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To everyone of you! You had our backs! You saved my sanity!

Today we received a very small amount of money from SSA. It is nowhere near what is owed to Adriano, but this payment is a harbinger of things to come.

I have been on the phone at least 3 times a week since mid-August trying to confirm that the Judge's decision is being implemented. Until Tuesday of this week, Adriano was still on temporary status (benefits ended 30 Aug 25), and they were still collecting the overpayment ($58K) that the judge voided.

On Monday I was advised by the local SSA office to file another appeal. I spoke with our lawyer (now retired), and he suggested that it would be prudent to do that, so I called SSA again. Whoever answered the phone told me that Adriano was now confirmed as off temporary and back on regular status and that they could find no evidence of a pending overpayment!

Now, Friday, a small amount was paid and there are 2 letters from SSA in today's mail (delivered in about 5-6 hours, so I don't know what they say yet!). So, it looks as if we have an end in sight.

I hope you all understand how much your support has meant. Not just that we didn't lose our house, but knowing that you all had our backs...I cannot repay any of you for the peace of mind that gave me.

However, in light of the fact that we will be getting the money back that was confiscated, I don't feel right not paying forward your generosity and support. I will be donating an amount equal to your combined donations to causes which I feel will support the most vulnerable Americans the way you have all supported us.

My community, my chosen family has given us much over the last 45 years...I am so honored to pay that forward. Thank you is so inadequate but it is all I can say: Thank You All A Thousand Times A Thousand!

25 years UMUC/UMGC faculty. Yay!

I worked for Irene in Korea and liked her very much.  She was warm and efficient in her job.  I cannot claim to have been her close friend, but certainly we were friends.  In short, I really liked Irene.  I wish her well as she embarks on her ultimate adventure.  I know she will fare well.

Posted on: Jul 04, 2025 at 10:13 AM

Uncle bill, hope you have a nice birthday and that your family are safe from the fascist roundup of non-white Americans and non-white immigrants. Remember, being undocumented is a misdemeanor.

The "In Memory" postings on the OMA Website almost always bring back memories that touch me personally.  I was with the Maryland overseas program for 40 years (1967-2007) and often knew personally the colleague who had passed away.  Usually, I don’t add comments, especially when others closer to the person memorialized have provided more meaningful memories than I could.

Charley Burden, however, is an exception.  He and I, as well as his wife (Elke), met in 1971-72 when Charley joined the European Division as a full-time faculty member in economics and business.  Elke, also an experienced teacher, taught German language.  When they arrived, I was in Heidelberg as the Mediterranean Area Director and over the next two academic years Charley taught in Rota, Aviano, Torrejon (Madrid) and Heraklion.

In subsequent decades, whenever Charley had sabbatical or a leave of absence from his professorship at Georgia State University, he and Elke would return to teach with the European Division.  And, over those years I interacted with Charley fairly often and came to know him well.  Sadly, Rosemary Hoffmann, who passed away earlier this year, was perhaps the only other active OMA member who would have been able to comment about Charley.  Given Rosemary’s role as an Area Director, administrator of the foreign language program and fellow teacher of German, likely knew Elke and Charley well.

Charles was a very good teacher—respected and liked by his students.  He also was a very good human being.  Whenever I think of Charley Burden, the term, "Decent Person" comes to my mind.  He was very certainly that.

I last spent time with Charley and Elke in the fall of 2019 at that year's OMA Gathering in Heidelberg.  We had dinner together at the small Indian restaurant on Bahnhofstrasse behind what was then the Crowne Plaza Hotel.  I had not seen either of them for more than 20 years.  It was a great pleasure for me...to see them both.

At that time, Charley informed me that he had a serious illness...that would at some point probably take his life.  I do not know if that was what finally caught up with him.

I do know that Charley Burden was a genuinely good person.

The "In Memory" postings on the OMA Website almost always bring back memories that touch me personally.  I was with the Maryland overseas program for 40 years (1967-2007) and often knew personally the colleague who had passed away.  Usually, I don’t add comments, especially when others closer to the person memorialized have provided more meaningful memories than I could.

Charley Burden, however, is an exception.  He and I, as well as his wife (Elke), met in 1971-72 when Charley joined the European Division as a full-time faculty member in economics and business.  Elke, also an experienced teacher, taught German language.  When they arrived, I was in Heidelberg as the Mediterranean Area Director and over the next two academic years Charley taught in Rota, Aviano, Torrejon (Madrid) and Heraklion.

In subsequent decades, whenever Charley had sabbatical or a leave of absence from his professorship at Georgia State University, he and Elke would return to teach with the European Division.  And, over those years I interacted with Charley fairly often and came to know him well.  Sadly, Rosemary Hoffmann, who passed away earlier this year, was perhaps the only other active OMA member who would have been able to comment about Charley.  Given Rosemary’s role as an Area Director, administrator of the foreign language program and fellow teacher of German, likely knew Elke and Charley well.

Charles was a very good teacher—respected and liked by his students.  He also was a very good human being.  Whenever I think of Charley Burden, the term, "Decent Person" comes to my mind.  He was very certainly that.

I last spent time with Charley and Elke in the fall of 2019 at that year's OMA Gathering in Heidelberg.  We had dinner together at the small Indian restaurant on Bahnhofstrasse behind what was then the Crowne Plaza Hotel.  I had not seen either of them for more than 20 years.  It was a great pleasure for me...to see them both.

At that time, Charley informed me that he had a serious illness...that would at some point probably take his life.  I do not know if that was what finally caught up with him.

I do know that Charley Burden was a genuinely good person. 

Happy birthday friend! Thinking of you today and sending our best wishes for the next year.

 I was very saddened to learn the news about Rosemary Hoffmann’s passing.  By some quirk of fate, I read the email from the Maryland Portal as I was engaged in a Zoom meeting for a class, Philosophy 100, I originally taught for her and Wally Knoche many years ago. 

I met Rosemary for the first time in late August of 1977.  I was working on one of my Sorbonne theses, living in the Kleine Mantelgasse in Heidelberg and living a quiet life with little to worry about beyond whether to go the General Library of the University of Heidelberg or the Philosophisches Seminar.  Someone had suggested that I apply for a teaching position with the University of Maryland on the other side of Heidelberg. Without giving it much thought, I did so and a week later got a call from Bob Speckhard, the English Coordinator.  He interviewed me and said, “I want you to meet Rosemary and Wally,” I have a feeling that you have a lot in common with them.

This was the understatement of the century.

If I remember correctly, this interviewed occurred on a Thursday and early the following week I was on a Medevac plane to Zaragoza, Spain.  This plane stopped first in Nice and then went to Rota before taking me to Zaragoza, which is in the middle of the Aragon Desert (I think).

I worked directly for Rosemary and Wally for four years, getting to know both very well as they guided me through the ropes of becoming a Maryland-in-Europe prof.  Rosemary had so many different personal and professional virtues.  When I started in the Med Dept at Maryland, I had never taught, had not really lived in an English-language environment for almost a decade.  She was so careful and understanding she had a much better knowledge of my needs than I did.  Over the first six months, she taught me how to heed and follow the departmental processes, how to be patient and think through how to work with the adult working students and how handle the various challenges of working on a rather isolated, often politically charged USAFE base.  These might seem like simple and obvious skills but for me they were challenging-- I had been outside of the US and focused on France and philosophy for so long that I needed a mentor.

As I began to understand the world of adult education in a military environment, I easily figured out how to adapt my own continental philosophical interests to the US adult ed program. Here again, Rosemary was incredibly helpful.  As a pedagogue she had unique skills—stimulating and imaginative but extremely disciplined. As someone had no discipline outside my academic interests, these weren’t easy lessons for me.   This was a long time ago now and the cultural differences between the US and Europe were wider then than they are now.  Rosemary was a gifted academic with a PhD in German; she had a very good sense of who I was and how to help me bridge this gap cultural.  After about a year of teaching basic lower and upper-level courses, she began to work with me on the creation of new seminars and 3sh courses. By the time this process started, I had moved from Zaragoza to Naples and then on to San Vito Air Station near Brindisi.  The mission there was a cutting-edge USAFE intel project. My students there were mostly Air Force and Navy intelligence analysists and linguists; they were part of the global US intel community and had served at NSA in Maryland, Misawa, Japan and several places in the UK and Germany.  These were exceptional students who were yearning for challenging courses which would help them develop as students and humans.  Rosemary understood this situation well and encouraged me to develop new courses and teach ones in Shakespeare, American Lit, French and other similar ones.  She often flew down to either Naples or Brindisi and we not only worked on our Maryland projects but had really interesting trips in the Italian country side.  She was incredibly curious and open; she loved meeting the Italian agricultural workers in these areas.  We would get ourselves invited into their unique Trulli homes and be offered meals.  Experiences of a lifetime!!

Rosemary and I met up again professionally when I transferred from La Maddalena in Sardinia to Hahn, AB in the Hünsruck region of Germany.  The world was changing and this decision for me was very significant.  Rosemary had moved from Wally’s assistant in the Mediterranean area to the directorship of part of part of Germany—I forget the exact title. 

Hahn AB was a crucial part of the Reagan military build-up in the early 1980s.  It was the first base in Europe to use the new multi-role fighter, the F-16, and had a nuclear storage area as well as one of the important AF intel units.  This meant working with multiple services, a very complex student body, and an expanding student body.  Because of its geopolitical importance, it also became a site of political protests and terrorist attacks.

For Rosemary, this meant that she was responsible for one of the most important university programs in Europe—or anywhere really.  Our professional relationship changed during this time.  Another administrator probably would not have grasped the complexity of her new assignment or grasped the importance of finding the right personnel to teach and manage the program.   As my professional relationship with Rosemary deepened, so did my understanding of teaching in general and my own professional responsibilities in particular.  I still taught experimental classes over several academic areas but the need in the Hahn world was for something else—someone who could handle the high volume of students and also figure out practices that would help this student population.  In conjunction with the field reps, Patrick Pryor and Bill Badger, and the ESO, Mike Koster, we devised ingenious approaches to teaching classes that suited these students with very odd schedules and incredibly demanding military exercises that closed the bases down for days and weeks—thus cutting the students off from their classes.  I was often the lead prof to teach these “trick” sessions, to trouble shoot them and prepare them for general use. Rosemary was so emphatic, intelligent, and demanding in these discussions and meeting.  These traits were all but absent from my personality but little by little I got better; what one of the protest magazines once called “Militär-Heimat Hunsrück” despite all the stress, demonstrations, and dangers, Rosemary developed an incredible program.  To this date, I receive emails from our former students who always express appreciate for those classes.  As they tend to say, “We realized that you were there for us.”

After a while, Rosemary decided to return to the US to pursue one of her deep loves—architecture.  The changes in the US presence in Europe continued:  wars, more terrorism, many huge demonstrations, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the “drawdown” of troops.  Hahn AB closes but I moved to the nearby Bitburg AB and Spangdahlem.  Technology was changing global education and for many reasons Maryland in Europe was at the forefront of this.  This shift in teaching possibilities led me to accept a position at the home campus in Adelphi, MD.  After decades as a UMUC prof, seldom visiting the US, and always more interested in continental Europe than “elsewhere,” I found myself arriving at Maryland’s US HQ as an administrator. 

As I was being shown my office, one of the first people to greet me was my friend and former supervisor, Rosemary Hoffmann.  She was modest and kind: “Do you remember me?”  I started laughing—"Of course,” I said, “and started into “Do you remember…?”

For about a decade our offices were a few meters from each other.  Both of us liked being back in the US—we liked the DC-NYC corridor and felt that the institution needed our European expertise.  It was also interesting to have contact with “USM,” the University System of Maryland.  This gave us a good sense of how UMUC fit into the Maryland master plan.

During this time, Rosemary, in addition to working in university administration, taught German and did very important work in adapting language studies to the new online methods. 

I have been typing for about an hour from the Marriott Downtown Hotel in Philadelphia where I am attending a Northeast Modern Language convention and participating in a political demonstration at the Philadelphia City Hall.  It is time for Rosemary Memorial Service.  I was shocked and saddened to learn that she had passed; she had such a deep influence on my life, and I can’t think of anyone I admired more.  I had planned on sharing some of the kind and helpful things she did for me in my first few years back in the US, but ran out of time. 

Many of us are at once deeply saddened to think she’s no longer with us and infinitely grateful to have known such an intelligent, kind, and curious person. 

 I was very saddened to learn the news about Rosemary Hoffmann’s passing.  By some quirk of fate, I read the email from the Maryland Portal as I was engaged in a Zoom meeting for a class, Philosophy 100, I originally taught for her and Wally Knoche many years ago.  

I met Rosemary for the first time in late August of 1977.  I was working on one of my Sorbonne theses, living in the Kleine Mantelgasse in Heidelberg and enjoying a quiet life with little to worry about beyond whether to go t0 the General Library of the University of Heidelberg or the Philosophisches Seminar. 

 Someone had suggested that I apply for a teaching position with the University of Maryland on the other side of Heidelberg. Without giving it much thought, I did so and a week later got a call from Bob Speckhard, the English Coordinator.  He interviewed me and said, “I want you to meet Rosemary and Wally,” I have a feeling that you have a lot in common with them.

This was the understatement of the century.

If I remember correctly, this interviewed occurred on a Thursday and early the following week I was on a Medevac plane to Zaragoza, Spain to teach there on a trial basis.  This plane stopped first in Nice and then went to Rota before taking me to Zaragoza, which is in the middle of the Aragon Desert (I think).  Far, far from a German university town.

I worked directly for Rosemary and Wally for four years, getting to know both very well as they guided me through the ropes of becoming a Maryland-in-Europe prof.  Rosemary had so many different personal and professional virtues.  When I started in the Med Dept at Maryland, I had never taught, had not really lived in an English-language environment for almost a decade. 

 She was so careful and understanding; she had a much better knowledge of my needs than I did.  

Over the first six months, she taught me how to heed and follow the departmental processes, how to be patient and think through how to work with the adult working students, and how handle the various challenges of working on a rather isolated, often politically charged USAFE base.  These might seem like simple and obvious skills but to me they were challenging--I had been outside of the US and focused on France and philosophy for so long that I needed a mentor.

As I began to understand the world of adult education in a military environment, I easily figured out how to adapt my own continental philosophical interests to the US adult ed program. Here again, Rosemary was incredibly helpful.  As a pedagogue she had unique skills—stimulating and imaginative but extremely disciplined. As someone had no discipline outside my academic interests, these weren’t easy lessons for me.   This was a long time ago now and the cultural differences between the US and Europe were wider then than they are now.  Rosemary was a gifted academic with a PhD in German; she had a very good sense of who I was and how to help me bridge this gap cultural.  After about a year of teaching basic lower and upper-level courses, she began to work with me on the creation of new seminars and 3sh courses. By the time this process started, I had moved from Zaragoza to Naples and then on to San Vito Air Station near Brindisi.  The mission there was a cutting-edge USAFE intel project. My students there were mostly Air Force and Navy intelligence analysists and linguists; they were part of the global US intel community and had served at NSA in Maryland, Misawa, Japan and several places in the UK and Germany.  These were exceptional students who were yearning for challenging courses which would help them develop as students and humans.  

Rosemary understood this situation well and encouraged me to develop new courses and teach ones in Shakespeare, American Lit, French and other similar ones.  She often flew down to either Naples or Brindisi and we not only worked on our Maryland projects but had really interesting trips in the Italian countryside.  She was incredibly curious and open; she loved meeting the Italian agricultural workers in these areas.  We would get ourselves invited into their unique Trulli homes and be offered meals.  Experiences of a lifetime!!

Rosemary and I met up again professionally when I transferred from La Maddalena in Sardinia to Hahn, AB in the Hünsruck region of Germany.  The world was changing and this decision for me was very significant.  Rosemary had moved from Wally’s assistant in the Mediterranean area to the directorship of part of part of Germany—I forget the exact title.  

Hahn AB was a crucial part of the Reagan military build-up in the early 1980s.  It was the first base in Europe to use the new multi-role fighter, the F-16, and had a nuclear storage area as well as one of the important AF intel units.  This meant working with multiple services, a very complex student body, and an expanding student body.  Because of its geopolitical importance, it also became a site of political protests and terrorist attacks. 

For Rosemary, this meant that she was responsible for one of the most important university programs in Europe—or anywhere really.  Our professional relationship changed during this time. 

 Another administrator probably would not have grasped the complexity of her new assignment or grasped the importance of finding the right personnel to teach and manage the program.   As my professional relationship with Rosemary deepened, so did my understanding of teaching in general and my own professional responsibilities in particular.  I still taught experimental classes over several academic areas but the need in the Hahn world was for something else—someone who could handle the high volume of students and also figure out practices that would help this student population.  In conjunction with the field reps, Patrick Pryor and Bill Badger, and the ESO, Mike Koster, we devised ingenious approaches to teaching classes that suited these students with very odd schedules and incredibly demanding military exercises that closed the bases down for days and weeks—thus cutting the students off from their classes.  I was often the lead prof to teach these “trick” sessions, to trouble shoot them and prepare them for general use. 

Rosemary was so empathetic, intelligent, and demanding in these discussions and meeting.  These traits were all but absent from my personality but little by little I got better; what one of the protest magazines once called “Militär-Heimat Hunsrück” despite all the stress, demonstrations, and dangers, Rosemary developed an incredible program.  Even now, I receive emails from our former students who always express appreciate for those classes.  As they tend to say, “We realized that you were there for us.”

After a while, Rosemary decided to return to the US to pursue one of her deep loves—architecture.  The changes in the US presence in Europe continued:  wars, more terrorism, many huge demonstrations, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the “drawdown” of troops.  Hahn AB closes but I moved to the nearby Bitburg AB and Spangdahlem.  Technology was changing global education and for many reasons Maryland in Europe was at the forefront of this.  This shift in teaching possibilities led me to accept a position at the home campus in Adelphi, MD.  After decades as a UMUC prof, seldom visiting the US, and always more interested in continental Europe than “elsewhere,” I found myself arriving at Maryland’s US HQ as an administrator.  

As I was being shown my office, one of the first people to greet me was my friend and former supervisor, Rosemary Hoffmann.  She was modest and kind: “Do you remember me?”  I started laughing—"Of course,” I said, “and started into “Do you remember…?”

For about a decade our offices were a few meters from each other.  Both of us liked being back in the US—we liked the DC-NYC corridor and felt that the institution needed our European expertise.  It was also interesting to have contact with “USM,” the University System of Maryland.  This gave us a good sense of how UMUC fit into the Maryland master plan.

During this time, Rosemary, in addition to working in university administration, taught German and did very important work in adapting language studies to the new online methods.  

I have been typing for about an hour from the Marriott Downtown Hotel in Philadelphia where I am attending a Northeast Modern Language convention and participating in a political demonstration at the Philadelphia City Hall.  It is time for Rosemary’s Memorial Service.  I was shocked and saddened to learn that she had passed; she had such a deep influence on my life, and I can’t think of anyone I admired more.  I had planned on sharing some of the kind and helpful things she did for me in my first few years back in the US but ran out of time.  

Many of us are at once deeply saddened to think she’s no longer with us and infinitely grateful to have known such an intelligent, kind, and curious person.