What lingers in the memory is how ordinary the weekend was shaping up to be. Barely 19 and a few months removed from Parris Island, Marine Private First Class Steve Hankins ’75 was loafing in his barracks when a news bulletin shattered the Friday afternoon calm.
Forty years after graduating, Brenda Esch ’83 is back in Greensboro, this time as New Garden Friends’ new pastoral minister.
A new school year means Leslie Alexander ’95 is on the road again with her spreadsheet riding shotgun. On the road to schools like Cove Creek and Blowing Rock, Green Valley and Bethel, Valle Crucis and Mabel. There are eight elementary/middle schools and one high school in Watauga County, whose postcard-worthy towns are found on the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina.
Hannah Moran ‘11 is a high school English teacher in Massachusetts who is quick to share the joys of teaching – the inspiration, the humor, the “ah-ha” moments when a line from Shakespeare resonates with one student or makes a literary connection to the newest Taylor Swift album. She’s also seen the other side of teaching, the one where would-be educators struggle financially and personally before even getting into a classroom.
In a corner of Mark Dixon’s ’96 Hege-Cox Hall classroom is a portable wooden table that wasn’t always a table. In another lifetime, the table’s top, sides and legs were part of an upright piano. That was before Mark extracted the soundboard from the piano’s innards, sketched out a blueprint, pulled out some tools and – voila! – a table.