From the 40th reunion:


Since my willfully miserable years at WJ I've cheered up considerably. I went to GWU, where I was told on graduating that a degree in fine arts and a dime(those were the days) would buy me a cup of coffee. My guidance counselor suggested I join the Air Force. The only problem was that if I didn't like it my only ways out were pregnancy or insanity...instead I worked doing freelance art, rode and took care of horses at the Charlestown racetrack, trained dogs, got married, had two kids, Timothy, now 33, and Hope, now 30, (married and with two little boys who have melted my crabby little heart). I got divorced, and fell in love with soccer, and rock and roll and life, really. For several years I raised the two lovable children, was brownie leader, soccer coach, and also frivolous hiker, soccer player,etc.etc.

In 1984 I got a job as a letter carrier. I thought it would be healthy and entertaining, but it was more Sisyphean. Every morning, painfully early, a mountain of mail . It did share with the race track the sense of a world complete with its own strange rules and language, but after five years I quit.

I live in a small house in Cabin John, that I bought in 1976 and, admiring self sufficiency, I learned to do simple car and house repairs. I even, with lots of expert help from friends, built two rooms onto the house. It is surrounded by the garden I love. In 1985 I met Brian, my dear mate. He has shared my life, helped me bring up my children, and now we walk along the river with our beloved dogPaddy and enjoy life and each other.  Tim is an artist, a Buddhist, a searcher, while Hope is deeply happy as a mom, wife, and librarian.

Even though I can't remember a time when I wasn't drawing or painting, and I take a sketchbook everywhere I go, it still amazes me that I have ended up doing art and teaching it in a little studio at Glen Echo Park. I started as a resident artist there in 1992 and I teach children, or to be more accurate, I collaborate with them in wha is sometimes amazingly creative and if not, is almost always enjoyable.

I feel glad that so many of us are having good lives, and I hope to hear more interesting news in years to come. Until then, take care of yourselves, Cathie France Nelsen

From the 40th reunion:

Joseph A. Neurauter cuts a somewhat unusual figure for a chief procurement officer. He isn't a former accountant, or a business executive or even a consultant. He didn't navigate Washington's political machinery before arriving at the Housing and Urban Development Department in mid-August. Neurauter is a former Army trial and appellate judge and a retired colonel in the Judge Advocate General Corps. "We were looking for a good manager, because we have a young and diverse workforce," says A. Jo Baylor, Neurauter's predecessor at HUD.

During a distinguished military legal career Neurauter earned nearly a dozen awards and medals before retiring from the Army. In 1997, he presided over several of the high profile Aberdeen Proving Ground trials, in which five men were convicted of sexual misconduct or rape of female recruits at the Maryland facility in 1995 and 1996. His JAG career also exposed him to contract law. "I was lucky to be something of a generalist," says Neurauter.

After retiring from the Army in 1998, Neurauter spent three years working for the Pentagon as a civilian judicial adviser to the Army's Judge Advocate General.

Then it was on to the General Services Administration, where he was an acquisitions deputy and the agency's suspension and debarment official. In 2004, he investigated an information technology contract administered through the Interior Department that was used to supply the Army with civilian interrogators in Iraq.

HUD has had a chief procurement officer since 1998, but unlike the chief acquisition officer positions created government wide by Congress two years ago, the department's CPO is not a political appointment requiring Senate confirmation. The CPO title remains distinct from CAO, which belongs to multi-tasking HUD Deputy Secretary Roy Bernardi.