While serving with the U.S. Army in Iraq in 2004, Danielle Green ’99 lost part of her arm when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded behind her security post. Twenty-two years later, the Purple Heart recipient’s sacrifice and resilience continue to inspire. Last year, Green became the first female veteran featured as a playable character in the video-game franchise Call of Duty. A former Fighting Irish basketball player, she earned a master’s degree in counseling after her recovery, going on to support veterans facing post-traumatic stress disorder and other challenges. She now travels the United States as a motivational speaker and advocates for veterans’ causes. . . . In April, Vinny Mauri ’24M.S. became the fourth-fastest marathoner in U.S. history, posting a time of 2:05:54 in his first race of that distance while winning the Glass City Marathon in Toledo, Ohio. The 25-year-old amateur had no coach and no sponsors but received an American flag at the finish line, a gesture that denotes that a runner has met the Olympic marathon trial qualifying standard. As a varsity distance and cross-country runner at Arizona State and Notre Dame, Mauri told Runner’s World, he felt injuries and other setbacks had kept him from reaching his potential. After taking time away, he decided to return to the sport and “to really fall in love with running more than I ever have.” He thought he might enjoy marathons: “At Notre Dame or Arizona State, I just loved the long run. That was my favorite day of the week.” Running 90 to 110 miles each week to train, mostly alone and on a treadmill due to Ohio’s cold winter weather, Mauri completed the fastest debut marathon by an American, surpassing the previous mark by two minutes. . . . Madeline Buckley ’11 and Adriana Pérez ’22 were among the Chicago Tribune reporters who contributed to the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series on Operation Midway Blitz, last year’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in the city. In awarding its local reporting prize to the Tribune, the Pulitzer committee cited its “powerful coverage of the Trump administration’s militarized immigration sweep . . . that described in vivid, muscular prose how the siege-like incursion of ICE agents unified Chicagoans in resistance.” Buckley, a criminal justice reporter, and Pérez, who covers environmental issues, were among dozens of staff members whose reporting, photography and editing made up the 15 stories in the winning entry. . . . South Bend community leaders and development partners gathered in March to celebrate the groundbreaking of The Monreaux, a 57-unit, mixed-use, downtown housing development led by former WNBA champion Devereaux Peters ’11. Her company, Chateaux 14 Development, develops housing to serve a range of incomes and provides qualifying residents with additional support such as help applying for Social Security and SNAP benefits as well as access to online classes in financial literacy, resume-building and nutrition. Peters is also leading a redevelopment effort in Chicago’s West Englewood neighborhood to transform a former elementary school into an affordable housing community for families and seniors. “Part of what I want to create is spaces that get rid of that stigma,” she says. “These could actually be beautiful spaces that are absolutely necessary and that will uplift communities.”
. . . A temporary summer job at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer led to a near-50-year career for Joel Connelly ’69. One of the Pacific Northwest’s most renowned political commentators and an advocate for the region’s wilderness areas, Connelly died April 15 at age 78. During his temp job in the early 1970s, he reported on a plan to transfer land in Larrabee State Park, near his hometown of Bellingham, Washington, to the state’s Department of Natural Resources, which, he recalled in a 2013 interview, would have logged “the bejesus out of it.” After Connelly’s report, the state discarded that plan, and a long career in journalism was born. His focus became local, state and national politics and the environment. Washington Governor Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, called Connelly “our state’s premier political analyst. . . . He had a real gift for weaving our state’s political history into his stories. I had the good fortune of getting to know Joel well, and I’m saddened by his death. Our state is poorer for it.” . . .
Andrew Fedynsky ’69, a lifelong advocate for Ukrainian culture and democracy, was inducted in April into the Cleveland International Hall of Fame. Since 1987, the former foreign policy adviser to Kansas Senator Bob Dole, a Republican, and chief of staff to Ohio U.S. Representative Mary Rose Oakar, a Democrat, has been director of Cleveland’s Ukrainian Museum-Archives, one of the largest collections of Ukrainian cultural artifacts in North America. Fedynsky took over the museum after the death of his father, who fled communist rule in the 1950s, bringing his family to the United States, a story the younger Fedynsky told in an interview published in the Autumn 2023 issue of this magazine. As a college student, he taught history at his former Ukrainian Saturday school and during summers worked with Smoloskyp, a publishing house that distributed books banned in the Soviet Union. “These objects tell the story of the ongoing fight for Ukraine’s independence, freedom and democracy,” he says of the collection he has stewarded for nearly 40 years. “They communicate about daily lives over the course of generations of a people in their own country and around the world. It’s a story Vladimir Putin wants to erase.”