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Posted on: Feb 10, 2025 at 4:09 PM
To everyone who reached out to us when we were desperate, I have some news.
Today we received a copy of a letter from the SSA, setting a hearing date for 28 April 2025. Although we no longer have legal representation (our lawyer got sick and her back up retired) I have every confidence that things will go in our favor.
Again, my gratitude to everyone for their thoughts and help through this really terrible ordeal. The mental cost, the loss of my peace of mind (to me...Adriano is lucky to have a "spotless" mind!) has been dear and eased only by help and support given by everyone. Watch this space after the end of April. I don't know how long decision take but rest assured I will be posting the news as soon as I have it!
Chris was modest and just brilliant. Im sorry to hear she's gone, and glad she was safe and loved to the end. Condolences to her friends and family.
Gary and I worked together in the 1990s as academic directors, and in the Maryland faculty exchange program in Xian, China. He was a perfect colleague: kind, responsible, well-informed, and funny as hell. Condolences to his family and friends.
Wow, Dennis, I am glad you were able to help Gary with that. Very nice. For me, I had heard of Gary and Jenny as early as 2001. After that, I would see him at various workshops and faculty meetings, but never really got to know him well until we were posted in Okinawa together. We shared what we were doing in our class and also hung out a few times together including his home. More recently, I am really thankful to get to see him this past February at a workshop. Thank you so much for being there, Gary. I am glad your YouTube channel is here to stay and is something that we can be enlightened with and remember you by. Until we meet again.
I'm not going to say a lot about Gary because I don't know a lot about him or his background. I'll just say that the few times I had with him and his delightful wife Jenny were very enjoyable. They were both, not only highly intelligent and informed on many topics, but they were also socially delightful. I have not seen them since my retirement in 2014, but I will miss just knowing Gary is out there. I wish Jenny a lifetime of happiness, remembering how happy she was with him and knowing they will someday be together again.
.. Gary taught from 1987 to 2024. He was a popular and friendly professor who taught psychology snd biology. Gary and I were both at Yongsan for a long time and were also posted to Okinawa together some years ago. He and his wife (Jenny Ko Laugel) were at Misawa for 5 years before returning to Korea a few years ago. He was a good friend and many of us will miss him greatly Frank Concilus
Few people have influenced me as strongly as Toni Sepeda, so I am very pleased to be able to share a few quick memories of her on this Maryland forum. Interestingly, as I type this, I am in the middle of teaching a UMGC Zoom philosophy class about Descartes and radical doubt. My philosophy students are in breakout rooms with a collaborative assignment, so I have about fifteen or twenty minutes to write this.
It has always struck me as mysterious how back in the pre-internet and pre- Nick Allen/Gerry Heeger “One Maryland,” epoque, the Maryland colleagues heard about each over time and distance. I taught my first class for Maryland (sic…I know that this is not the formal name) in the summer of 1977. Although still enrolled at Paris IV, I was living in Heidelberg because of thePhilosophisches Seminar and got hired to teach a single Maryland freshman English class and then started a six-year barnstorming teaching tour of the Mediterranean: Zaragoza, La Maddalena, San Vito Air Station, Naples a few times, and Vicenza.
Thanks to the administrative creativity of Rosemary Hoffmann and Wally Knoche, I was soon teaching normal classes and seminars in several different academic areas. Almost immediately, certain names became familiar to me because they were Maryland legends: their students described the personalities and teaching prowess of Phil Churchill and Pauline Fry; a little later, I heard about Toni, Patrick and Catherine Quinn, Robert-Louis Abrahamson, and the Bardis, John and Abby, in the UK. Although hearing these Maryland Teaching Tales happened over forty-years ago, I remember the names of the students who described these professors to me and recall my admiration about the connection between those professors and their students. Both then and now, I admired that connection and knew that it had importance.
In the early 1980s, during the Reagan military build-up of NATO, I moved from La Maddalena to Hahn AB in the Hunsrück-Mosel area of Germany about eighty miles (I think) from Heidelberg and close to Trier and the French and Luxemburg borders. Hahn AB was the first F-16 base in Europe and about a thirty-minute drive from two key USAFE installations, Spangdahlem AB and Bitburg AB. All three were very active military installations and had burgeoning university programs, both graduate and undergraduate.
Very quickly, I met Toni and Craig, who were living at the time in a very scenic villa right on the banks of the Mosel River. I remember the first time I met them in person.
Craig was outside his villa focused on a painting he was doing of the river. At this moment, we hadn’t met each other, and he probably didn’t realize who I was. I hesitated to bother him but within seconds I realized who it was and said, “Craig…?” Of course, I couldn’t resist blurting out that I knew all about Tony’s interest in Henry James and Virginia Woolf and the courses she was teaching. He accepted my blundering and lack of discretion with courtesy and grace. I remember our discussion about all the classes I had taught in Italy—the Freud, Nietzsche, Twenties, and Thirties classes I had taught with Sebia Hawkins. It was clear that he was fast-forwarding to how he and Toni would thrive in that open, sunny, and academically interesting area. He had many questions about Venice, where I had lived off and on for years because of my aunt who lived in S. Elena-Venezia. It was clear to me that he and Toni were working on a move to a climate and artistic environment that suited them.
A few weeks later, I met Toni in person. This was at the Hahn High School: I was teaching a tea-time English 291 course, outlining the structure of a university research paper on the board. Students had questions and as I was trying to navigate out the door to make room for the 6:30 class, in walked Toni with a slide projector, a beach bag full of teaching paraphernalia, and two or three students carrying large art history books. Of course, I knew exactly who it was. More focused on her students than her rude colleague, Toni still managed to smile, “Richard?”
Toni, Craig, and I always planned to have meals and discuss academic and cultural interests, but we were simply too busy. The military education programs were expanding very quickly then; the Air Force had finally instituted a tuition-assistance program for family members, which meant that women had easy access to university courses. This greatly improved the UM classes; the bright women often with partial degrees from excellent US universities (Rutgers, St. Johns, Stoney Brook come to mind, but there were more) flooded into our courses. Not only could Maryland offer upper-level art history, English, and philosophy classes, but seminars, field study, and Open University courses became naturals in this environment. Despite spending little time together, the three of us had an easy understanding of each other. We shared a strong sense of the value and interest of teaching humanities courses to adults; we realized that because our students were older than typical US undergraduate students and because they had been all over the world doing interesting and often dangerous jobs that we had pedagogical and human opportunities that standard profs don’t have the chance to explore. We also grasped that many of our students could easily transition to graduate programs in the humanities. Toni was tireless and tenacious with her gifted students—helping them bridge the distance between a tense NATO during the height of the Cold War and a graduate program in either Europe or the US.
My philosophy students have finished their break-out room assignment and need my attention, so I will stop for now. In another note, I will share how my frustration with always seeing Toni and Craig driving by me in their white BMW led me to sign up for one of their UM Field Study courses in Rome. I want to share with the Gypsy Scholar community how much I learned and how memorable that trip was—where I finally got to see Toni and her full team in action. The lessons I took away form that week with them in Rome changed the way I taught and had long-term influences on my whole professional outlook. I also want to mention our Donna Leon connection and admiration for her “Brunetti’s Venice.”
Let me share a hint now, though:
Richard Schumaker
1 Westway
Greenbelt, MD 20770
301.728.5175