Washington DC – The Friar Files

May 6, 2020May 15, 2020

Praying for Nurses and Medical Professionals with Fenwick Ties

The observation of National Nurses Week, celebrated May 6 – May 12, has extra-special meaning this year.

As is the case with many care-givers, the hard work of dedicated nurses often is taken for granted. Sometimes, it takes a health crisis such as the Coronavirus pandemic to bring these medical heroes into the spotlight.

Pictured above is alumna Julianne (Comiskey) Heinimann ’01, who works as a NICU nurse at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. She is one of at least 34 Friar alumni — women and men — who are registered nurses or nurse practitioners (see list below) across the United States: from Chicago, Oak Park, Downers Grove and Indiana to Washington (DC), Ohio, Arizona and San Francisco. (We know there are many more who are not in our system.)

Kathryn Meade, the mother of Fenwick senior Jack Meade (Lombard, IL), is one of at least nine parents working in the nursing field (see below). ” I had contracted COVID-19 from work,” shares Mrs. Meade, who has been a nurse since 1994, working as a NICU nurse for 22 years until recently becoming a Lactation Consultant. “Thankfully, I am on the mend and am humbled by the outpouring of love and support I received,” she says.

In observance if National Nurses Week, we want to publicly thank these moral servant-leaders for all that they do for their patients – especially by putting themselves and their families at risk during the COVID-19 crisis. You make us all proud to be fellow Friars!

Mary	Berkemeyer	’11	Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago	Emergency Room Registered Nurse
Monica	Bomben	’11	Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago	Registered Nurse, Neuro/Ortho
Allison	Borkovec	’07	Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston	Registered Nurse
Marco	Candido	’03	Independent	Registered Nurse
Katie	Dalton	’06	Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago	Registered Nurse
Jennifer	Dan	’08	Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago	Cardiac Cath Lab Nurse
Lauren Sarah	Dillon-Ellsworth Finan	’99 ’04	Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, IL Lurie Children’s Hospital, Chicago	Nurse Nurse, neurointestinal and motility
Shannon Daniela	Flannery Giacalone	’14 ’07	Northwestern Memorial University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital	Registered Nurse Registered Nurse
Margaret	Grace	’13	Rush University Medical Center, Chicago	Registered Nurse
Sharon	Grandy	’01	Presence Health (Arizona)	Emergency Room, RN
Julianne Michelle	Comiskey-Heinimann Androwich- Horrigan	’01 ’05	Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago Northwestern Memorial	Registered Nurse (Neonatal ICU)
Dana	Jakoubek	’01	UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco	Kidney Transplant Nurse Practitioner
Bridget	Kern	’07	Rush University Medical Center, Chicago	Registered Nurse
Amy	Konopasek	’01	Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, IL	Registered Nurse Multidisciplinary Coordinator
Alexis Grace	Kozyra Lattner	’12 ’15	AMITA Health Cleveland Clinic	Registered Nurse Registered Nurse
Robert	Lewis	’71	Emory University Emergency Medicine, Atlanta	Nurse Practitioner
Anne	Loeffler	’06	Rush University Medical Center	Nurse Assistant 2
Mark	Manankil	’86	Advocate Healthcare/Good Samaritan Hospital, Downers Gtove, IL	Nurse/Psychiatry
Madalyn Molly	Mazur McHugh	’11 ’13	U. of Chicago Hospital – Stem Cell Transplant Unit MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, Washington, D.C.	Charge Nurse/ Floor Nurse Registered Nurse
Martin	Mikell	’86	Zablocki VA Medical Center, Milwaukee	Registered Nurse
Elissa	Mikol	’04	Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago	Pediatric Surgery, Nurse Practitioner
Kyle Nora	Morris Napleton	’97 ’15	Saint Mary’s Medical Center, Chicago Loyola Medical Center, Maywood	Registered Nurse ICU Nurse
Thomas	Papadakis	’01	Rush Oak Park Hospital	Registered Nurse, Emergency Department
Rachel Katherine	Koranda-Plant Racanelli	’00 ’08	Loyola Medical Center (Chicago) AMITA Health Medical Group	Registered Nurse Family Nurse Practitioner
Terri	Ferrera-Salinas	’09	Magnificat Family Medicine, Indianapolis	Registered Nurse
Pamela Andrew	Chase-Smith Straub	’97 ’87	Champaign, IL UnitedHealth Group, Ohio	RN Nurse Practitioner
Brittney	Woosley	’08	Gottlieb Memorial Hospital, Melrose Park, IL	Permanent Charge Nurse/RN

According to the Fenwick database, another 225 people (including alumni) have listed either “medicine” as their business/industry or “nursing” or “physician” as their profession. They are:

February 20, 2020February 20, 2020

Alumnae Spotlight Shines on Cortney Hall: Class of 1999

The local television anchor/host remembers a lot about her days at Fenwick, where she received a detention on her first day as a freshman student in 1995.

By Mark Vruno

Cortney Hall remembers feeling nervous – again. The Fenwick alumna (’99), now an Emmy-nominated TV journalist, was back among Friars, preparing to deliver the commencement address to the Class of 2016. The problem: She was sitting near Andy Arellano, her old speech teacher. Twenty years earlier, Mr. Arellano had seemed “so scary,” not just to Ms. Hall but to generations of Fenwick sophomores. Contrary to her on-air vivaciousness on NBC-TV’s “Chicago Today” show (Channel 5), Hall insists she was a shy 15-year-old.

“We looked at speech class as a ‘gateway to graduation,’” she recalls, adding that she felt prepared four years ago. “That’s what Andy does. He prepares his students and makes them feel confident about getting up and talking in front of other people. Speech class was tough at the time, but he also made it entertaining. He taught skills that I have carried with me throughout my life and career.”

*Hall’s 1999 yearbook photo from Fenwick.*

Hall grew up in the south/western suburbs of Downers Grove and Oak Brook. Comparatively, “Fenwick was diverse – and I don’t mean just racially or ethnically,” she explains. “The school pulls people from all over the Chicago area, with different life experiences.”

But no matter where Fenwick’s student live, physically, their families all seem to have one thing in common: “They all care and have similar core values,” she believes. “Going in [to Fenwick], you know you’re among like-minded people whose parents want structure and discipline for them; who want their children to learn and have morals.”

It takes time and “some distance” to appreciate many aspects of what makes Fenwick such a special place, admits Hall. “Is it strict? Yeah. We weren’t allowed to hang out in the hallways like kids at other schools,” she continues. “As a teenager, you worry about things like wearing the Catholic-school uniform. However, as an adult, you look back and understand that there was a different purpose. We weren’t caught up in the brand of jeans our classmates were buying. We heard about bullying incidents at other schools, but I don’t remember stuff like that happening at Fenwick when I was there. We were a different group of kids.”

The stress of Mr. Arellano’s speech classes is not Hall’s only faculty memory of Fenwick. “Fr. Joe [Ekpo] was a character, with his chants of ‘Up, up, Jesus! Down, down, Satan!’” she remembers. Hall played tennis, and Mr. Bostock was her soccer coach. “I was mildly terrible,” she self-assesses. “And Dr. Lordan [retired in 2019] was a Fenwick staple, of course.” She remembers (fondly?) getting JUG on her very first day as a freshman student — for a skirt infraction. “There were two tricks for shortening our skirts: We’d either roll them at the top or staple them at the hem,” she laughs.

*From the 1998-99 Yearbook: “Cortney Hall, the Fenwick Fashion Diva.”*

Hall adds that she had fun as a Blackfriars yearbook staffer (she was student life editor) and wrote a “column” her senior year. “It was a parody on uniforms: shirt colors (blue!) and shoe options.” She also was active in Campus Ministry, NHS, SADD and The Wick.

Hall’s absolute favorite memory as a Friar? Hands down, it was “going downstate for boys’ basketball in 1998,” she exclaims of her junior-year experience in Peoria, IL. “I went with friends to cheer them on!”

Life after Fenwick

*Ms. Hall’s lifelong love of basketball led her to moonlight as the official, in-arena host for the NBA’s Chicago Bulls at the United Center.*

From Fenwick, Hall moved on to Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.), where she majored in marketing at the McDonough School of Business. “Georgetown was my first choice,” she notes. “I’ve always been a big basketball fan, and the Hoyas were really cool in the ’90s.”

Being from Chicago, she wanted a school in a big city and was accepted at Columbia and NYU in New York. “Applying to colleges was a great experience,” she shares. “I received a lot of great guidance. Fenwick put me in a good position to get into my ‘reach’ schools.” A visit to Georgetown’s campus sealed her fate.

As an under-grad at Georgetown, she says she really didn’t know what she wanted to do. After graduating, “I worked at the World Bank in D.C. for a while but decided that wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to sit in front of a computer all day long.”

Her game-changer turned out to be media coverage of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Like many Americans, “the powerful images coming out of New York captivated me,” she says. “I was in college when it happened, glued to my TV set and the news [reports].”

January 30, 2020February 3, 2020

God, Honor, Country: Fenwick Alumnus Leads U.S. Intelligence Community Counterterrorism

Protecting and serving is a way of life for this Friar and decorated military son who fights international terrorism.

By Mark Vruno

Fenwick’s Friar Files blog has reported on an “intelligence community alumnus [who] prays the Rosary every morning at 5 a.m.” This Friar spoke last semester with students at Fenwick, and the U.S. government has cleared the school to share the following, somewhat random facts about this mystery person:

He works for the National Counterterrorism Center‘s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in Washington, D.C.
For counterintelligence reasons, he stays off of social media. (See below).
He also has worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as a strategic advisor and, before that, for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
He held a leadership position at U.S. Central Command (Department of Defense) before retiring from the U.S. Army in 2001.
He graduated (general engineering) from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and went on to earn a master’s degree in international relations.
He served his country in Operation Desert Storm in the Gulf War (Iraq, 1991), where he earned a Bronze Star. (See photo.)
He managed crises teams during Rwanda’s civil war in the mid-1990s.
He followed and reported on coup attempts (in Paraguay and Suriname, South America) and refugees (from Cuba and Haiti).
He worked in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and briefed POTUS, the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council on military matters.

The Bronze Star: awarded for heroic achievement, heroic service, meritorious achievement or meritorious service in a combat zone.

Describing such a vitae as “impressive” might be considered a gross under-statement. When he visited Fenwick history and government classes in October 2019 to talk about counter-terrorism and the U.S. “intelligence” community, the former Army infantry officer challenged students to a search contest on finding information about him. “Try to find me on Google. You won’t. I’m off the grid,” he said. “There are other people with my name, but they’re not me. If you do find me online, please let me know!”

Intel expert

In military and national-security contexts, so-called “intelligence” is information that provides an organization with decision support and, possibly, a strategic advantage. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines intelligence as “information that has been analyzed and refined so that it is useful to policymakers in making decisions.” According to the FBI, intelligence is the information itself as well as the processes used to collect and analyze it.

Slogan on a CIA T-shirt that our friend brought with him to Fenwick: “In God We Trust, All Others We Monitor.”

“What they teach here at Fenwick sets the foundation for your futures.”

“Our job is to tell truth to power,” the alumnus told Fenwick students in an attempt to explain the role of the United States’ intelligence/ counterterrorism communities. The absence of truth leads to abuses of power, he warned, quickly adding that truth and integrity are moral values which align with Fenwick High School’s mission. “What they teach here at Fenwick sets the foundation for your futures,” he assured them.