The Memorial Wall

Kevin Hickman, co-founder of Aotearoa’s largest retirement village operator and an influential figure in the racing industry, died on Friday.

Based in Christchurch, the 74-year-old former detective-turned-rich-lister was known for co-founding Ryman Healthcare in 1984, with a kaupapa that it had to be good for his own mum.

He was involved in the company for 34 years, during which it was listed on the stock exchange and became the largest retirement village operator in New Zealand.

Former Ryman chief executive Simon Challies said Hickman was a man who wanted to be respected more than liked, “[But he] achieved both because he was a very personable guy.”

Challies vividly recalled the day in 2006 when he succeeded Hickman in the executive chair. His predecessor emptied his office entirely and left a single post-it note on the desk for Challies to find: “It’s all yours, don’t cock it up.”

Hickman took risks on people, Challies said, giving them opportunity and self-belief to achieve.

“He was an incredible hard worker and he was incredibly well-researched. He would study topics, whether it was racing or retirement villages...more than anyone else.”

Ryman Healthcare facilities currently home more than 14,000 residents across New Zealand and Australia, according to the company website.

Hickman was also known for his work in the thoroughbred industry as a sponsor, breeder and owner.

He was made an Officer of the Order of Merit in 2016 for his services to charities, including the Christchurch Medical Research Fund and the Champion Centre for young children with disabilities.​

A man’s man and a coach’s coach.

That was Bob Monken, in the words of one of his peers.

The hall of fame Lake Park High School football coach and 57-year Wheaton resident died Sunday at 86 from Parkinson’s disease, a little over a year after his wife of 61 years, Jo Ellen, died in May 2023.

“I feel like I am incredibly lucky to have him as my father. He was a great example of how to be a husband, father, and a man,” said Ted Monken, one of their three sons, all football coaches.

Bob Monken, 86, and his brothers Glenn, Mike, Bill and Jim all are in the Illinois High School Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame.

Twelve Monkens have coached high school, college or professional football, including Bob’s son, Todd, offensive coordinator of the Baltimore Ravens, and nephew, Jeff, Army’s head coach.

Ted Monken said his father taught the same lessons at home as he did on the football field.

“He was the same person for all his players as he was to his sons,” said Ted Monken, Glenbard South’s defensive coordinator. “Tough but fair. He prepared all his ‘sons’ to be successful in life. Not at that particular moment, but for the rest of our lives.

“The number of messages I have received the past few days from former players, coaches, and friends has been humbling,” he said.

Lake Park's career football victories leader, Bob Monken went 151-112 with the Lancers from 1964-93, winning conference championships in three decades.

He also was Lake Park's first department chair of physical education and briefly served as athletic director.

“I love the guy, and he’ll be missed tremendously. He had a lot of impact on my life, and I know he did on a lot of others,” said former Lake Park Principal Marty Quinn, who successfully pushed for Lake Park’s West Campus football stadium to be dedicated as Bob Monken Field. That happened last October.

When Quinn informed Bob Monken’s former players of his death, they were “devastated,” Quinn said.

“Education and academics came first to Bob regardless of the 32 years (two as assistant at Lake Park) he was as a coach. He got that in the minds of his players, that the academics come first,” Quinn said.

“I think that was something all of us appreciated about Bob. It wasn’t just about football, it was about developing the character of your players. There’s life after football.”

Yes, there is. For Monken there was also grandchildren, travel and golf. He was part of a group of retired football coaches, dubbed the Coach’s Tour, who continue to play on Thursday mornings.

Retired Oak Park-River Forest head coach and Downers Grove South assistant Jack McInerney has led the Coach’s Tour for two decades, enlisting coaches such as Joe Petricca, Paul Murphy, Jim Covert, Larry McKeown, Joe Bunge, Ken Schreiner, the late Bob MacDougall and others.

Even with Parkinson’s, Monken came to the course until about a year ago, McInerney said. In his heyday he was among the group’s top players.

“He was a man’s man and a coach’s coach. He always had great stories, a terrific personality. He was just a lot of fun to be around,” McInerney said.

“It’s a big loss for all of us because he was in our group initially and everybody liked him, everybody knew him. Guys like that don’t come around that often,” he said.

“When it is my time,” Ted Monken said, “if a fraction of people remember me the way so many remember Dad, I will have a life well-served.”

The former alderwoman, who served from 1989 to 2011, championed historical preservation, beautification and the protection of park spaces, friends, family and colleagues said.Former Ald. Mary Ann Smith, who oversaw Edgewater’s beautification and historic preservation in her two decades in office, died Wednesday at 77, according to her family.

A native of the Northwest Side, Mary Ann Smith died from complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Matthew and Michael Smith, her two sons.

As 48th Ward alderwoman from 1989 to 2011, Smith prioritized creating park spaces, improving local schools, introducing traffic calming measures and preserving the ward’s historic blocks, her family, friends and colleagues said.

Smith “radiated authenticity, sweetness, compassion,” and was always followed around by her dogs and cats, Matthew Smith said.

“Her spirit translated seamlessly into her aldermanic years,” he said. “She was very much a mother to the 48th Ward community, whether they were ready for it or not.”

Thom Greene, an Edgewater resident and architect, worked with Mary Ann Smith throughout her time as alderwoman and remained friends long after. He and others who knew her well attribute much of Edgewater’s success and beauty to her and her predecessors’ work.

Smith succeeded two other eminent female leaders in Edgewater: former alds. Marion Volini, who served the neighborhood from 1978-1987, and Kathy Osterman, who was alderwoman from 1987-1989.

“Everyone thinks, ‘Oh, this neighborhood’s really great,’ and they don’t realize how we got there and what we did to create the world that they just walked into,” Greene said. “It’s a great legacy of those women; they really were the forefront and leaders for decades in the 48th Ward.”

Mary Ann Smith even went so far as to earn a brief criminal record for her commitment to keeping the neighborhood looking good.

In 1993, a private group began putting up “terrible” advertisement benches and wouldn’t listen to the alderwoman’s warning that they couldn’t use public space like that. So, she took matters into her own hands, Greene said.

Mary Ann Smith, Greene and one of her sons went out one night and painted over the benches — only to be caught, arrested and charged with criminal damage to property, Greene said and according to a 1993 Chicago Tribune article.

“She was all about beautification,” Greene said, recalling the story with laughter. “She always loved that story.”

Another of her lasting legacies was the restoration of neighborhood schools like William C. Goudy Technology Academy, George B. Swift Specialty School, Pierce Elementary School and Nicholas Senn High School, said former Ald. Harry Osterman.

“Mary Ann was really able to lead the effort to make sure the schools were top notch,” Harry Osterman said. “The kids going back to school in the fall are going to be in better learning environments because of Mary Ann.”

Mary Ann Smith was also chair of the City Council’s committee on parks, ensuring the community had the green space it deserved. In her later years in office, she helped lead an effort to get smoking banned at city beaches.

Parks on the 6100 and 5900 Blocks of North Sheridan Road, as well as green space behind Senn High School, are thanks to Mary Ann Smith, said Jack Markowski, another of her longtime friends in the neighborhood and the former commissioner for the Department of Housing.

“Mary Ann was always looking out for the good of the community, working with the block clubs, the neighbors, the condo associations,” said Markowski, who also was executive director of the Edgewater Community Council from 1983 to 1990.

Mary Ann Smith was Kathy Osterman’s chief-of-staff, and, before that, was involved in community organizing with the Independent Voters of Illinois and her local block club, her friends said.

In a 2016 Chicago Sun-Times article, Mary Ann Smith attributed her community work — and her experience as a young mother — as the inspiration for her jump into politics.

“I remember literally walking in to see Mayor Richard J. Daley’s health commissioner in 1974 with a baby on each hip,” she told the newspaper. “There’s no one more passionate than a person with a new baby.”

After her tenure as alderwoman, Smith remained involved in community affairs, including serving on the Chicago Landmarks Commission and, most recently, on Ald. Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth’s (48th) zoning advisory council.

“Alderwoman Mary Ann Smith paved the way for women like me to serve on City Council. It has been an honor to follow in her footsteps,” Manaa-Hoppenworth said in a statement. “She will be greatly missed and my thoughts are with her family.”

Mary Ann Smith attended the College of Saint Teresa from 1964-1967 and graduated from Mundelein College in 1985.

Retired Professor Peter Kugel, a long-time member and former chair of the Computer Science Department who devoted much thought to the human dimension of computer technology, died on October 11, 2021. He was 91.

Befitting a scholar with a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard University who had worked in the software industry and at MIT before coming to Boston College in 1974, Dr. Kugel focused his research on the connections between human intelligence, logic, and computability. He summed up these interests in an abstract for a 2009 article: “I believe the human mind can evaluate functions so uncomputable that no machine, not even a hypercomputer, can compute them. But I believe that computers can evaluate such functions, too, because computers, like minds, have other ways to evaluate functions that go beyond computing. If we allow them to use these ways—or, as I shall put it, to uncompute—they may be able to do things that only minds can do well today.”

Earlier in his career, Dr. Kugel published an influential article on studying the process of induction—“by which we reason from the particular to the general”—using ideas from the theory of abstract machines and recursion theory. Another article offered suggestions on developing precise accounts of cognitive processes that could be modelled on computers.

He also was interested in how college teachers develop as teachers, and in 1989 published an op-ed piece in The New York Times that explained how bringing a cup of coffee to class helped him create a better rapport with his students.

“My pauses, as I sipped, not only gave my students time to think about what I had said, but gave me time to think about what I was going to say next,” he wrote. “I began to use my pauses to look around the room to see how my students were reacting to what I had just said. When I saw their attention wander, I tried to bring them back. When I saw them puzzled over some concept that I thought I had explained, I gave another example. My lectures became less organized and less brilliant, but my students seemed to understand me better. And my courses became more popular.”

Interviewed in 1989 by the Boston College Biweekly, Dr. Kugel—then the Computer Science chair—discussed how he and his colleagues made sure that the knowledge they passed along to their students was put to use.

“In computer science, you learn to do something by doing. We don’t simply lecture. We give students at least one assignment a week they must complete. And it’s not like doing an essay; a program has to work before your job is done.”

Dr. Kugel retired in 2005, but continued to write, teach, and learn. Among other activities, he took courses at the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement, where he taught a class titled “Vision and Art.”

A tribute posted on the Computer Science website recalled Dr. Kugel for “his wide-ranging interests and for his humor. He was an exceptional colleague and an especially generous mentor to both students and junior faculty colleagues.”

Dr. Kugel is survived by his wife, Judy, and sons Jeremy and Seth, who were all at his bedside when he died.

University Communications | January 2022

Joan Cushing, a fixture of the Washington theatrical scene who entertained audiences of all ages, first as the plume-hatted Mrs. Foggybottom in a long-running political satire revue and later as a nationally known creator of plays for children, died May 21 at a care facility in Columbia, Md. She was 77.

Her family confirmed her death and said she had Parkinson’s disease.

Ms. Cushing, a onetime schoolteacher, began her performing career at Washington-area piano bars and burst to fame as Mrs. Foggybottom, a character she conjured up to amuse bar patrons in between show tunes and standards.

Named for the neighborhood of Washington that is home to the State Department, the Watergate complex and George Washington University, Mrs. Foggybottom was a martini-sipping dowager — one of “those ladies who lunch,” as Ms. Cushing described her.

In the persona of her alter ego, Ms. Cushing skewered the city’s grandees in a cabaret-style show, “Mrs. Foggybottom and Friends,” that opened in 1986 at the New Playwrights’ Theatre, played for nearly a decade at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, appeared at the Hexagon charity revue — where Ms. Cushing was a regular — and also went on the road.

“Political satire has an essential role in this town,” Ms. Cushing told the Washington Times in 1995. “People do take themselves too seriously.”

She joined several acts in Washington, among them the Capitol Steps and Gross National Product, that delivered sendups of politicos, wonks, VIPs and wannabe VIPs in a mixture of stand-up and song. Mark Russell, perhaps Washington’s best known musical parodist, once declared of Ms. Cushing that “she has more dignity than I do.”

Her number “The Deficit Shuffle” incongruously had U.S. Sens. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) and Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings (D-S.C.), authors of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings balanced budget act of 1985, singing in rap.

Mrs. Foggybottom mounted her own campaign for the presidency on the Cocktail Party ticket. She pledged, if elected, to ensure that every American could correctly spell “hors d’oeuvres.”

In addition to her stage performances, Ms. Cushing penned a satirical column that appeared in the Capitol Hill publication Roll Call and in the Georgetowner newspaper.

She had never written for children, however, when Imagination Stage, then located at the old White Flint Mall in suburban Montgomery County, Md., commissioned her in 2001 to write a musical based on the book “Miss Nelson Is Missing!” (1977) by Harry Allard with illustrations by James Marshall.

Kathryn Chase Bryer, the director of theater at Imagination Stage, said that she and her colleagues admired the cleverness of Ms. Cushing’s lyrics for Mrs. Foggybottom and did not see her lack of experience in theater for young people as a limitation.

Ms. Cushing was a gifted storyteller, Bryer said, and the principles of storytelling are the same, whether the audience is made up of grown-ups or children. “When you’re a child you care about things passionately,” Bryer said. “They just happen to be different things than what you care about when you’re an adult.”

“Miss Nelson Is Missing!” — about a schoolteacher, her class and the dreaded substitute Viola Swamp — became one of the most popular musicals for children. (It is currently playing again at Imagination Stage, now located in Bethesda, Md.)

From that point on, Ms. Cushing devoted her career in large part to young audiences. Her works became mainstays of Imagination Stage, the Adventure Theatre at Glen Echo in Washington and other children’s theaters around the country.

She followed “Miss Nelson Is Missing!” with “Miss Nelson Has a Field Day” and brought author Barbara Park’s popular character Junie B. Jones to stage in “Junie B. Jones and a Little Monkey Business.”

Ms. Cushing’s play “Petite Rouge,” based on a book by Mike Artell with illustrations by Jim Harris, is a Cajun retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, and “Ella’s Big Chance,” adapted from a book by Shirley Hughes, sets Cinderella in the Jazz Age.

Ms. Cushing’s play “Grace for President,” based on a book by Kelly DiPucchio and LeUyen Pham, centers on an African American girl who runs for president in a mock election at her school. It remains one of Ms. Cushing’s most popular works, according to her agent, Susan Gurman.

Joan Marie Cushing was born in Evanston, Ill., on Aug. 18, 1946. Her father was a physicist, and her mother was a Montessori teacher who raised Ms. Cushing and her seven siblings.

Ms. Cushing grew up in Winnetka, Ill., outside Chicago, before moving at age 13 to Kensington, Md., a suburb of Washington. She had years of classical music training and graduated from the Academy of the Holy Cross, an all-girls Catholic school in Kensington, in 1964. She was a 1970 elementary education graduate of the University of Maryland.

Ms. Cushing taught elementary school while moonlighting as a piano player at Washington-area bars and restaurants, including Mr. Smith’s in Georgetown and the Fire Escape Lounge in Alexandria, Va., where Mrs. Foggybottom made her debut. “One day,” Ms. Cushing told The Washington Post, “I decided that playing piano was more fun” than teaching.

Her husband, Paul Buchbinder, died in 2010 after 25 years of marriage. Survivors include a son, Ben Buchbinder of New Orleans; a stepson, Chris Buchbinder of Mill Valley, Calif.; a son from a previous relationship, Patrick Lavelle of Lafitte, La.; a sister; six brothers; and four grandchildren.

Ms. Cushing was a longtime District resident and belonged to Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown.

She wrote several plays for adults, including “Flush!,” set in a restroom at a venue that is hosting both a wedding and a funeral; “Tussaud,” about the French wax sculptor Marie Tussaud; and “Breast in Show,” a musical about the experience of breast cancer.

But her works for young people were perhaps the most enduring, if only because the collective audience of children is continually renewed.

“When I write, I don’t write for kids,” Ms. Cushing told the Nashville Tennessean. “I just write. I know in my head that a kid audience will see it, but I try not to think about that. When I was growing up, we didn’t go to children’s musicals. We just went to Broadway. And no, we didn’t get everything, but we still had a great time. Sometimes, with children’s musicals, there can be a very simple story on the surface, but another level underneath.”