1990

In June, Susan L. Abrams released her book, The New Success Rules for Women: Ten Surefire Strategies for Reaching Your Career Goals. The book, which is based on interviews with 45 top-level women executives, as well as on Abrams¹ own experiences, presents easy-to-understand strategies for career success.

Sarah Crewe is taking a well-deserved break from the Class Notes columnist job. She¹s done yeoman¹s work to keep us in touch through this column for 10 years now. Thank you, Sarah! For the future, when you have news about yourself or ¹90 classmates, please e-mail me at trotter5@swbell.net or put something in the mail to Susu Trotter, 16 Lenox Place, St. Louis, MO 63108.

I just took over and do not have most of your addresses, so I¹m winging it a bit for this column. I have a 24-hour deadline on this one (I promise to be more on top of things next time). I did coerce several classmates today into volunteering their news in order to save you all from an entire column devoted to me. Their news follows.

Bill Zinke has left Baskin-Robbins to work for Ready Pac Produce <\m> maker of packaged salads and fresh-cut fruits and vegetables <\m> as their VP of marketing. He reports loving every bit of the new job and is enjoying a far healthier diet. (A tough day at BR included sampling 20 varieties of ice cream sundaes for planned promotions. ³The sugar/caffeine high followed by the crash was brutal,² but he expects no sympathy.) Bill and his wife, Brooke, bought a home a year ago in Pasadena, Calif. (two blocks from the Rose Bowl Parade route). They now share it with their one-year-old daughter, Annlyn, whose delivery was remarkable. Bill wrote, ³That whole myth about the first birth being a long, drawn-out labor didn¹t quite hold true for us.² Despite arriving home within a half-hour of Brooke¹s call, Bill had to abandon trying to get her to the hospital and the two of them delivered their daughter in the living room. ³Six EMTs showed up three minutes later to rush us to the hospital where it was determined that everyone and everything was fine. Fatherhood is a truly amazing and humbling experience and I¹m loving every minute of it!² Amazing, indeed.

For those of you who always envisioned North Carolina-boy Shaila Bettadapur speaking French and brunching over Belgian chocolates, your prophetic talents have been realized. Apparently, the cement guys at Holnam recently decided Shaila was just the man to become finance director at Beligium¹s Groupe Obourg-Origny. He¹s busily applying that southern accent to his ³French deep immersion classes,² while waiting for wife Jacquie Adair Bettadapur and the two kids to move from Detroit. They will live south of Brussels in Waterloo (Avenue du Centaure #1, 1410 Waterloo, Belgium) for about three years. Soon after arriving in Europe, Shaila had brunch with Marie-Eve Rougeot and her one-year-old son, Ian. Shaila writes that the conversation with Ian was interesting: Shaila¹s deep immersion French not yet having quite taken hold.

Although Ginny Blissert Bachman is certain you will be bored by news from her, I really laid the guilt trip on her about my potentially empty debut column. So she wrote that she lives in the Bay Area with her husband, Keith Bachman, and daughters three-year-old Avery and one-year-old Natalie. She ³joined Hooked on Phonics as director of product marketing last January and is having fun making great products that help kids learn.² However, she swears she does not create the infomercials and hasn¹t even met Meredith Baxter-Birney, ³but maybe if Avery learns to read this year, she¹ll get her 15 minutes of fame in 2001.² Ginny also holds the title of chief domestic officer at home ³where TGs now mean a Disney movie, and tennis shorts have been replaced by princess dresses. Can you take a baby jogger on a hash run? Can I even make it to the end of a hash run?² (Not to cast aspersions on Ginny¹s concern over her current athletic fitness, but I¹ve heard rumors that she¹s fit enough to be irritatingly chipper during her marathon runs.)

Ginny recently saw Laura Kottler Egerter and Dean Egerter and family when they were making a swing through the Bay Area on their northern California vacation. Laura and Dean have three kids, five-year-old Jenny and three-year-old twins Colin and Claire. Ginny reports that the adults actually got to talk over lunch on the Stanford campus while the kids had fun playing Duck-Duck-Goose among the passing students.

John Palmer is also living in the Bay Area and recently closed his fourth buy-out transaction for Hanover Partners, Inc. John and Kellogg grad, Andy Ford ¹91, are co-founders of the private investment company. They started Hanover after John left Wells Fargo where he was a vice president and division finance manager. John heads the company¹s northern California office. His work includes overseeing the three manufacturing companies Hanover purchased in Colorado, North Dakota and Oregon. John is still a humble New Englander at heart, and consequently, refused to allow me to print anything even vaguely complimentary of him. So, although other sources tell me John knows his stuff, his company is doing very well and his personal life is equally successful <\m> you did not hear it from me.

In disappointing news, Kevin George won¹t be printing any more Christmas photos of himself in the embrace of supermodels Tyra Banks or Niki Taylor. He left his marketing job at P&G¹s Covergirl brand, ³giving up working with supermodels in favor of segmentation models² for Angara e-Commerce Services in the Bay Area. The move was a terrible disappointment to his slightly near-sighted and confused grandmother, who thought the Christmas photos were of Kevin and fiancé(s). Kevin is now just an unengaged VP of client services working on being the next dot-com tycoon.

Karuna Subramanian Rawal continues her 10th year with P&G. Karuna is currently marketing director in the area of customer marketing. She works with P&G¹s retail customers to develop their marketing strategies. She and her family moved to Chicago about three years ago when her husband, Viresh, joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. I met Karuna¹s four-year-old daughter, Maya, at our 10-year reunion in the spring. She¹s outgoing, charming, beautiful and, I have to say, way too smart. The child reads. And I mean complete sentences, speeding through words like elephant and friend and several others that trip me up. (My oldest daughter is the same age and is still trying to decide if A is a number, a triangle, or ³a pretty ladder.²) However, I¹m pleased to report that Karuna¹s second child, two-year-old Arjun, is completely illiterate.

Elaine Angelopoulos Melorides wrote that she is ³still working at Jones Lang LaSalle where she is an executive vice president based in Chicago.² Last June, her twin boys, Dean and James, were born. She and husband Stephen live in Lincoln Park. He is a pilot for Delta Airlines, but the arrival of Dean and James has slowed the family¹s travel a bit.

<@body copy BOLD>Michael Backus is now at Cain Brothers, a health care investment banking firm that tries ³to buy health care stuff.² I would have asked for clarification, but with a 24-hour deadline, you take what you can get. I did meet Mike¹s wife at the reunion last spring and want to commend her publicly for attending our reunion on the last day of her otherwise romantic honeymoon.

Mike wrote that Peter Litman is a freelance consultant in New York City in the cable TV business and that his wife has a part in the Dr. Seuss¹s musical opening at Thanksgiving on Broadway. I have no idea if Mike is making that up. Perhaps I¹ll need to be a bit more diligent researching my future news reports.

Until then, I¹m really looking forward to hearing from all of you and will do my best to help us keep in touch.