Class Note 1988
This will be the first of a series focusing on our first-year dorms, beginning with some of my Russell Sage dorm mates.
Karen Redding Morton, Lynda Jones Maitland and Cyndi Brandenburg lived in Room 404. Karen and her husband, Craig Morton ’89, have lived in the Upper Valley since graduation and have raised their four children there. Karen and Craig actually got married the day before Craig graduated, so that his Dartmouth football friends could attend. Three of their children attended and played sports at University of Richmond; their youngest is a sophomore and plays football there now. Their other daughter, Moriah, graduated from Dartmouth in 2017 and was on the track and field team; she was the 2017 New England women’s javelin champion. Karen is the executive director of Good Beginnings, a nonprofit servicing the families of new babies, and still enjoys running the trails of Hanover and Lebanon, New Hampshire. Craig, after 20 years in IT at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital, is now a pastor of a church near campus.
Lynda lives near Burlington, Vermont, with her husband, John Maitland, and has three children: a recent college graduate, a college student and a senior in high school. “I have loved living in Vermont. We have hiked, biked, skied and skated right outside our back door. I have had the privilege of teaching children in Vermont public elementary schools ever since graduation. It’s hard to believe we’re all 50-plus. My youngest child is a senior in high school, yet I feel like it was yesterday that I was getting ready to go to Dartmouth.”
Cyndi lives in Jericho, Vermont, with her partner, Bill Vespa. Cyndi and Bill have three children: Joey, a junior in high school; and Sarah and Maria, both sophomores at Smith College. Rounding out the family is a shih tzu named Mojo who “suffers from an extreme case of mistaken identity, thinking he’s a really big badass dog when he is actually quite the opposite.” Cyndi is a professor at Champlain College, teaching interdisciplinary courses (with themes such as food and community or evolution, adaptation and extinction or healthcare as a global human right) and often travels with students to unpredictable places like Morocco, Jordan, India and Sri Lanka. “The fourth floor of Russell Sage was a place to expect the unexpected. I loved my roommates to pieces and I also adored the guys down the hall (Scott Sabol, Justin Hlavin and Mark Kelsey), even though I came back one night to find all my furniture in the hallway and once got out of the shower to discover that my bath towel had been replaced with a washcloth.”
Ken Leonetti, Room 307, now lives in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts, and is the co-managing partner of Foley Hoag LLP in Boston, where he has practiced bankruptcy law since 1995. Ken and his wife, Susan Amster, have two kids, Chuck (17) and Isabel (15), both of whom are ski racers. The family loves to ski and travel together, spending almost every winter weekend, and a good portion of each summer, in New Hampshire. Ken and Susan also do a yearly 100-mile fundraising bike ride for the Dana Farber Cancer Center in Boston. Ken keeps up with Sigma Nu brothers Jay Fogarty, Brent Forester, Jevin Eagle, Larry Spiegelman, Jeff Carton and Bill Bundy, many of whom meet up for an annual weekend hike in the White Mountains. “Funny, but for a guy who grew up in the strip-mall suburbs of Long Island, I spend a lot of my free time outdoors in New Hampshire. Clearly, Dartmouth was a good influence on me.”
Hope to see you in Hanover for our 30th—June 14-17, 2018.
—Jere Mancini, 34 Wearimus Road, HoHoKus, NJ 07423; d88correspondent@gmail.com
