2013 Officers and Chairpersons of Friends of Spy Pond Park

Betty Athanasoulas* earned her BA from Boston University and MA from Middlebury College having attended the graduate program in Madrid.  After her retirement as a Spanish/Latin teacher at Needham High School, Betty continued working as an AP consultant for the College Board and supervised student teachers at Tufts University. She is currently teaching ESL to international employees at Biogen Idec and is a volunteer with English at Large.  She is a member of St. Athanasius Greek Orthodox Church and a volunteer for the Arlington International Film Festival. A lover of the outdoors, Betty has been a long-term member of the AMC, and until she moved to Arlington In December 2010, she enjoyed gardening in her community garden plot in Cambridge for forty years. Her first winter in Arlington Betty crossed Spy Pond when it was completely frozen and immediately felt a deep connection to the pond. Since then, she has joined the FSPP to volunteer during some Work Days in the park.

Jamie Ciocco has been working in publishing and media for 16 years. Since 1999 he has run a small multimedia programming and design company, trendy.com, programming museum exhibits and educational software for clients including McGraw-Hill, the Franklin Institute, Hubbell Lighting, Inc., and the Liberty Science Center.  Prior to that he was Lead Multimedia Programmer at SilverPlatter Education, where he programmed two CD-ROM projects that won Gold Apple Awards from the National Educational Media Network. He received his BA in English & American Literature from Harvard in 1994. Jamie returned there from 1997 to 2004 to act as Assistant Senior Tutor and Drama Tutor in residence, running a 90-seat theatre and publishing the House Facebook in both printed and online forms.  He has served the FSPP for five years as Layout Editor for the newsletter.

Jason Fligg is a fourth grade teacher in Westford where he has taught for twelve years.  During the summer, Jason runs the College Gate program based in Winchester High School.  He holds a M.Ed. from Fitchburg State and an undergraduate degree from Boston University. Jason grew up in Reading, MA and has lived in Arlington for the past ten years with his wife, Erin, and his dog, Cooper.  In his spare time he enjoys going on long hikes with Cooper, cooking delicious meals, drinking fine wines, and enjoying the company of his friends and family.  He has served the FSPP for the past three years on Work Days, helped produce and participated in our second PSA for acmitv and facilitated the creation of our most recent PSA.

Karen L. Grossman is from a small town northeast of Pittsburgh, PA. She graduated from Syracuse University, B.S. and Boston University, M.Ed. and worked for 35 years as a speech and language pathologist in the Wilmington, MA Public Schools with children in preschool through high school.  Karen has lived in Arlington since 1974 and currently resides on the shore of Spy Pond near the park.  She enjoys her view of the pond on a daily basis and has been involved with the FSPP since 1992.  She’s been President of the organization since she retired from full time employment in 2004, was elected to the Mystic River Watershed Association Board in November of 2009 and continues to serve on the Outreach and Fundraising Committees.  Her other interests include singing with the Mystic Chorale and her temple, reading, the arts, canoeing, short distance bicycling, and world travel.

Sally Hempstead grew up in New York and Connecticut. She graduated with a BA degree from Mount Holyoke College in Art History and English Literature. She was married for forty-five years to an attorney and has a daughter in Somerville, a son living in Kure Beach, North Carolina and to her great joy, four grandchildren. She worked for thirty-five years in the real property field as a legal abstractor and researcher, ten years as a business owner and twenty-five years in partnership with a property attorney. Sally is past president of The Connecticut Association for Real Property Professionals and was the auditor of land records in her town. For many years, she was and still is very active in church work and was chairman of the board of her local church in Connecticut. On moving to Arlington two years ago, she discovered Spy Pond, fell in love, joined the FSPP almost immediately, and has enjoyed working with the other members to preserve this valuable resource. Sally also has the pleasure of reading once a week to an extraordinary woman who is sightless.  She served the FSPP this past year as Town Day Chair, coordinated the Feast of the East table, and faithfully did outreach on Work Days.

Jacki Katzman still believes that the power of natural beauty is our best tool for saving the world. She holds a BA from Smith College and an MBA from the Johnson School of Management at Cornell University. For 25+ years, Jacki worked on the bleeding edge of the information technology sector as a public relations and business communications professional. She studied at the Landscape Institute at Harvard, the Arnold Arboretum and the New England Wildflower Society, and has worked as a residential landscape gardener.  Jacki has been Co-Chair for Publicity for the FSPP since January 2010.

Betsy Leondar-Wright first participated in environmental advocacy during the nuclear power movement in the 1970s. She worked as a community organizer in low-income communities for a decade, including running youth programs at an urban community garden. Much of her work for progressive non-profits, including nine years at United for a Fair Economy, has involved public education and media relations. Betsy has a BA and MA in sociology from Boston College. She is the author of Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists and the co-author of The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide. Betsy has been active in the FSPP since 1997, is a past President and now focuses on children’s activities and public education through performance and art serving as FSPP Co-Chair for Park Events.  Betsy helped produce and record our second PSA for acmitv.

Gail Teschmacher McCormick has an MSW from Columbia University and created OUR FRAGILE EARTH, a collection of paintings dealing with environmental issues, exhibited in museums, university art galleries and by the United Nations.  She helped develop and is currently a board member of HealthLink, a Massachusetts North Shore citizens group working to protect public health by eliminating toxins in the environment through research, education and community action.  Gail has been active with the FSPP for three years and has been Co-Chair and is now a member of the Beautification Committee. She is also Co-Chair of Sustainable Arlington and active with the Public Art commission.

Marshall McCloskey grew up in Philadelphia, PA, earned a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1961-62.  He met and married a local girl from Medford, MA, and bought a house in Arlington in 1968, where they raised 4 sons, and lived for 30 years, except for the six years in Huntington Beach, CA.  He never designed a circuit and retired from work as a software engineer in 2008. During his career, Marshall worked on navigation systems for oil exploration, which involved extensive travel, patient monitoring devices for hospitals, adaptive optics systems, and did software consulting as an independent contractor. He now lives in Belmont, considers himself handy around the house, works as a warden at the polls when there’s an election, directs a road race in Lawrence and is active in the local road running community.  He gets to see his children and his grandchildren who are in the Boston area as much as he wants, which he counts as a blessing.  Marshall has served the FSPP as Membership Secretary for almost three years.

Fred Moses is a Boston area photographer with over 25 years of experience. His primary concentrations are product, portraiture, and travel stock photography. A specialty is jewelry. He has made both images and computer aided design tools for jewelers. Travel and travel photography are Fred’s special loves. Environmental portraits of people working, market places, and extremes are particular favorites. His work is held in private collections internationally and has appeared in juried exhibits at the ACA and the Fuller Craft Museum. In addition, Fred builds informational and commercial web sites. He has been the FSPP Webmaster since 2005. Fred has made marbled papers that he has sold to bookbinders and graphic designers and recently he has begun to create designs on silk. Over the course of his more than three decade technical career, he has held management and individual contributor positions in software engineering in diverse areas including system software, computer aided design and manufacturing, financial systems, and print and web publishing systems.  Fred has a BS and MS in Engineering Science from Washington University.

Richard Norcross * and his wife, Ruth, have lived in Arlington Heights since 1985, but he grew up in Waltham, MA.  Richard has fond childhood memories of coming to Spy Pond to skate on the ice with his father each winter.  He continued this pastime into adulthood and considers the pond a wonderful natural asset to the area. He has worked with the Friends of Spy Pond Park in the park’s planting beds to help eliminate the invasive plants and clear out natural debris.  Richard looks forward to continuing this assistance to the FSPP Beautification Committee in 2013.

Lally Stowell received a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College with a concentration in political science and Spanish and a M.A. from Southern Connecticut State College in Child Development.  She has worked with inner city youth in the Harlem Education Program in NYC, at the New Haven Head Start and Follow Through Programs, and at MIT’s Upward Bound.  She taught child development and parenting for many years at Watertown High School and then switched to teaching ESL in Cambridge, first at Centro Presente and then at the Cambridge Community Learning Center where she has been teaching an ESL Family Literacy class since 1993.  Lally has also tutored day care providers through ABCD in Boston, mentored/tutored high school students through the Posse Foundation and volunteered at the Food Project.  She has been active in helping to eliminate invasive species in the planting beds in Spy Pond Park. Lally has been Co-Chair for Publicity for the FSPP since January 2010 and maintains our Memory Books, the record of our community outreach efforts since the beginning of FSPP.

Beverly Williams grew up in Asia, the American South, and New Jersey and graduated from Douglass College of Rutgers University.  Almost thirty years later she returned to Rutgers for a Master’s in Teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language. Now retired, she still enjoys tutoring adults who are learning English.  After living in Northeast Pennsylvania for over thirty years, Bev and her husband Wally Williams moved to Arlington last year. New apartment dwellers, they have enjoyed digging in the dirt at Spy Pond Park. Bev was a long-time volunteer at a Peace and Justice Center in Wilkes-Barre, PA.  She has served the FSPP for two years as Recording Secretary and helped with volunteer recruitment and planting bed maintenance throughout the active seasons since then.

* Beginning in 2013