Walter Johnson High School Class of 1966

Classmates

The most important part of this effort is to reconnect with friends in the great class of 1966. As Baby Boomers, think about what we’ve experienced, from learning cursive with cartridge pens to posting Instagram images with our smart phones; from learning about JFK’s assassination during the school day to watching the Twin Towers fall on 9/11; and for many of us, going from worrying about prom dates to welcoming grandchildren into our lives. It’s an amazing time to be living! Let’s celebrate and share.

Please complete your profile here.

Your contact information will be hidden, and secure. This website is maintained by our committee, not an outside commercial outfit. It will only be used with your permission for the 50th Reunion Book we will put together for attendees of the 50th Reunion.Those who are unable to attend the Reunion in the spring of 2016 will be able to order the Reunion Book.

Please post your bio and comments. Confirm your name, add your memories, observations, and reflections. Upload a recent picture. With your permission, these will be included in the 50th reunion memory book. THINK BACK and share your thoughts about last 50 years: high school, friends, the '60s, family, growing up in Bethesda. Have fun with this! Also, take a look at the “High School Life” section. We’d love to use those in our class book as well. It’s easy to upload and caption them.

Use the "send a message" feature to contact friends, and your email will appear for them to respond. HAVE FUN RECONNECTING AFTER ALL THESE YEARS!

Please note: the reunion committee reserves the option to edit or revise entries for spelling, grammar, and length.

First name

Last name

Email address

Confirm email address

Password

Confirm password

Hear from MyEvent

I agree to receive updates, reminders, and information related to this event or campaign.

Michael Domanski

Then

Now

Occupation:	Cardiologist
Comment: I found myself intrigued by reading the posts of my classmates from Walter Johnson detailing their lives, partly because, in many cases, they seem so, well, complete. I remember those of you who I actually knew as young people (okay, kids). Honesty impels me to say that, in some ways, I prefer to remember the vigor that attended you with lives to be experienced rather than to read the story of those lives mostly lived. The posts and pictures underscore the unsettling (if suppressed in the daily bustle) reality that the shadows now point East. Partly as a useful exercise for me and because there may be some interest, I detail below, by personal era, what I have done over these many years, redacting a few false steps (paths not taken, really) that are of little significance to how the story actually got written. *Walter Johnson.* I was a bit younger than most (or all) of my classmates and a situational awareness of the world came later than it did for many of you. When I was a boy I always wanted to be an Aerospace Engineer. The irrelevance to that enterprise of most of what I was learning at WJ resulted in intense boredom with most of the curriculum. An exception was being a lab assistant to the Physics teacher – Mr. Meyers (or was it Myers). The time there was not fully subscribed and so sitting in the back room I came upon a copy of Angus Taylor’s text: Advanced Calculus. At the time, WJ did not have a calculus course but only something that I guess was a poorly motivated and taught introduction to real analysis. I became engrossed in Taylor’s book and, over the course of the year, taught myself a good deal of calculus that later served me will at Georgia Tech. I also fell in love with the calculus because it looked like something that I could actually use, *Georgia Tech.* I grew up more on my first day at Tech than all the years that preceded it. The Dean of Students, a stately, elderly Southern gentleman, got the whole freshman class together in the gymnasium, told us to look at the person on our left and then the one on our right. That done, he informed us that when this class graduated in that very gymnasium only one us would be there. I looked at the old man and realized he meant it. In that moment I concluded that my entire future would depend on a 3 digit number, my grade point average. I turned out to be right. As a matter of full disclosure, on the other hand, the old man was wrong; the number was more like 20%. I paid the price of thousands of hours studying for tests, survived the carnage that followed, and finished number one in the Aerospace Engineering class. Some decades later I would be inducted into Georgia Tech’s Academy of Distinguished Engineering Graduates and served for some years on the Dean’s Engineering Advisory Board. Our main purpose was to grow the research endeavor but I made a point of pushing for a more humane treatment of the undergraduates. Please know that if you have kids considering Tech, they take a lot better care of their undergraduates than what we experienced in the “old days” and it is a well-respected, major research university.. *Medicine.* There came a time when I decided on a career in medicine. I took Biology 1 and 2, organic chemistry and the MCAT and applied to Medical School. With the combination good MCAT scores, a 3.9 GPA and an engineering degree, I was accepted to all (or essentially all) of the schools I applied to. I chose the University of Maryland for reasons that are another story. Then Penn State for residency, and Vanderbilt for cardiology training. I had spent about a year in the bone marrow transplant unit at Johns Hopkins as a medical studet and while waiting to start residency (I graduated early). During my first year in residency I became interested in cardiology and so abandoned my prior goal of a career in tumor immunology. I spent about 5 years in private practice mostly in North Dakota (yes, it was cold) where the cash crops are wheat, sunflowers and Minuteman ballistic missiles. I set up a cath lab, taught myself to do angioplasties (still could do it that way in the early 1980s), ran the CCU and noninvasive imaging and learned a lot. Also, I was on the faculty of the University of North Dakota. Medical School. NIH My suppressed interest in an academic medicine led me back to Bethesda and the NIH where I spent the next 24 years largely doing large clinical trials (that era is detailed in my prior posting). Here I became a card carrying scientist, publications, books, etc. (see also my prior post). New York. About 6 years ago, I was recruited to the faculty of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (and at that point retired from the Federal Civil Service) where I spent the next 5 years. My research interests remained large clinical trials while my clinical practice became focused on advanced heart failure and heart transplants. I ran (started) the Advanced Heart Failure and Transplant Cardiology Fellowship among other things and enjoyed New York. Toronto. Apparently out of the blue, I was invited to look at and was offered a position on the faculty of the University of Toronto School of Medicine as director of a cardiology division (57 cardiologists) that serves three (really four counting a cancer hospital here) major teaching hospitals of the University of Toronto (Toronto General Hospital, Toronto Western Hospital and Mount Sinai). A Chair, money for research, and a major leadership position in a major academic medical center was just too good to do anything but accept, so here I am. I even have Ontario license plates. *Baseball.* My baseball exploits are detailed in the prior post. I am actually quite proud of my expertise in the technical aspects of baseball and teaching it. The paradigm that I was teaching was about how to succeed (learn everything you can about something, practice assiduously, and then execute). It works in baseball, school and life. Winning State and other championships is not necessary to teaching the lesson but it sure makes the point that the paradigm works. *Kids.* My twins are now 12 years old and along with our two Maine Coon Cats, the five of us reside in Toronto. For me, they are the center of everything. The kids could not be more different. David is a straight A student, was the President of his class in New York and is a really first rate young athlete. He has a focus and competitive maturity that I acquired only in college (on the first day). He is a tournament tennis player but his greatest aptitude appears to be baseball. He is fast, is an excellent shortstop with excellent range, is almost impossible to strike out and sports a 65 mph fastball and excellent breaking pitches (yes, I am bragging but I have been coaching competitive youth baseball teams for almost 40 years and am so I am a pretty good judge of ballplayers). David was accepted to, and next year will attend, Upper Canada College here in Toronto (this after getting all of the math questions on the SSAT right). Probably the best prep school in Canada – Google it, you will see what I mean. Daniel is completely different. Kind, gentle, imaginative, loved by everyone who meets him and unable to hit a telephone booth he is standing in with a baseball bat. He is a computer jock who spends too much time on the machine but enjoys it greatly. Daniel goes to Crestwood (for those of you who know Toronto – which may be none of you- where the environment is warm and nurturing. Daniel will no doubt work with people because he is so very caring and warm. So, it has been a busy first 50 years since leaving WJ. There won’t be another 50, of course, but I have a lot left to do, personally and professionally. So, assuming survival, I am good for one more post in 10 years at which point I hope that I can still present you with a story that still has a couple of chapters remaining to be written.: Mike Domanski Michael J. Domanski, MD Director, Division of Cardiology Peter Munk Cardiac Centre University Health Network/Mount Sinai Hospital Pfizer Chair in Cardiovascular Research Professor of Medicine, University of Toronto 4N-484, 585 University Ave. Toronto, ON M5G 2N2 Tel. 416-340-5510, Fax 416-340-4862 e-mail: Michael.Domanski@uhn.ca

Occupation:

Cardiologist

Comment: I found myself intrigued by reading the posts of my classmates from Walter Johnson detailing their lives, partly because, in many cases, they seem so, well, complete. I remember those of you who I actually knew as young people (okay, kids). Honesty impels me to say that, in some ways, I prefer to remember the vigor that attended you with lives to be experienced rather than to read the story of those lives mostly lived. The posts and pictures underscore the unsettling (if suppressed in the daily bustle) reality that the shadows now point East.

Partly as a useful exercise for me and because there may be some interest, I detail below, by personal era, what I have done over these many years, redacting a few false steps (paths not taken, really) that are of little significance to how the story actually got written.

Walter Johnson. I was a bit younger than most (or all) of my classmates and a situational awareness of the world came later than it did for many of you. When I was a boy I always wanted to be an Aerospace Engineer. The irrelevance to that enterprise of most of what I was learning at WJ resulted in intense boredom with most of the curriculum. An exception was being a lab assistant to the Physics teacher – Mr. Meyers (or was it Myers). The time there was not fully subscribed and so sitting in the back room I came upon a copy of Angus Taylor’s text: Advanced Calculus. At the time, WJ did not have a calculus course but only something that I guess was a poorly motivated and taught introduction to real analysis. I became engrossed in Taylor’s book and, over the course of the year, taught myself a good deal of calculus that later served me will at Georgia Tech. I also fell in love with the calculus because it looked like something that I could actually use,

Georgia Tech. I grew up more on my first day at Tech than all the years that preceded it. The Dean of Students, a stately, elderly Southern gentleman, got the whole freshman class together in the gymnasium, told us to look at the person on our left and then the one on our right. That done, he informed us that when this class graduated in that very gymnasium only one us would be there. I looked at the old man and realized he meant it. In that moment I concluded that my entire future would depend on a 3 digit number, my grade point average. I turned out to be right. As a matter of full disclosure, on the other hand, the old man was wrong; the number was more like 20%. I paid the price of thousands of hours studying for tests, survived the carnage that followed, and finished number one in the Aerospace Engineering class. Some decades later I would be inducted into Georgia Tech’s Academy of Distinguished Engineering Graduates and served for some years on the Dean’s Engineering Advisory Board. Our main purpose was to grow the research endeavor but I made a point of pushing for a more humane treatment of the undergraduates. Please know that if you have kids considering Tech, they take a lot better care of their undergraduates than what we experienced in the “old days” and it is a well-respected, major research university..

Medicine. There came a time when I decided on a career in medicine. I took Biology 1 and 2, organic chemistry and the MCAT and applied to Medical School. With the combination good MCAT scores, a 3.9 GPA and an engineering degree, I was accepted to all (or essentially all) of the schools I applied to. I chose the University of Maryland for reasons that are another story. Then Penn State for residency, and Vanderbilt for cardiology training. I had spent about a year in the bone marrow transplant unit at Johns Hopkins as a medical studet and while waiting to start residency (I graduated early). During my first year in residency I became interested in cardiology and so abandoned my prior goal of a career in tumor immunology.

I spent about 5 years in private practice mostly in North Dakota (yes, it was cold) where the cash crops are wheat, sunflowers and Minuteman ballistic missiles. I set up a cath lab, taught myself to do angioplasties (still could do it that way in the early 1980s), ran the CCU and noninvasive imaging and learned a lot. Also, I was on the faculty of the University of North Dakota. Medical School.

NIH My suppressed interest in an academic medicine led me back to Bethesda and the NIH where I spent the next 24 years largely doing large clinical trials (that era is detailed in my prior posting). Here I became a card carrying scientist, publications, books, etc. (see also my prior post).

New York. About 6 years ago, I was recruited to the faculty of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (and at that point retired from the Federal Civil Service) where I spent the next 5 years. My research interests remained large clinical trials while my clinical practice became focused on advanced heart failure and heart transplants. I ran (started) the Advanced Heart Failure and Transplant Cardiology Fellowship among other things and enjoyed New York.

Toronto. Apparently out of the blue, I was invited to look at and was offered a position on the faculty of the University of Toronto School of Medicine as director of a cardiology division (57 cardiologists) that serves three (really four counting a cancer hospital here) major teaching hospitals of the University of Toronto (Toronto General Hospital, Toronto Western Hospital and Mount Sinai). A Chair, money for research, and a major leadership position in a major academic medical center was just too good to do anything but accept, so here I am. I even have Ontario license plates.

Baseball. My baseball exploits are detailed in the prior post. I am actually quite proud of my expertise in the technical aspects of baseball and teaching it. The paradigm that I was teaching was about how to succeed (learn everything you can about something, practice assiduously, and then execute). It works in baseball, school and life. Winning State and other championships is not necessary to teaching the lesson but it sure makes the point that the paradigm works.

Kids. My twins are now 12 years old and along with our two Maine Coon Cats, the five of us reside in Toronto. For me, they are the center of everything.

The kids could not be more different. David is a straight A student, was the President of his class in New York and is a really first rate young athlete. He has a focus and competitive maturity that I acquired only in college (on the first day). He is a tournament tennis player but his greatest aptitude appears to be baseball. He is fast, is an excellent shortstop with excellent range, is almost impossible to strike out and sports a 65 mph fastball and excellent breaking pitches (yes, I am bragging but I have been coaching competitive youth baseball teams for almost 40 years and am so I am a pretty good judge of ballplayers). David was accepted to, and next year will attend, Upper Canada College here in Toronto (this after getting all of the math questions on the SSAT right). Probably the best prep school in Canada – Google it, you will see what I mean.

Daniel is completely different. Kind, gentle, imaginative, loved by everyone who meets him and unable to hit a telephone booth he is standing in with a baseball bat. He is a computer jock who spends too much time on the machine but enjoys it greatly. Daniel goes to Crestwood (for those of you who know Toronto – which may be none of you- where the environment is warm and nurturing. Daniel will no doubt work with people because he is so very caring and warm.

So, it has been a busy first 50 years since leaving WJ. There won’t be another 50, of course, but I have a lot left to do, personally and professionally. So, assuming survival, I am good for one more post in 10 years at which point I hope that I can still present you with a story that still has a couple of chapters remaining to be written.:

Mike Domanski

Michael J. Domanski, MD

Director, Division of Cardiology

Peter Munk Cardiac Centre

University Health Network/Mount Sinai Hospital

Pfizer Chair in Cardiovascular Research

Professor of Medicine, University of Toronto

4N-484, 585 University Ave.

Toronto, ON M5G 2N2

Tel. 416-340-5510, Fax 416-340-4862

e-mail: Michael.Domanski@uhn.ca

William Donnelly

Then

Now

Thomas Dorman

Then

Now

Ann Dorsey

Richard Dorsey

Then

Quay Dortch

Then

Now

Marital status:	Committed Relationship
Occupation:	Oceanographer
Comment: Graduated in 1970 with a B.A. in Chemistry (who would have thought since I received a D in chemistry at WJ) from Randolph-Macon Woman's College (which voted several days ago to become co-ed), in 1973 with a M.S. in Biochemistry fomr Indiana University and in 1980 with a Ph.D. in Oceanography from the University of Washington. From 1980-2002 I held research/teaching positions at the University of Washington, Seattle, Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, Boothbay Harbor, ME, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, and Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, Cocodrie, LA (way down the bayou). My research evolved to a study of the effect of excess nutrients from human activities on coastal marine systems (eutrophication), focusing on hypoxia (the "Dead Zone") and red tides in Louisiana. Along the way I have gone on research cruises to some very interesting places and had some amazing opportunities, including dives to the bottom of the Gulf of Maine in a submersible and a visit to Antarctica. Even though I was a member and president of the Biology Club in high school (pretty geeky for a girl at that time), my high school self would probably be astonished at my professional life. We got tired of living in Louisiana and wanted to try something different, so I took a job at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as the manager of a program that funds grants for research on red tides (really called Harmful Algal Blooms or HABs, since they aren't all red) throughout the US. Since I enjoy the job, I have no immediate plans to retire. Personally, I have had several long term relationships, one of which resulted in marriage and divorce, but no children. For the last 29 years I have been happily living with Ben, who is an oceanographer and data manager, working on the Chesapeake Bay for the State of Maryland. One of the reasons for moving back to this area was to be nearer to my parents as they grew older. It has been wonderful to come back to Maryland where there are so many things to see and do. But absolutely nothing, including WJ, looks the way I remember it. I also serve on the Board of my community Home Owners Association where I deal with landscaping and erosion issues.

John Douglas

Then

Occupation:	Retired

Barbara Dubin

Then

Evan Duncan

Then

Darla Dunlop

Then

Showing 151 to 160 of 666 results

Classmates

Register