Posts Tagged ‘Retirement News’

Nancy (’62) and Hainds (’63) Laird

Nancy and Hainds Laird presented a recital for their 60th wedding anniversary on July 23, 2023. Nancy played the Sonata for Oboe and Piano by Francis Poulenc; Hainds played the Rhapsodie for Alto
Saxophone and Orchestra by Debussy. They also performed two duets, one of which they played together at their Senior Recital at the University of Houston in 1962.
Nancy and Hainds met as freshmen in 1958 when they joined the UH band under the direction of James Matthews. Nancy would go on to graduate with a Bachelor of Music Education degree in 1962. Hainds
followed with a Bachelor of Music degree in 1963. Nancy taught music in public schools for several years, but always kept playing the oboe. Hainds kept up with the saxophone, and both of them played in community orchestras and bands through the years, at times professionally.
Nancy also played English horn and oboe for several years in a professional orchestra in Lawton, Oklahoma.
After sixty years, they are still making music together and sharing it, as they have done all these years, with the public, their family, and friends.
Nancy and Hainds were married on December 22, 1962, at the home of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Dale Porter, in La Porte, Texas. They postponed their 60th Anniversary celebration and recital until July 2023 so that all their children and extended family members could attend. The recital was held at 3:00 P.M. on July 23, 2023, at First Presbyterian Church in Wichita Falls followed by a Reception.

Jeanne Clerc (Ed. D. ’83)

Dr. Clerc is now retired in Roanoke, VA. She spent her career in higher education after graduating from the University of Houston. Most of the time was in higher education administration as a dean, associate provost, etc. Her last position was at Western Illinois University where she returned to teaching in Health Sciences as a professor.

Larry McClaugherty (’72)

This Class Note is from Larry McClaugherty:

Allan Young from Illinois came in for the Final Four weekend. He was a member of the UH Freshman football class of 1967 as was I. He wanted to get together some of that fall 1967 class when he was in town. It was a busy weekend with final four, Astros, and all of us scattered.

However, four of us were able to make it. The picture includes l-r: Bill Manahan, Gary Heflin, LMc, and Allan Young. Bill played at Galena Park & now lives in Porter. Gary played at San Angelo with Gary Mullins and now lives near Floresville and Allan who played in a small town near Springfield, Illinois. He now splits time between Illinois and Ft. Lauderdale, Fl. We met for 3 hours at Demeris BBQ on the West Loop to reminisce and the stories flowed. They might have been embellished a “little” or maybe a lot.

Jeanne Clerc (Ed.D. ’83)

I am now retired in Roanoke, VA. I spent my career in higher education after graduating from the University of Houston. Most of the time was in higher education administration as a dean, associate provost, etc. My last position was at Western Illinois University where I returned to teaching in Health Sciences as a professor.

Jim Fulenwider (’68)

Jim Fulenwider (’68) recently returned from a two-week classic photographic safari in Kenya and Tanzania, along with his brother, David Fulenwider (’67). Their adventures began in Nairobi, Kenya where they explored the Giraffe Conservation and Elephant Orphanage. Next, they traveled to Amboseli National Park in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro where they photographed the East African Elephant, cheetahs on the hunt and other wildlife. Day 6 found Jim and David crossing into Tanzania in the coffee country to the city of Arusha beneath the twin peaks of Mt. Meru and Mount Kilimanjaro. On Day 7 they crossed the Great Rift Valley to the Ngorongoro Crater Conservation Area, where agriculture, wildlife conservation and tourism co-exist in one of Africa’s first experiments of multiple land use.

By Day 9 they entered the Plains of the Serengeti and en route visited Olduvai Gorge and learned about its early history and the research and discovery of the earliest known species of humanoids. Their last stop in Africa was Lake Victoria and the Maasai Mara National Reserve. In the Maasai Mara they experienced via a balloon ride scenic vistas of the great migration of wildebeest and zebras and enjoyed interacting and learning from the Maasai people about their culture and traditions.

By the end of the trip their cameras had found, among varied wildlife, lions on the hunt, hippos, giraffes, crocodiles, baboons, monkeys, just to name a few.

Jim comes from a legacy of Cougars. His mother, stepfather, and brother got degrees at UH. Last month Jim and his wife Charlotte established the Jim and Charlotte Fulenwider Scholarship Endowment for the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Jim is a committed Cougar with a long history of spirit and pride.

Tom Fenske (’76, ’77)

I saw this picture in the Spring 2018 University of Houston Magazine. Wow, what a flash from the past. I see from the banner that this dates from the campaign days of 1976. I could so easily be in this picture as during those years I went up and down those stairs countless times. I was even grabbed by a Secret Service agent on the bottom of the stair case on the left when I attempted the go up the stairs while President Ford’s son was getting ready to speak on the upper landing during the 1976 campaign.
I got nostalgic seeing this picture because I have very deep roots to this building and most of my experiences there went way beyond just being a student. For over two years I was employed there with two different jobs. At that time the building comprised of two sections, the three story primary structure (well, basement and two upper levels) and an adjacent one story underground structure. Just behind and below those stairs is where the entrance tunnel to the underground section was. My first job was in an office down there and I was heading to class from work when the Secret Service grabbed me.
I worked for what was then called the “Campus Activities Department” and they provided support and advisors for all on-campus organizations like clubs, honor societies, student government, campus programming, fraternities, and sororities. This service center took up the major portion of the underground portion of the building. One of the services was called the Organization’s Bank, and it allowed qualified groups from all aspects of campus life to have an “account” for their treasuries, all managed through a central Campus Activites bank account. I first encountered this when I volunteered in the campus programming board, then called Program Council. The woman who ran this bank was very friendly and pleasant so I’d drop by and visit from time to time just to say “Hi.”
In early 1975 she needed a new assistant and offered me the part-time office job. It was convenient working on-campus and it helped draw me into the mainstream of virtually all of campus life. This was long before mass computerization so all the transactions were handled manually via an even-then ancient Burroughs automatic posting machine with individual ledger cards for each account. Young people are always amazed that we were able to use tools such as this in those pre-computer days but the machines and the procedures worked quite well. I worked there for over a year and quite enjoyed my time there. The office was down a back hallway and I was working once when a fire occurred in one of the maintenance closets on the far edge of the building. They evacuated both buildings as a precaution and that office was so out of the way, I was found happily working away by someone making a last pass through the building. It was news to me. Of course, they had suppressed the alarms. So much for fire drills, right?
I could have worked in that office for another year until graduation, but through contacts in the building I became aware of a job in the maintenance department of the same building, as a student assistant to the building mechanics. Office work was okay, but this job provided the opportunity for more hours and an even more flexible schedule. My hours were quite limited in the office job but in this role, I could work evenings and even weekends and pretty much set my own schedule. There was *always* something to do. Some weeks I could almost work full-time if the evening mechanic was sick. On a student economy, more hours was always a plus.
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This job was great, and because of it I eventually came to know almost every inch of the building complex. I’m talking every office, every mechanical room, every deep dark cranny, even disgusting places you don’t want to know exist. Those steps in the picture? I painted those once, with a non-skid coating. I regularly had to go onto the roof of the building too. One of the main duties was to go on rounds and make sure there were no problems like squeaky belts or grinding motor bearings (remember that fire I mentioned). Once, while working over the holidays, I found a large amount of water pooling in the corridor between the main building and the underground offices and checked outside on the ground above that corridor. It was obviously a major water main leak. University repair crews had to be called in for an emergency repair even though it was Christmas Day.
The building was extensively renovated a few years ago and I’m sure when they were doing that, they found my scrawl on any of the older breaker boxes that had survived 35+ years in the building. Once, some electricians were working in the ceiling above a dining room of what was called the old Cougar Den on the bottom level. The workers found they needed to flip an unmarked breaker and this unfortunately cut power to the cash registers in the main dining area one floor above. This happened in the middle of the lunch rush. Nobody realized that during some past construction work power had been tapped below the floor to a circuit in the Cougar Den to facilitate installation of new outlets for a cash register station that had no other access to power. It took a frustratingly long time to locate the problem because no one thought to relate the work on the lower floor to this problem. After that, another student worker and I spent a weekend mapping all the breakers in the building.
That particular work came in handy too because not long afterwards, we had been called in to help the short-staffed custodial group to do a rather large banquet reset in the third level ballroom late one Saturday night. When we were almost done I was in the hallway outside the ballroom and detected a faint whiff of burned tar, which I knew was most likely the tell-tale odor of a fluorescent light ballast shorting out.
Sure enough, a quick survey discovered a nearby display case just beginning to fill with smoke. We immediately ran to shut off power at one of the recently audited breaker-boxes down the hall. My boss found a key to the case, which was thankfully almost empty and I removed the bulbs which rendered that fixture totally inoperative. I replaced the ballast the next Monday morning and found it had suffered primary short that had already burned a hole in the ballast case (sometimes they just get hot and stop working) — this would have definitely continued into a bad fire and would have caused a lot of damage. It was just pure luck we were there (hey, it was a chance to grab a couple of extra hours pay, right?) and we knew the smell and immediately went hunting for the source. A hot ballast can not be ignored.
Ah the anonymous life of the Unsung Heroes.
I checked every maintenance closet and machine room every day I worked, mostly for just that sort of thing. Problems were always cropping up on equipment that ran 24/7 (I return again to the fire, even though that pre-dated my maintenance work). I had other regular duties too, for instance I changed all the air filters in the building every month or so. I also changed uncounted numbers of light bulbs in every section of that building. To this day I still find myself instinctively scanning ceilings in big buildings and secretly noting the lights that are burned out. I worked on plumbing repairs, helped with repair work on the food service equipment, and was involved in really unusual stuff too.
Once, one of the sewage sump pumps (one of those disgusting areas I mentioned earlier) jammed and bent the long drive shaft. It needed to be machined but most machine shops around the area could not handle a shaft that long; it was at least ten feet. Somehow my boss heard about a super machine shop in the Physics Department, which even back in 1977 was an amazing facility. We both carried this disgusting, mumblemumble-encrusted hunk of metal by hand far across campus to that shop in one of the science buildings and they machined it. It barely fit in the service elevator, which opened directly into the machine shop floor.
The curious thing about working in that building was that, as it turned out, both jobs were unplanned extensions to my education. The office and bookkeeping skills I learned in the Organization’s Bank were a huge help in every job I held later. Note: computer business processes were all built on the models of the tried and true manual process. In he next job, by doing the varied maintenance work I gained invaluable on the job experience in electrical, plumbing, and carpentry repair. These are things I still use to this day.
The other great part about the maintenance job was that it was a blast most of the time. The two senior mechanics were WWII veterans, one was a marine in the pacific and the other one had been with the Flying Tigers and was later a B29 mechanic in India, working on the bombers that flew over the Himalayas, so the stories I heard were personal and insightful. Truly they were part of the greatest generation. Once that B29 mechanic and I had to make a long excursion across campus in the underground tunnels that snake under most campuses. (Maybe I’ll share that story another time.)
I had other duties too. I served as projectionist for campus-run movies and there were times I ran the sound and lights in the ballroom for dances and other events held there. As I previously said, there were also times we helped out the custodial staff for banquet setups.
Neither one of these jobs were college “work-study” positions, they were considered regular employment; part-time jobs that added to my seniority when I later held a position at another state institution. But just like any work-study job, it was a great convenience to work on campus.
Heck, I even had a master key to the building, something I needed to use while doing my general rounds. Even custodial staff with many years employment there didn’t have a master key. If I had to work on Saturday/Sunday mornings, I had to be on-time because I was the guy with the key!
Who knew what a flood of memories would come from that simple picture.
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Thomas Fenske is a writer living in North Carolina. He’d like to say he was a product of the famed writing program at the University of Houston but sadly, that program came into existence the year after he graduated. Missed it by *that* much.
http://thefensk.com

Kathy (’79) and Larry (’72) McClaugherty

Kathy and Larry McClaugherty organized a gathering for the Hill Country Houston Cougars on Saturday, August 6 at the Camp Verde Restaurant and General Store in Camp Verde, Texas.

Those in attendance were: Michael & Laura Urbis, Alene & Chris Kirklen, Ford & Sharon Smith, Jo & Dewayne Neal and Larry & Kathy McClaugherty. Everyone had a great meal & great fellowship. The group is looking forward to a date, place and time for September’s gathering to get Cougars together to visit and support each other.

Kathy (’79) and Larry (’72) McClaugherty

The Hill Country Houston Cougars gathered at the Backwoods BBQ on Saturday, June 18, 2022 to meet, enjoy great Backwoods barbeque, and share University of Houston stories and connections. We laughed and enjoyed all the wonderful stories we had. It was amazing how everyone was connected including the common denominator of our time at the University of Houston. It was a fabulous afternoon of friendship and fellowship.

Several families were represented and included: Ford & Sharon Smith, Bill & Margie Morgan, Sandra Schrenck, Roger & Joan Schrenck, Jeff & Debra Spearman, Mark & Cynthia Hoffman and Larry & Kathy McClaugherty.

Larry McClaugherty (’72)

1972 alum Larry McClaugherty hosted a gathering with fellow UH College of Pharmacy Graduates. He said the following about the event:

“We had a small gathering of a few local Hill Country Houston Cougars that graduated from the University of Houston College of Pharmacy in our home today for hamburgers on the grill, peach cobbler and of course blue bell.

The individuals in the picture or l-r:  Dawn Woods, ’82, Janet Sheehan Guidry, ’92, BILL Morgan, ‘ 63, my self ’72 and our spouses.  It was fun to hear all the stories.  I hated to see them go home.  We look forward to more as we can.

Have a great week.

Go Coogs!”