The Winter 2018-19 issue of Keene State Today opens with a celebration of our eleventh president – and the first who is also a graduate of the College. Enjoy a conversation with Melinda Treadwell ’90, who was recently named president after a year in the role on an interim basis.
We then turn to the topic of “House,” which we look at from a variety of perspectives. We talk with members of the College community who build houses, sell houses, clean houses, and more.
The First-Person Project highlights three Keene State graduates who live and work in New England. Look for them in the back of the magazine and on our website at keene.edu/first-person.
March 27, 2019 – Keene State’s First Alumna President Laying the Path Forward
Melinda Treadwell ’90 is a woman in motion. On Move-In Day, she can be found lugging students’ suitcases up the stairs of first-year dorms. On Election Day, she’s taking a turn behind the wheel of the van transporting students to their...
When Norma Walker ’51 climbed the stairs to the stage at the 2018 Reunion Awards Luncheon held in the Student Center, she knew that Keene State President Melinda Treadwell ’90 would be saying a few words to thank her for her service to the College Alumni Office. But she wasn’t...
You know Blake House, that Keene State building that sits on the northwest corner of Main and Winchester streets? The one that currently houses the Management Department and once housed the Home Ec Department? It’s got a long and storied history, one that goes back to colonial days in Keene...
You’re finally a junior at Keene State College. You move into your first off-campus house or apartment. You and all of your friends are excited to have the freedom of living on your own. Then, water starts dripping from your kitchen ceiling. A couple of weeks later, you find mouse...
My father, Bob Johnson, had a serious stroke in 1990, at age 77, followed by a difficult, but successful recovery. At age 80 he fell on a Boston sidewalk, so I made a trip to visit him and my mother, Wanda, so I could sense...
It’s not a metaphor when Fred and Carol (Johnson) Collins talk about their relationship in terms of a house. The 1969 graduates designed and built their own home in South Duxbury, Vermont, two years after their wedding, and since then they’ve been making adjustments, additions, and changes to it to...
When fine artist Frankie Brackley-Tolman ’74 paints houses – for many years a favorite subject of hers – she sometimes thinks about the Tom Waitts Song “The House Where Nobody Lives.” Indeed, her houses and barns, unpeopled shapes and colors, are studies in stillness. Sometimes they’re tucked into a distant...
Deviroux D’Errico describes her personal housekeeping style as “organized chaos.” Professionally, though, she always puts her best mop forward.
D’Errico, a Keene State College junior, works as a part-time house cleaner while studying film. She’s been tidying and scrubbing for pay since she was in high school. “I was just...
Jessica Enman ’12 found her niche thanks to a downturn in the economy. An architecture major, she graduated at a time when even people experienced in the field couldn’t find work. She took what she thought would be a stop-gap job as a kitchen designer at a lumberyard.
Amanda Abramson-Clarke ’09 may be a real estate agent, but there are definitely times when she feels more like a therapist. “Buying or selling a house is a very emotional thing,” she says.
Emotions can range from the joy of buyers who didn’t think they would qualify for a mortgage...
With 1.2 million viewers, the hit HGTV show House Hunters International follows prospective home buyers and their realtors around the world as they embark on buying property in a foreign country – from Australia to Croatia. Chris DeVito ’08, a film studies major, is part of the team that helps...
HEAD: Hard at Work in the ‘People’s House’ Megan Stone’s degree in history and her penchant for public policy come together nicely in the building where she works, which is also likely New Hampshire’s most recognizable “house.” As a legislative aide for the largest representative governing body in the United...
Virtually all of the tenants Laura Scott ’89 coaches in her role as a resident service coordinator with Keene Housing have full-time jobs. That makes it somewhat ironic that the public housing authority is part of the federal Moving to Work program.
Erik Block ’02 had what he calls a “trial by fire” in the design-build business.
He was a senior at Keene State, preparing for graduation, when a fire destroyed about a third of his family home in Connecticut. An architecture student, he headed for the lab and drew up plans...
