Bryan Gruley ’79 compiled the Wall Street Journal‘s page 1 story of September 12, “Nation Stands in Disbelief and Horror,” that helped the Journal win the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Distinguished Breaking News Reporting. Gruley was working the _Journal’_s Washington beat at the time, a job previous held by Danny Pearl, the reporter taken hostage and murdered in Pakistan earlier this year. Gruley is a past contributor to Notre Dame Magazine; his most recent piece was an Autumn 2001 Perspectives essay on his family’s destructive relationship with cars. . . . The January 14 issue of People magazine carried a feature on Beth Murphy, daughter-in-law of Tim Murphy’s ’56, who lost her husband — Tim’s son Kevin — in the attack on the World Trade Center. As she tries to raise their two young children alone, she’s also battling recurring melanoma. . . . Thomas McGinty ’75 served as a supervising structural engineer during the above-ground cleanup work at the World Trade Center. The Brooklyn resident, who studied architecture in graduate school at Columbia University, is now chief architect for The Applied Companies, a residential development company based in Hoboken, New Jersey. The firm is involved in high-rise luxury housing throughout the state. . . . Chauncey Veatch ’75J.D., a social studies teacher at Coachella Valley High School in Thermal, California, near Los Angeles, was named 2002 National Teacher of the Year by the Council of Chief State School Officers and Scholastic Inc., the children’s publishing company. He was honored by President Bush in a Rose Garden ceremony in April. He was earlier named California State Teacher of the Year. . . . That was Bruce Hiler ’74 at the side of former Enron CEO Jeffrey K. Skilling during Skilling’s testimony before Congress and an interview on CNN’s Larry King Live. Hiler is Skilling’s attorney. . . . Paul Bevilaqua ’67, chief engineer for Lockheed Martin Corporation, invented the revolutionary jet engine on Lockheed’s new Joint Strike Fighter, which last year won the company a $200 billion defense contract, biggest in history. The plane appeared on the cover of May’s Popular Mechanics and is scheduled to be featured on the Discovery Channel in August and on PBS’s NOVA in the fall. Bevilaqua’s concept, a vast improvement in efficiency on existing jump-jets, borrows power from the jet engine to run a fan behind the cockpit that draws in air from above and blows it out the bottom of the plane. Last year an experimental prototype became the first plane to fly at supersonic speed, hover and land vertically. . . . Michael F. Morrissey ’64 was elected chairman of the board of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which contributes approximately $100 million a year to organizations involved in youth development and entrepreneurship education. . . . One of the three women killed in the scaffolding accident at Chicago’s John Hancock Center in early March was Melissa Cook ’94. She was driving the Honda Civic onto which a scaffold fell from 42 stories up, crushing the car. Also killed was her cousin and lifelong friend Jill Semplinski Nelson, 28, who was in the front passenger seat. Nelson had flown in from her home in Kansas to celebrate Cook’s 30th birthday. Their mothers were in the back seat and survived. . . . Institutional Investor magazine profiled Ann Combs ’78, assistant secretary of labor and head of the department’s Pensions and Welfare Benefits Agency. The article called her the top U.S. pension regulator and custodian of the nation’s defined-contribution plans. It also said Combs is "arguably the best-qualified person ever to serve in her post "and “the Bush administration’s most influential voice on retirement concerns.” . . . Mark Serrano ’86 entered the national spotlight as part of the widening disclosure of cases of child-molestation by priests. A front page story in The New York Times on March 18 described his experiences as an altar boy at the Church of Saint Joseph’s in Mendham, New Jersey, west of Newark. He said the priest there molested him from the time he was 9 until he was 16 (1974-81). The priest was removed by the diocese in 1986. Serrano’s family later sued the diocese and settled out of court, agreeing not to discuss the case publically. With the disclosure of sexual abuse by a Boston-area priest whom the church knowingly allowed to continue his parish work, many victims have come forward with their stories, secrecy agreements or not. Serrano, 37, is president of a public relations and governmental affairs consulting firm in Northern Virginia. He and his wife were expecting a fourth child. . . . Father Joseph Landauer ’66, ’68M.S. once shared an address with a future saint. According to an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Landauer lived in Rome from 1968 to 1970 at the headquarters of Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic group. Opus Dei’s founder, Father Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, who is to be elevated to sainthood in October, was also in residence at the time. Landauer is now a chaplain of an Opus Dei house in Pittsburgh. He told the Post-Gazette that Escriva, who died in 1975, “was the man closest to God I have ever met.” . . . Former Notre Dame All-American and current Pittsburgh Steelers running back Jerome Bettis won the Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year Award in recognition of his playing excellence and off-the-field community service. Bettis, who left the University before earning his degree, is the fourth former Irish athlete to named NFL Man of the Year following Jim Flanigan ’94 in 2000, Dave Duerson ’83 in 1987 and Joe Theismann ’71 in 1982. . . . Former Notre Dame offensive lineman Mike Rosenthal ’99, now with the NFL’s New York Giants, was inducted into the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. . . . Jerry M. Brady ’58, publisher of the Idaho Falls Post Register, won the Democratic nomination for governor to challenge incumbent Republican Dirk Kempthorne. Brady’s great-grandfather, James H. Brady, a Republican, was governor of Idaho from 1909 to 1911. . . . Former Arizona governor and U.S. interior secretary Bruce Babbitt ’60 has joined water development and agricultural resources company Cadiz Inc. as chairman and chief executive officer of a new subsidiary that will focus on the Middle East. . . . Robert H. Gore Jr. ’31, said to have been the last graduate of Notre Dame’s agriculture program and an early developer of the popular Florida coastal village of Sea Ranch Lakes near Fort Lauderdale, died in March at age 93.
Notre Dame Magazine, summer 2002