1950s
Elizabeth C. Fesler, BS ’52, MEd ’61, PhD ’74, Akron, OH, wrote, “In looking back at my nearly 70 years as both an educator and community volunteer—years during which I learned first-hand the importance of reaching out to make communities better places for more people—I fondly recall an early life experience that set me on this path.
“When I was 14 years old, at the bidding of our school’s debate coach, my 15-year-old brother and I walked door to door through our neighborhood of largely first-generation residents. Our mission was to share information with our neighbors about the newly formed United Nations. I still remember my sense of excitement about the idea that if different nations could come together in peace, so many of the world’s problems would be solved!
“My many decades as an educator and community volunteer started with a KSU scholarship in 1948. [Those decades included] nearly 40 years in the Akron Public Schools, where I held positions ranging from teacher and counselor to principal and psychologist. Fourteen more years followed in the private-school sector, where I was hired as director of the upper school at a well-known Cleveland academy. It was also during this time that I began working with both individuals and families in my own private office as a licensed psychologist.
“In closing, it is with a grateful heart that I recall the inspirations from some of the distinguished KSU faculty—Dr. Mona Fletcher, Dr. Popa and Dr. Donald Wonderly.”
Fesler and her husband, William Fesler, BA ’51, established the Elizabeth and Bill Fesler Undergraduate Scholarship in Literacy at Kent State. It is based on her belief that early intervention in reading and language has the most profound effects on children. Many studies have shown that improving children’s reading competency by the time they are 8 leads to success later in life and is often the key to eliminating poverty.
Allan G. Kaupinen, BBA ’57, Alexandria, VA, presented a bust of his former Golden Flashes football teammate, Jack Rittichier, BFA ’56, to the US Coast Guard in June 2021. The bust will be on display in Florida and will be installed in the future National Coast Guard Museum to be built in Connecticut.
During the Vietnam War, Lt. Rittichier was a Coast Guard aviator serving in Vietnam on exchange with the Air Force. On June 9, 1968, he and three Air Force crewmen attempted to rescue a Marine Corps pilot who had been shot down near the Laotian border. During the mission, bullets struck Rittichier’s HH-3E “Jolly Green Giant” helicopter, causing a fire. As he attempted to set down in a nearby clearing, the HH-3E lost altitude and exploded as it hit the ground. Rittichier was the first Coast Guardsmen killed in action during the Vietnam War. His remains and those of his crew were recovered in 2002, and he was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in 2003.
In his time at Kent State, Rittichier was captain of the football and track teams. He is remembered for his 90-yard touchdown run against Bowling Green that propelled Kent State into its first bowl game, the 1954 Refrigerator Bowl in Evansville, Indiana. Kent State University’s Golden Flashes football team named the Most Valuable Player award after Lt. Jack Columbus Rittichier in 2009 and has presented a bronze trophy (based on a sculpture titled “Jack’s Run”) to the team’s MVP each year since 2014.
Anne Rankin Mahoney, BA ’59, Denver, CO, wrote, “Dr. Oscar Ritchie was my advisor and my best teacher at Kent State. He was my model for the kind of college teacher I wanted to be. I hope I have done him justice over the years. At the end of my senior year, I was awarded the Engleman Creative Writing Award from the English department and the Outstanding Woman in Sociology Award from the sociology department. I pursued both writing and sociology at Kent State and have ever since. I was elected to the Laurels Women’s Honor Society, now probably no longer in existence, and am also a member of Alpha Chi Omega, Gamma Lambda chapter.”
Mahoney’s new memoir, Both Career and Love: A Woman’s Memoir 1959-1973 (Outskirts Press, Dec. 17, 2020), covers her struggle to achieve her goal of being a sociology professor and having a partnership marriage in which she and her husband both worked and were actively involved with their family. She had never met a woman sociologist and had never seen the kind of marriage she envisioned. Part women’s history, part love story, the book reads like a novel and follows her from the time she graduated from Kent State until she was hired as a sociology teacher in 1973 at the University of Denver, where she is now a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology.