Class Notes Fall 2021

(Pictured Above) Leslie Bates Carroll, Susan Baker, Karen Kwitter, and Karen Stevens Jorgensen had a mini reunion on Sept. 20 at Susan’s home in Lenox, Mass.

Bonnie Lucas has won a New York City Artists Corps grant. NYC offered grants to visual artists, musicians, writers, and actors to support the arts during COVID. A requirement of the grant was to initiate a community project, so Bonnie taught a collage workshop at a senior center in her Chinatown neighborhood.

Carol Bolton Dane has installed a Little Free Library in front of her house. “Forty-four years after earning a library degree, I finally am a librarian,” she writes. “It’s gratifying to note that children’s books are in high demand. I’ve been collecting beautifully illustrated picture books for decades, and now I can share the best ones with a growing number of kids.”

Inspired by our class Zoom sessions, Freeman friends Meg O’Rear Calcagni, Mary Ruth Koehler Schaumberg, Barbara Sherlock, and Gail Wicklund meet monthly on Zoom. They enjoy wide-ranging discussions in the true Wellesley spirit. Linda Lucignani Eyler, Jane Hansen, Sally Branch Silcox, Helen Kuss Ewen, and Joyce Bihary are also part of the trend, Zooming regularly to share news and discuss books, including Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and American Nations by Colin Woodard.

Taylor Wright, Nina Macdonald’s older daughter, married Matthew Beilby in March 2020; their son, Charles Vincent Wright, was born this July. Taylor’s family missed both events, due to Australia’s COVID restrictions. Taylor, Matt, and Charlie live in Melbourne, where Matt is finishing a master’s in data science and Taylor works for Unilever.

Anne McCauley reports that her daughter, Chloe Ferguson (Princeton ’13), was finally able to celebrate her marriage to Alex Edkserdjian (Oxford ’15) at the groom’s family home and a nearby medieval church in Northamptonshire, England. Having endured five COVID tests and the mandatory British quarantine, Anne and her husband, Tom Ferguson, were delighted that everything went as planned, since the wedding had been rescheduled from August 2020. The young couple lives in New York. Anne works at home in Wellesley and officially retires from teaching at Princeton next June.

News briefs: The final mystery novel by our late classmate Sheila Connolly has been published. Sheila’s daughter Julie Williams edited the completed manuscript of The Secret Staircase. Nan Roberts and Ellen Maycock crossed paths in Bristol, R.I., in July to catch up. In October, Kim Kahrilas held a show of her mosaic works at the historic Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton, Calif.

Retired pediatrician Helaine Pleet lives in the Oakland, Calif., area. Last fall, she started a local chapter of Together Women Rise, a giving organization focused on gender equality issues in developing countries. Lainey says: “Every month, we study a chosen grassroots grantee organization and the culture/history of its country and then each contribute to it the restaurant cost of the potluck meal we’ve prepared (local recipes, of course!). We are learning a lot, feeling as if we are contributing to effective local organizations with low overhead, and enjoying the conviviality of interesting shared meals. Check out their website.”