Written by Stu Kushner

Grandparents again….

Son of Carol Cotton Hendrix (1964), Bob, has second child, making Carol a grandma again!

Risa Tamura Hendrix – Born 3/10/05

Carol's son Bob, his wife Kayo, and Risa!

Carol’s son Bob, his wife Kayo, and Risa!

Risa Tamura Hendrix -  9 pounds, 2 ounces - 20 inches long

Risa Tamura Hendrix – 9 pounds, 2 ounces – 20 inches long

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Written by Stu Kushner

Herbert Jones – Class of 1968

68-jones_herbertHerbert Jones (1968), resident of Damascus, MD for 32 years, died Tuesday morning, September 28, 2004, the victim of a fatal vehicle accident in Gaithersburg, MD. There is a permanent notice and guest book available to leave the family a message. Thank you to Judy Warner Weixel (1984) for letting MSO know of this sad news.

Written by Stu Kushner

Stephanie Rae Bowan Cohen (1957-2004)

75-bowman-cowan_stephanie-polaris75-bowman-cowan_stephanieStephanie Rae Bowman Cowan (1975) passed away on August 19, 2004. There is a notice posted on the San Diego Union-Tribune website.

Thank you to Betty Lopez (1975) for tracking-down this sad news, with the help of Scott Crain (1974) and Joe Russell (1974).

Written by Stu Kushner

Joe Melanson – Class of 1978

78-melanson_joeJoe Melanson (1978) passed away on Sunday June 27, 2004. A memorial service was held for Joe on Saturday August 7th at St. Jude’s. You may contact the family via Gail Melanson Carr (1976), Beth Melanson (1979), and Jeanne Melanson Friedman (1979). In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, P.O. Box 309, Maryknoll, NY 10545-0309.

The online Post-Legacy notice/guest book was available until August 3rd. Our condolences to the Melansons. Thank you to Jim Cyr (1981) and Kristina Donnelly (1978) for letting MSO know, so we could inform all friends and classmates.

From the Melansons: “We thank all of the Peary alumni who came to the memorial service, and those who contacted us and kept our family in their thoughts and prayers. Your support and caring are appreciated more than we can express.”

Written by Stu Kushner

Will Seng – Class of 1977

77-seng_willWill Seng (1977) passed away the morning after Christmas 2003. Our deepest condolences to the Seng family. From the Sengs:

Captain Wilfrid L. Seng, III – Fairfax County Fire & Rescue (20 years)

“Will Seng – loving husband, father, son, brother, uncle and great friend of all – passed away at 1:40 this morning, Friday, December 26, 2003. Born on July 5, 1959, Will was 44 years old. Kathy, Joe and Tommy were with him as he peacefully departed this world for heaven. Fighter that he was, Will survived cancer long enough to celebrate Joe’s 15th birthday on the 23rd, as well as Christmas at home. Please remember Will and his family in your thoughts and prayers.”

Will’s siblings include John (1975), Mike (Good Counsel), Laura Seng Knutsen (1978), and Mary (1979).


77-seng_will-post-metro

Wilfrid L. Seng III, 44, a Fairfax County firefighter who retired in 2003 as shift captain after 28 years as a professional and volunteer, died of pancreatic cancer Dec. 26, 2003, at home in Damascus.

Mr. Seng was born in Bethesda and lived in Maryland throughout his life. While the family lived in Rockville, he attended St. Jude Thaddeus School and graduated from Robert E. Peary High School in 1977. He earned an associate of arts degree in fire science from Montgomery College in 1980. He volunteered with the Kensington Volunteer Fire Department for 10 years. He began his career as a firefighter with the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department in 1980, after graduating first in his recruitment class. He completed his service at Station 30 in Merrifield, Va., in June 2003.

He was a member of the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 2068.

Mr. Seng and his family moved to Damascus in 1995 and belong to St. John Neumann parish in Gaithersburg.

Mr. Seng joined 12 fellow firefighters who traveled to Florida in 1992 to assist metropolitan Dade County firefighters in repairing damage caused to their homes by Hurricane Andrew. On Sept. 11, 2001, he led one of many rescue teams called to put out fires and aid in search and rescue following the terrorist attack on the Pentagon.

Mr. Seng also worked part-time in exterior and interior home renovations, applying his skills as a carpenter, plumber and electrician. He was an avid baseball fan and enjoyed touring baseball parks throughout the country with family and friends.

Survivors include his wife of 17 years, Kathy Cunningham Seng and their two sons, Joseph and Thomas Seng, all of Damascus; his parents, Joseph and Joyce Seng of Mount Airy; brothers John Seng and wife Christine of Rockville, and Mike Seng of St. Petersburg, Fla.; and sisters Laura Knutsen and husband Kris of Lewes, Del., and Mary Seng of Beltsville.

A memorial service was held Tuesday. A graveside inurnment service followed at All Souls Cemetery in Germantown.

Memorial gifts may be made to an education fund created for Mr. Seng’s children: The Seng Children Benefit Fund, c/o Sandy Spring Bank, 26250 Ridge Road, Damascus, MD 20872.

Funeral arrangements provided by Simple Tribute Funeral Service, Rockville.

Written by Stu Kushner

ESLEY to the RESCUE

In the battle between preservation and development, Esley Hamilton (1963), who works for the St. Louis County Parks Department, is the ultimate bureaucratic wheel-greaser for preservationists.

63-hamilton_esleyBy Florence Shinkle of the Post-Dispatch

Esley Hamilton, the preservation historian for St. Louis County, wore his over-big glasses and tweed jacket to a recent meeting between local preservationists and officials from the Missouri Department of Transportation.

The mild-mannered Clark Kent outfit and job title disguises Hamilton’s power. He has been known to change the course of highways – bending steel, if you will – by the force of his historical documentation.

Participants met that day to discuss which houses in the impending path of rebuilt U.S. Highway 40 (Interstate 64) were eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. Making the list does not assure that a building will be spared, but it helps.

At risk were three homes on Bennett Avenue, a street of unpretentious ranch houses on the north side of Highway 40 near Laclede Station Road. The neighborhood had already been rejected by the state preservation offices as insufficiently historic to qualify for the register.

Esley to the rescue. Hamilton’s students in a landscape architecture class he was teaching at Washington University traced every title of every property on Bennett Avenue, uncovering a dramatic story of African-American settlement in the county. Hamilton presented his facts straightforwardly, letting them speak for themselves.

He said that in the years after Shelley vs. Kramer (the Supreme Court case that resulted in open housing) when African-Americans were able to move into St. Louis County, they mostly moved into existing homes. But a new development of mostly brick ranch houses was planned for Bennett with the prospect that blacks would be moving in.

The city of Richmond Heights did everything possible to keep the homes from being built, including attempting to pass a bond issue to purchase the area for a park. So while the homes aren’t very old – just 50 years or so – they are part of civil rights history, Hamilton said.

The panel of Transportation Department archaeologists and engineers all nodded gravely, acknowledging the merit of the account. They had heard it before, in newspaper stories that Hamilton alerted reporters to. Someone announced that the department designers had been able to “tweak the design” for the new road.

Lesley Hoffarth, project manager for the new highway, stood up, declaring, “I did the tweaking; I’ll show where we tweaked.”

Net result: Three old homes will remain standing, for whatever future blessing they may bestow.

Threshold to the past

Old houses make you want to know who lived there. Lose the house, you lose the frame for contemplation of the past. You lose the physical threshold to another dimension.

Founded in 1957, the St. Louis County Historic Buildings Commission, an advisory body to the St. Louis County Council, began a cursory survey of local landmarks in 1959.

In 1977, Esley Hamilton became a consultant to the commission, and in 1980, he accepted a salaried position within the Parks Department as the county historian and preservationist.

Immediately, the commission authorized him to do an area-by-area in-depth inventory of the county’s treasures. And who would have known there were so many?

Hamilton excavated historical foundations that no one had been aware existed. He provided provenances and the glitter of heritage to more than 200 properties, many of which would have been dismissed – including an outhouse on Henry Avenue in Manchester which recently was accepted to the National Register as part of the Henry Avenue Historic District.

And he gave preservationists a crucial weapon – facts to replace spotty memories and vague intuitions of a building’s worth.

Largely completed by 1988, the county’s inventory of historic buildings now is quoted like Scriptures by preservationists, as is Hamilton himself. “Esley said” shores up a building’s historical merit the same way that a beam shores up the building itself.

In a public hearing to consider razing a historic structure, “Esley said” resounds like the opening shot in a war.
And if Esley doesn’t say, the outlook for a building is grim.

“I wanted to save my father’s house,” University City resident Kay Drey recalled. “I called Esley for an evaluation. Esley said it wasn’t historical; it was just old, so they tore it down.”

In the battles to readjust the balance between preservation and development, Hamilton is the ultimate bureaucratic wheel-greaser for the preservationists: the advance man, the go-between, the behind-the-scenes man who won’t give up the seemingly lost cause.

Hamilton worked for eight years to save Hazelwood’s Utz Tesson house, built in 1782. It sat marooned on Utz Road in the middle of Tesson Park Estates. Developer Charles Karam wanted to build on the lots where the house sat. What really worried him was that he couldn’t get liability insurance on the empty building, so it sat there like an accident waiting to happen.

The city of Hazelwood had no money to move the home. For years, the threat of demolition hung over the house, sometimes like a distant cloud, sometimes like an imminent sword.

Hamilton circulated fliers seeking a buyer at preservation conventions. He ran ads in national publications. He put the building at the top of a list he drew up of the county’s most endangered sites. Then he made sure the list got to the newspapers.

The years of consciousness-raising by him and Hazelwood’s small band of preservationists paid off. Karam had agreed to give the city the house if only someone would get it off his land. Three weeks ago, Mills Corp., developers of a mall in Hazelwood, put up $50,000 to move the old house to safety in Hazelwood’s Brookes Park as a goodwill gesture to the city.

Hamilton prizes accuracy, of course. He writes helpful letters to the editor to set the record straight on matters such as the proper pronunciation of Fauquier Avenue (Fawkeer, the anglicanized version, is correct because the name is descended from Francis Fauquier, who was an English-born colonial governor of Virginia, unenamoured with things French.)

Hamilton also has written letters on the danger of cleaning statues by power-spraying them and on the number of times the United States has had six presidents alive at once.

The letter writing is done in between his teaching of landscape architecture at Washington University, his leading of tours of historic sites for the Missouri Historical Society, his singing tenor in his church choir, his book writing (he’s working on a book about postwar county subdivisions) and his endless meetings in behalf of preservation.

Last Christmas season, he had on his schedule six Christmas parties with various preservation societies. He has never owned a television; he regards it as a time waster. He has never had a wife, one suspects for the same reason. He lives in University City.

Came here in 1969

Intimate as he is with the city, Hamilton regards himself as “an outsider.”

“I’m getting to know a lot of people, for being an outsider,” he commented once approvingly. “In fact, people are asking me to sit on boards now. But you’re supposed to have money if you sit on a board, and I don’t have any money.”

Hamilton, 58, was born in Pennsylvania, the only child of a second-grade school teacher and an estimator for an airplane manufacturer. They surrounded the little boy with erudition. Ada, his mother, who was 42 when he was born, died two years ago. He and his father, Joseph, who now lives in a retirement center in Washington, D.C., communicate every Saturday morning, punctually at 8:30.

Esley Hamilton arrived in the St. Louis area in 1969. He worked in East St. Louis for six years as a planner for Model Cities, the federally funded program to resuscitate America’s downtowns.

Jamie Cannon, who was director of planning in East St. Louis at the time, recalls that Hamilton’s digs were in a rooming house at the corner of Missouri Avenue and 15th Street, an area so dangerous that whenever Cannon gave Esley a lift home, “I just slowed down enough so he could get to the curb; I never stopped completely. But Esley himself walked everywhere unscathed. Something about him made people look after him and feel protective
toward him.”

That purity of purpose that emanates from Hamilton strikes people as being at odds with his cultural sophistication and his savvy about getting a building nomination through the bureaucratic thickets. Trying to describe him, his admirers join contradictory adjectives: “knowledgeable” and “innocent,” “sophisticated” and “guileless.”

“He wants absolutely nothing for himself,” says Christy Love, who teamed up with Hamilton to keep development from overtaking the Charbonier bluffs in north St. Louis County.

“If you asked him what he wanted for Christmas, he’d probably tell you a stronger historic preservation ordinance.”

Normally, Hamilton has the zest for battle of someone who believes he’s in service to a great cause, but he gets downhearted over the proliferation of toothless preservation ordinances in municipalities around the county, ordinances that let the owner of a historic home choose whether he wants to participate in the city’s historic preservation program.

“It’s not the homeowners who volunteer to cooperate that are the problem; it’s the ones who don’t,” Hamilton snapped after the Chesterfield City Council passed just such a softie. He looked perplexed and disappointed. People who should know better were making it easier to squander something that seemed to him infinitely precious.

He said, “There’s always someone in every meeting who stands up and talks how a preservation ordinance is unfair because a city shouldn’t be able to tell a homeowner what to do with his property. Well, the city tells the homeowner when to cut his grass and whether he can have a fence or not and how to design his garage. What’s different about telling him he has a historic home and he can’t demolish it without a long enough delay to give people a chance to save it?”

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Written by Stu Kushner

Thank you from Gale

Gale Senseman Privette (1966) wishes to "thank you all for your generous donations for my bail money for my lock up for Muscular Dystrophy Association" fundraiser on June 11, 2003!

Gale Senseman Privette (1966) wishes to “thank you
all for your generous donations for my bail money for
my lock up for Muscular Dystrophy Association”
fundraiser on June 11, 2003!

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Written by Stu Kushner

Bonnie Ledford Stapp – Class of 1967

Published in the Oklahoman on 5/18/2003.
Bonnie L. Ledford Stapp
August 2, 1949 – May 13, 2003

67-ledford-stapp_bonnieBonnie L. (Ledford) Stapp, wife of Karl Stapp, passed away at the age of 53 on Tuesday, May 13, in Edmond. She was born August 2, 1949, in Washington, D.C., to Louise and Stanley Ledford. She was preceded in death by both her parents and her brother, William M. Ledford. Bonnie grew up in the Washington, D.C., area and graduated from Robert E. Peary High School in Rockville. She attended the University of Oklahoma, receiving her degree in Education in 1971. She was active in her sorority, Alpha Gamma Delta, as both an undergraduate and as an alumnae. She
earned her Masters Degree, summa Cum laude in Psychology in 1993 at the University of Central Oklahoma.

As a licensed professional counselor to abused children, she first worked at Family and Children in Tulsa. She later formed her own company, Transitions, Inc., in Oklahoma City in partnership with Elizabeth Ashton. Additional honors include being named a National Certified Counselor and being certified as a Criminal Justice Specialist. Bonnie is survived by her husband Karl and her three children: Quentin Lobb of Oklahoma City; Joshua Lobb of Portland, OR; and Mary Lobb of Oklahoma City, stepdaughter Sarah Stapp of Oklahoma City. Her family also includes nephews Stanley (and Suzanne) Ledford of Conroe, TX; John (and Kelley) Ledford of Dallas, TX; and niece Megan Ledford of Dallas., TX.

Services were held at the Putnam City Christian Church. Interment followed at the Rose Hill Burial Park. Memorials may be made to the Bonnie Ledford Stapp (Transitions, Inc.) Memorial Fund, c/o Lawyers for Children, Bank One Center, 100 N. Broadway, Suite 2250, Oklahoma City, OK 73102. This fund will benefit Indigent children in need of therapeutic care. Memorials can also be made to the Putnam City Christian Church Youth Fund, 4215 N. Grove, Oklahoma City, OK 73122. Matthews Funeral Home in Edmond was in charge of arrangements.

Written by Stu Kushner

Jeffrey Graydon Daniels – Class of 1970

From the Washington Post

Saturday, January 25, 2003; Page B07

Jeffrey Graydon Daniels
Systems Analyst

Jeffrey Graydon Daniels, 50, a systems analyst who in the early 1990s helped to found Sugarloaf Systems Inc. and served as its president until he retired in 2002, died of cancer Jan. 23 at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital.

He was born in Baltimore and raised in Rockville. He had lived in Dickerson since 1976.

Mr. Daniels was a 1970 graduate of Robert E. Peary High School in Rockville and was a graduate of Montgomery College.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, he was a computer programmer and systems analyst for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and General Electric Co. In the 1980s, he was a partner in Data Now Computer Services.

At Sugarloaf, his clients included the Defense Department and the Smithsonian Institution. In the early 1990s, he installed the scheduling calendar for President George H.W. Bush.

Mr. Daniels was active in community theater and choral groups and performed with the Maryland Lyric Opera, Beneath My Wings Productions of Frederick and the Frederick Choral Arts Society.

He built and flew model rockets with the National Association of Rocketry and was a volunteer with the Literacy Council of Montgomery County.

After his cancer was diagnosed in March 2002, he began a Web site, www.jeffsjournal.com, that chronicled his illness and explained his medical condition and treatments.

Survivors include his wife, Terrie Jayne Daniels, whom he married in 1975, and their son, Ryan, both of Dickerson.

Written by Stu Kushner

Sandra Searles Dickinson

63-searles-dickinson_sandraSandra Searles Dickinson (1966 – Peary plankowner, but graduated from Walter Johnson) in CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG at London’s Palladium.

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