford
Jan Greene
Lora and Max Burns
LTC John Watts
Steve Van Ostran
George McMath
Dan Andrews
LTC Ret. Charles Olson
Dee Bankston Kitchings
Peyton H. Keaton, III
Daniel B. Toon
Courtney Toon McDaniel
GSC Staff Council 2014
Alan Porter Giles
Ira Bryan Giles, Jr.
Gifts were made to continue the support
of these funds and scholarships
Lewis A and Manona B. Akins Scholarship
Art Fund
Barnesville Women’s League Scholarship
Baseball Fund
Basketball Fund
Dewaine T. Bell Music/Education Scholarship
Elaine Brown Music Scholarship
Rebecca Britt Brown Memorial Scholarship
Daisy Bush Nursing Scholarship
Class of 1957 Scholarship
Coggins Family Scholarship
Charles and Carolyn Connell Nursing Scholarship
Cross Country Fund
Lindsey Daniel Memorial Scholarship
Charles and Nelwyn Dodgen Nursing Scholarship
W.A. ‘Buster’ Duke Memorial Daughtry Foundation Scholarship
Brad Edwards Memorial Scholarship
Founder’s Day Event
Gordon Alumni Scholarship
Gordon State College Military Tribute Fund
Griffin Rotary Club Scholarship
Doris K. and S. Wayne Hempstead Nursing Scholarship
Joanne Prout Hewitt Music Scholarship
Highlander Athletic Club
Hightower Family Scholarship
Keadle Family Scholarship
Jennifer Kressaty Memorial Nursing Scholarship
Lamar County Sheriff’s Office Scholarship
Memorial Tree Fund
Music Fund
Cy Neuner Faculty/Staff Enrichment Fund
Dr. James and Mr. Joey Pharo Scholarship
President’s Choice Scholarship
Rebecca Yates Riley Memorial Nursing Scholarship
Jesse E. Rogers, Sr., Memorial/West Central Georgia Bank Scholarship
Florence B. Thomas Nursing Scholarship
Frances Wood Wilson Foundation Scholarship
The headline on the Griffin
Daily News front page for
Nov. 12, 1970, indicates
the competition between
Gordon College and the
city of Griffin to become
the home of a new junior
college of the University
System of Georgia.
Banks Donates Record
of Gordon Transition
Former Gordon College Foundation President Peter Banks donated the papers he
collected as a trustee during a significant period
of Gordon State College’s history – when it
became part of the University System of Georgia
in 1972.
The papers include his Gordon Military
College Board of Trustees notebook which
contains the minutes of the board from the
1967-68 school year to the 1971-72 school year,
the last one of the private school’s existence.
In addition to this ordered record of the
College’s transition are approximately 1,000
loose pages of correspondence and notes, and
newspaper clippings.
Banks, the mayor of Barnesville, brought
the collection to Gordon’s Alumni House in fall
2013. Although he wasn’t certain of the value
of the collection, he was assured it constituted
a treasure trove of primary research material.
DONORS
Gifts were given
in memory of
Continued
Bess M. Bland
John C. Boesch, Jr.
Thomas C. Bolton
Joseph (Joe) Bray
Elaine Brown
Milton Allison (Al) Brown
Sammy Buffington
Arlis Burch
C.R.D. Burns
Robert E. Burns
Thornton A. Burns, Jr.
Daisy Bush
Milton Jackson Bush
Reynolds Bush
Barbara Bush Carter
Harold Grady Carter
Mildred Chappell
Virginia Coggins
Albert H. Colley
Capt. Roy E. Congleton
John R. Cook, Jr.
Naomi and John R. Cook, Sr.
Charles Michael Corry
Hubert Leon Crowder
George deMoro Dame
Lindsey Daniel
SGM Richard S. Davis
Taylor D. Davis
Virginia C. Dennis
Alexandra N. Desir
Charles Head Dodgen
Daisie Freeman Duncan
Brad Edwards
Gerald C. Elliott
Martha Elliott
Janet Ellis
James (Billy) A. Gatlin
Tad Giles
Morris Goodwin
Arthur Graves
Jan Allen Greene
Col. C.T.B. Harris
Joanne P. and John B. Hewitt
Rilla Holliman
Fred M. Huff
Betty A. Hyatt
Glen Ingram
Louise Lovejoy Jackson
Homer H. Keadle, Sr.
Peyton H. Keaton, Jr.
William Keaton
Jennifer Kressaty
Virginia L. Legge
Myrtle Lindsey
R.L. Lomonaco
Larry Leon Martin
John T. Middlebrooks, Jr.
Charles C. Morgan
Dr. and Mrs. Dennis O’Donnell
Beatrice L. Okeefe
Lt. Col. (RET) Manchester
(Sonny) C. Paget
James A. Pharo
Joseph A. Pharo
Golden Reunion
Class of ’63
Front row, left to right: Bill Sanders, Wayne
Williamson, Cheryl Burnette, Sue Milam
Dunbar, Midgie McKoy Coddington, Linda
Matthews Hanner, Jim Smith.
Second row: Joe Cornish, Judy Scarbrough
Young, Nancy Fountain Gregg, George
McMath, Marcia Karp Rosenfeld, Marcia
Whittington Knight.
Third row: Sandra Chapman Davis, John
Crawford, John Dudley, Jim Bankston, Ed
Schockley, Lynn Wilson, Marilynne Bates
Knighton.
Fourth row: Chuck Keadle, Mercer Bush,
Bobby Mangham, David Freeman, Thomas A.
Perkins, Jennie Ramsey Peterson.
Fifth row: Vernon Gray, John Webster, Bob
Lovein, Laura Harris Harrison, Marcelle
Milner Shelnutt.
Sixth row: Tony Watts, Diane Harris Brinkley,
Jim Pharr, Goebel Berry, Charles Maddox.
Seventh row: Dale Stave, Steve Van Ostran,
John McGarity, Charles Van Rysselberge,
John Harrell.
The
PRESIDENT’SREPORT
Is for All Gordon Alumni
Whether you attended Gordon when it was a private
military school or after it became part of the University
System of Georgia, the President’s Report is for you, and
about you. Even if you attended Gordon for only a semester,
you are part of the Gordon State College family.
If you know of an alumnus who does not know about
the President’s Report, let us know who he or she is. Contact
Natalie Rischbieter at natalier@gordonstate.edu or
call her at 678-359-5073. You may also fax your contact
information to 678-359-5738. We want you on our roll of
alumni. Gordon College, Advancement Office, 419 College
Drive, Barnesville, GA 30204.