Alumnae

Once I got staff writer Kathy Lally going, there was no stopping her. I had asked her to name some exceptional graduates of Goucher College, and here are a few she came up with:Marion Pines, class of 1944, who's been a major force in Baltimore and national job training; Margaret Kramer, '30, who developed the first oral medicine for poison ivy immunization; Florence Seibert, '18, who developed a purified tuberculosis vaccine.And there were more that Kathy had come across in reporting this week's cover story: Judy Lewent, '70, chief financial officer of Merck & Co., "the nation's highest ranking female CFO and one of the few women who has broken through the glass ceiling"; Sarah Tilghman Hughes, '17, who swore in LBJ; Joan Claybrook, '59, President Carter's director of National Traffic and Highway Safety; Paula Stern, '67, former chairman of the U.S. Trade Commission.

Pink flamingos peer down from the dining room walls of Mink Stole's apartment -- playful reminders of the notorious 1972 film that helped launch Stole's career as an actress, alongside Divine, John Waters and the rest of the Dreamlanders. While Stole says she has a copy of "Pink Flamingos" "somewhere," she hasn't seen the film -- or many of the other Waters' productions she co-starred in -- for some time. The past few years, Stole has been focusing on her budding career as a singer.

Emily Friel Owens, who was active in the alumnae association of the College of Notre Dame, died Wednesday of heart failure at Union Memorial Hospital.A Mass of Christian burial for Mrs. Owens, who was 87 and lived at Keswick, was to be offered at 11:30 a.m. today at St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church in Queenstown.She was a former vice president of the alumnae association and a member of the alumnae honor roll of Noyes Alumnae House.The former Emily Friel was a native of Queenstown, a graduate of what is now the Notre Dame Preparatory School and a 1926 graduate of the college.

A reception will be held Wednesday at the Peabody Conservatory in honor of the late Mary C. Walker, who upon her death donated $800,000 to the institution where she studied and worked for most of her life. The bulk of Walker's gift - $600,000 - is being designated for undergraduate scholarships, the Conservatory announced recently. The remaining $200,000 will be split evenly between the alumni fund and the archives. Walker was a granddaughter of a man who made his fortune in the 19 t h century in the meatpacking business.

Regina M. Hubbard, former alumnae director of the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, died Oct. 19 of heart failure at Pickersgill Retirement Community in Towson. She was 87. Regina Anne McKeowne was born in Baltimore and raised on Bartlett Avenue. After graduating from the Institute of Notre Dame in 1939, she enrolled at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, where she earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1943. During World War II, she worked as a secretary at the Coast Guard yard in Curtis Bay. After the war, she was an assistant buyer for more than a decade at the old Stewart's department store at Howard and Lexington streets, and later at its York Road and Walker Avenue location.

The house stands straight and square on its North Baltimore hillside. A diagram of its interior is almost like a doll's house, four stories of large rooms that are all the same size, except for lower ceilings above the ground floor and in the basement.That's Noyes House, the alumnae center on the campus of the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. It's a breath of the 1850s Italian revival that somehow has survived the years -- all straight lines and tall windows, all high ceilings, light and air and views of old trees and a parking lot.This little-known, antebellum relic is something else, however: a sample of what Baltimore families will come up with to help furnish spaces that cry for historic treatment.

A $10 million campus center that houses athletic facilities, a dance studio, a fitness center and a dining hall was dedicated yesterday at Garrison Forest School, although workers are still putting the finishing touches on the 53,000-square- foot building. G. Peter O'Neill, head of Garrison Forest, called the new center a "wonderful dream of ours" and credited the philanthropy of women, all of them alumnae, for making the dream come true at the all-girls school. "Women were the largest donors to the school," O'Neill said, with more than $7 million for the project coming from them.

Pioneering chemist Margaret Strauss Kramer, a 1930 Goucher College graduate who says she never forgot her Baltimore roots, wanted to remember her alma mater in a big way.The Baltimore native, raised in a house in the 2200 block of Eutaw Place, is donating $1 million to establish student scholarships in chemistry as part of the Towson college's five-year capital campaign."

What a bunch of rule-breakers those Seton High girls are. Back at the school Saturday, they tromped up and down the once off-limits golden stairs. They ate muffins and drank lemonade in the chapel. And then - in the hallways where talking was forbidden and students had to walk single-file between classes - Mary Sue Frankowski broke into song. "We are the girls of Seton High / You hear so much about," Frankowski sang, stomping her feet to keep time as others joined in the ruckus. "The people stop and stare at us / Whenever we go out."

Jean Makowski Waagbo played for the Mount Hebron girls varsity basketball team for two seasons before graduating in 1976. Now, she sits in the stands and watches her daughter, Kristen, who made the Vikings' varsity as a freshman. "It's awesome to see her playing on the same floor," Waagbo said. Tomorrow, Waagbo will be back on the floor at Mount Hebron, doing her best to turn back the clock. "I'll be as scrappy as a 41-year-old can be," Waagbo said. Waagbo will play in the 5 p.m. alumnae game that proceeds the inductions of Liz Brigham, Toni Clarke and Cynthia Carson Odell into the Howard County Women's Athletics Hall of Fame.

It's been said it takes a village to raise a child, but in this scenario, it takes a community to build a home. For the past seven years, Habitat for HumanitySusquehanna and Harford Technical High School, a vocational school in Bel Air, have partnered to build homes for those in need. This summer, the students were able to give back to one of their own and help an alumna achieve the American dream of homeownership. “It's really nice,” says the new homeowner, Kimberly Johnson of Aberdeen.

Kenneth O'Donnell, aide to President John F. Kennedy, stepped into a small cubicle at Parkland Hospital, where Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson nervously waited with his wife and several aides to learn the condition of the president. Kennedy had been shot as his motorcade made its way through downtown Dallas on a sun-splashed November autumn afternoon. "He's gone," O'Donnell said to Johnson, who through an assassin's hand had become the 36th president of the United States. It was 1:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, Nov. 22, 1963.

Sarah E. "Sally" Murphy, the first woman to serve as grand marshal of Baltimore's St. Patrick's Day parade and a retired city government worker, died of congestive heart failure Tuesday at ManorCare in Ruxton. The Rodgers Forge resident was 77. "She was one of the greatest workers at City Hall," said former Mayor Thomas J. D'Alesandro III. "She practically ran her department and was its main cog. " Miss Murphy was born in Baltimore and raised on Cecil Avenue. She was the daughter of Jerome Murphy, a Hynson, Wescott and Dunning pharmacist.

Please excuse Roberta Holehouse for having felt a bit overwhelmed when she first stepped onto campus at Penn State University as a freshman in 2005. Consider: Holehouse was home-schooled during her high school years, enjoying an All-Metro volleyball career at Christian Home Educators Network before being surrounding by 40,000 fellow college students while trying to make an impact for a powerhouse Division I program. "During the preseason in my freshman year, we were running a drill and I busted my chin open — that was the first time I kind of lost it and realized what I got myself into," she said.

Notre Dame Preparatory School is celebrating two milestones during a nostalgia-filled homecoming this weekend: Fifty years ago, the school moved to its campus on Hampton Lane in Towson and alumna Susanne Albert Nichols returned to her alma mater to teach art. At the time, she was the only lay teacher on the faculty of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, who quickly became her lifelong friends. Nichols, who graduated in 1951 and continues to teach three days a week, will be among the beloved teachers and distinguished alumnae inducted into the school's Foundress Society during the festivities.

Sharon Donoghue Knisely, a retired Social Security Administration analyst who headed the Archbishop Keough Alumnae Association, died April 16 on Frederick Road when she lost control of the motorcycle she was driving. She was 58 and lived in Catonsville. Born Sharon Marie Donoghue in Baltimore and raised on Wilkens Avenue, she attended St. Benedict's School. In 1965, she was among the first students to enroll at the new girls' Roman Catholic high school named after Archbishop Francis P. Keough.

When Mary K. Gardner was a high school senior in 1960s Virginia, many African-American women who attended college went to local schools. "I wanted a different kind of experience. ... I had this clear sense and the sound reason to go South," said Gardner, who graduated from Atlanta's Spelman College in 1967. The liberal arts institution was founded in the 1880s and is known as a school for African-American women. "It offered me the kind of well-rounded liberal arts education that I was seeking at the time," she said.