YHS '70 Profiles
YHS '70 Classmates
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Roberta Thayer-Smith
| Marital status: | Married |
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| Children: | 1 |
| Occupation: | VA DOE Systems Coach |
| Comment: | Greetings all, after graduation from YHS, I attended Averett College in Danville VA and received my degree in Elemenatry education. Six weeks after graduation, I departed Arlington for Queensland, Australia where I worked and lived for 22 years. I hold, along with my husband,and our daughter, dual citizenship in Australia and the USA. After returning to Virginia, we moved to Yorktown, where I worked with Gloucester County Public Schools and then Newport News PS as an elementary school administrator. I received my doctorate degree in Education from the College of William and Mary. Flunking out of retirement, presently I am a Faculty member at VCU, working with school divisons around VA for the Dept of Education. Covid self isolation has allowed me to build and relish in my garden, take up painting again, and further enjoy walking, kayaking and boating on the fantastic waterways near by. |
Michael Tramonte
| Marital status: | Married |
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| Children: | 1 |
| Comment: | To paraphrase the great Miles Davis: "When you hit a wrong note (In Life) it's the next note that makes it good or bad." |
Mary VanDevanter
| Marital status: | Divorced |
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| Occupation: | Psychotherapist/Executive Coach |
| Comment: | Hello Friends,
It’s hard to believe we are at this juncture in our lives. How could we be 49 years older? Aren’t we all still 18?
To be totally honest, I really hated high school, and Yorktown especially. I was a poor student, experienced severe ADD and felt chunky. Today, I understand that fitting in was hard for many of us, not just me.
As I often tell the adolescent clients under my counseling care, high school years cannot predict future happiness or success, however we define it. Thanks to the support of teachers like Peter Scott, Joanne Lichty and Bill Lee, I discovered my brain during senior year and felt I had turned a corner.
After 7 years mastering the demands of college, I received my BA from the University of Massachusetts. I majored in Theater and Music and spent the next several years acting, singing and performing stand-up until I burned out. I then spent the next five years in the satellite communications industry.
Luckier for me, I then returned to my lifelong love of singing as well as grad school to become a psychotherapist. I have enjoyed a very rewarding career and played many fulfilling roles. I’m slowly downsizing my private psychotherapy practice and transitioning to full-time executive coaching. With phone in hand, I can often work in my pajamas!
I returned to Virginia in 1983 and live in the Lake Barcroft area of Falls Church. I enjoy a regular diet of Yorktown friendships, am an active gardener, rock and roll enthusiast and participate in Appalachian singing groups.
Fast forward. This is the third time I’ve volunteered to help with our Yorktown reunion plans. It’s been a wonderful experience and has connected me with classmates in ways that weren’t possible in high school. My very best to all of you who are reading this. In my eyes, we are kinder and gentler and take life a lot less seriously.
May your roads be happy, peaceful and filled with love. I look forward to seeing you in September 2020.
Mary VanDevanter
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Tom VanPoole
| Marital status: | Married |
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| Occupation: | Retired Civil Engineer |
| Comment: | After Yorktown I spent several years in Charlottesville, partly studying at UVa, partly working, partly looking for work. I settled back in Northern Virginia permanently in 1980 and went to work for Wilbur Smith Associates as a draftsman, survey coordinator, and civil engineer. In 1985 I started working for the Virginia Department of Transporttion in their Northern Virginia District Land Development section, riding herd on private developers whose streets would eventually be accepted into the state highway system. In the next 32 years I worked with all four counties in NoVa, but mostly with Loudoun County which is the fastest growing county in the state and for a few years the fastest growing in the nation. While my plan review role missed out on most of the satisfaction of creating designs myself, I had a hand in ensuring that a huge number of other engineers' projects were designed and built to high standards, and negotiating significant improvements that benefit the public. I get some satisfaction in reflecting that I had a hand in the design of most of the roads in Eastern Loudoun for three decades. I was glad to retire at the end of 2017, but I keep my PE license up to date just in case. I married late in life. When I turned 50 I was chatting with one of our classmates Robin (McDowell) Mathews and she mentioned that her younger sister Mimi was still single. Two and a half years later Mimi and I married and settled happily in Arlington. Mimi and I enjoy traveling, trying to get to Europe every other year for a couple weeks, or visting relatives spread across the US in between. I still try to read a lot, but find as I get older that I am easily distracted. When younger I spent 14 years as an Engineer officer in the Army Reserve and Virginia National Guard. We are also active in our local church and in ecumenical groups at the state and international levels. |
Jane Watson (Ziegler)
| Marital status: | Married |
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| Children: | 2 |
| Occupation: | Elementary Teacher |
| Comment: | Greetings, YHS Classmates! It has been a pleasure to reconnect with so many of you at the Zoom gatherings. Here is a review of my last 50 years. It's hard to believe it's been so long! After Yorktown, I headed off to Madison College (now James Madison University). It was so comforting to have friends there - Chris Fasnacht, Holly Haseltine, and some other YHS graduates as well (my memory needs some help here). I loved college and graduated with an Elementary Education degree, certified to teach K-7. Thinking back, I've actually taught each of those grades somewhere along the way. Two weeks after college graduation, I married Gary Watson, whom I met at the Coast Guard Academy through Chris Fasnacht. Military life took us to Maine, Virginia, and South Carolina. Then in 1985 we relocated to Vermont, where we still live today. We have two children, David (married) and Julie (single). We do not have any grandchildren, but I do have a bunch of "grandstudents." I have been teaching first and second grades at the same Christian school for 30 years now. So some of my first students have also had a son or daughter in my class. I am not yet ready to retire from this job I love. Besides family, teaching, and church activities, I am hooked on barbershop singing. My dad sang barbershop for awhile when I was young. I joined a local competing chorus when we moved to Vermont and even pushed myself to sing in a competing quartet for many years. I still play the piano and organ when I have time, but now I am also learning to play the ukulele - something new! Travel has taken me to many of our beautiful states, Canada, and across the Atlantic to Austria one summer with a friend. I return to Virginia a few times a year to visit family, especially my mother, who is still alive and well at the age of 99(!) and living in Culpeper. I made it to our YHS 10 year and 20 year reunions and have enjoyed keeping in touch with some of you over the years. I am definitely looking forward to our gathering in October! |
Lynne Weiss
| Marital status: | Married |
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| Children: | 1 |
| Occupation: | writer/editor |
| Comment: | My best experience at Yorktown was working on Portfolio, the literary magazine, but I remember a number of good classes, the excellent library, and something called the Free University (I might have garbled that) in which some of us got together to discuss Marshall McLuhan and other works of social criticism. In fact, I was stunned when I went off to Goddard College in Vermont and realized the college library was not as good as Yorktown's. I left Goddard after a year and knocked around with an internship at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC and travel in Germany (where my family lived before I came to Arlington in 9th grade) and Europe, eventually transferring to U Penn, where I earned a BA in Anthropology. An early and ill-considered marriage to an archaeologist took me to Montana for a few years. I returned to Philadelphia, got a job with Mobilization for Survival, an anti-nuke group, and got interested in a Quaker-influenced intentional community of group houses devoted to training people in nonviolent direct action in West Philadelphia. I moved into one of those houses and fell in love with one of my housemates, Bob Irwin, who I eventually married. Bob was offered a job in Cambridge, Mass at around the time I decided to pursue an MFA in creative writing, so I focused my grad school applications on New England and went to UMass Amherst. After completing that degree, I ended up working in publishing--first for a Cambridge-based reference book publisher, and then landing in educational publishing. I worked in the social studies department at Houghton Mifflin for many years, freelanced from time to time, and ended up at National Geographic Learning where I developed high school programs in World History and Government. It was fun working on a government program through the final months of the Trump administration--we were afraid to go to the printer or pull the trigger on the digital edition until after Biden was inaugurated. I left that work in Feburary of 2021 to devote myself full-time to the novel I've been writing about a young woman who goes to Cornwall, England, in 1932, and finds herself enmeshed in the rise of the British Union of Fascists. It's fiction, but based on historical fact--the BUF at one point had 60,000 members. If you'd like to get a sense of my writing in general, please visit my website lynneweisswriter.com. Bob and I had a wonderful son shortly before I turned 40. I was leery of becoming a mom, and the impact it would have on my career and the division of labor within our household, but I'm so glad we did it. Bob was an excellent father. Our son, a union activist, married an African American woman and he and his wife are expecting their first child in December 2021. We are excited to become grandparents. In addition to writing, I/we love live theater and used to go to lots of it in Boston, especially to smaller and university-affiliated theater companies. We also loved hiking, museums, and travel and hope to be able to do more of it again soon. I became a Quaker in the early 1990s and have continued a lifelong commitment to the Quaker principles of peace, equality, simplicity, and community. Sadly, the person from Yorktown with whom I had stayed in closest touch over the decades, Terri Schwartz, passed away in June 2021. I know I'll miss her greatly after the reunion, when I won't be able to tell her about all the former classmates I had the chance to see and talk to. |
Bob Witeck
| Marital status: | Married |
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| Occupation: | Strategic Communications |
| Comment: | After Yorktown, followed by the University of Virginia, I returned to Arlington and to begin my career in Washington DC as a press secretary and communications professional, and eventually as an author too. I invested the first decade in my career to working in the U.S. Senate as press secretary for Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon, and then as communications director for the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. When I left Capitol Hill, I entered public relations and public affairs working at Hill & Knowlton, for several clients based in Georgetown. While it was a great run, I made the move 26 years ago to open my own communications practice with a close friend and business partner, Wes Combs. We began Witeck-Combs Communications in 1993 with a focus on LGBTQ and disability issues as our core strength. Our clients were corporate and nonprofit, and for nearly ten years, we represented Christopher Reeve as well. I became personally invested in LGBTQ civil rights and volunteerism, and served on numerous boards. I wrote the first book on LGBTQ marketing in 2006 called Business Inside Out. In 2013, we amicably dissolved the original partnership and I continued leading this work under my own brand as Witeck Communications (www.witeck.com), and I am now in my 26th year. I met my husband, Bob Connelly, Jr. in 1994, and we at last had the chance to marry (on our original October 1 anniversary date) in 2014, and this year (2019) we celebrate 25 years together, with our families closer than ever. Bob is an adjunct professor of film, sexuality and gender studies at American University, where he has been teaching for nearly 18 years - as well as a previous ten years stint for the National Geographic Channel. |
Pamela AKA Pamla Wood (Wood)
| Marital status: | Committed Relationship |
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| Children: | 1 |
| Occupation: | Retired (state gov/Water) |
| Comment: | I bounced around elementary schools in Arlington: Nottingham (1), James Madison (2-4), Jamestown (5-6) . Went to Williamsburg 7-8 and then moved to Paris, France. I returned for senior year. After HS, I went to Boston University 2 years, then finished at Univ of Kentucky with a BS in Agriculture, Agronomy. I worked in natural resources for the feds (Soil Conservation Service), nonprofits (KY Rivers Coalition), and the state (Division of Water). I stayed active in citizen-led efforts, helping nonprofits working on natural resource issues but also civil rights issues. I retired in 2004, finally moving to a farm where I raise meat goats and wool-meat sheep. I also train pretty extensively as a dancer: modern, improv, ballet, and aerials. My domestic life has been, well, rich and diverse, but somehow I shared parenthood with a husband/exhusband and raised a delightful daughter who now has grandkids. I seem to have found stability and peace on the farm with a male partner, Steve. |