“Ayuh,” I grew up in Maine—home of the “snap when you bite ’em” hot dogs, bean hole beans and the whoopie pie. My hometown was a small farming community in the northernmost reaches of the state, where memories of closing schools for the month of September to pick potatoes still linger. In contrast to today’s strict child labor laws, the annual Maine potato harvest was when impressionable young people (like me) learned the ethic of hard work and perseverance. It’s also where we learned how to cuss, smoke and make out. To this day I’m not sure which was more valuable. So, with Maine on my mind, here is the latest from classmates.


Kathy Krause, who summered in Bar Harbor, Maine, writes: “I am finishing out the last year of my term as chair of the department of foreign languages and literatures at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and looking forward to having far fewer administrative reports and committee meetings next year! Recently my husband, Bob, and I got the chance to take a raft trip down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon this past June. It was a fabulous experience, which we did in small six-person inflatable boats/rafts. Highlights included not just running rapids but hikes into side canyons to waterfalls, archeological sites and the amazing turquoise waters of the Little Colorado River. We ended the trip by hiking out of the canyon, up the Bright Angel Trail (all 7.7 miles and 4,420 feet in elevation change!) and spending the night at the rim. Our summer trip started in Pennsylvania visiting relatives, then stopped at the Lake Morey Resort in Fairlee, Vermont, for a conference. We finally traveled across the White Mountains and the state of Maine, where we did a lot of hiking in all locales (including Mount Cube, where we ran into some Outing Club students working on the trail) and generally had a wonderful time away from the horrible heat of the summer in the Midwest.


Tina Farrenkopf, who hails from Bangor, Maine says, “I have lived in beautiful Colorado since 2000. A great place to be! It is here that I met my partner, Paul Watkins. We have two wonderful children, Tessa, 6, and Tanner, 4, both adopted from Guatemala. I serve as a senior program officer for First Nations Development Institute in Longmont, Colorado, where I oversee a mix of federal and privately funded programs and am in charge of grant making for First Nations. It’s nice to be the person who gives out grants for a change, definitely more fun than writing for them. To keep my grant-writing skills up, I teach grant writing, along with some other related topics, in tribal communities nationwide. This summer I took my kids back to Maine to show them what they have been missing.”


Gail Chicoine Richards, from Vermont, which is close to Maine, adds, “I am the marketing department for a start up company in the Colorado Springs Technology Incubator. The company was founded by an engineer whose daughter has cerebral palsy and his inventions resulted in her making unprecedented gains in rehabilitation. As a result, we have two products currently on the market: www.pointscribe.com and www. gyrostim.com. In particular, GyroStim may become something everyone has heard of before too long, which is a very exciting prospect. Lastly, my oldest son is at the University of Colorado in Boulder studying film and is a member of the comedy improv troupe and my younger son graduates from high school this year and is hoping to continue his basketball career.”


—Derek Chow and Jan Gordon, 132 Wildcat Lane, Boulder, CO 80304; (303) 448-1580; janandderek@comcast.net