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PEOPLE Edited by Rodd Whelpley
APPOINTMENTS Gerald Shea of Burr Ridge is the new chairman of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. The Democrat, who has been on the board since 1999, will serve a one-year term as chairman. He succeeds William Engelbrecht. Shea is president of the consulting firm of Shea, Paige and Rogal Inc. of Springfield. He was a state representative for a decade, beginning in 1967. Robert Vickrey of Peru is Gov. George Ryan's choice for a seat on the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Vickrey is vice president of legislative affairs and economic development for Miller Group Media in LaSalle. He served on the Illinois Gaming Board from 1992 to January 2000. He became president of the board six months before his resignation, which came after he urged the board to approve the sale of a riverboat casino over the objections of regulatory staff and anti-gambling activists. Lynne Sered of Evanston has been appointed to the Educational Labor Relations Board. She is a domestic affairs associate for the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation and is married to Rep. Jeffrey Schoenberg, a Democrat. Also named to the Educational Labor Relations Board is Michael Prueter of Naperville, who is the general manager at Fairway Mortgage Inc. The board monitors labor practices in public schools and colleges. The new members will earn an annual salary of $77,230. If the state Senate approves their appointments, Procter's and Sered's terms will run until October 17, 2006. Pending Senate confirmation, Norman Sula of Naperville will become a member of the Illinois Prisoner Review Board. Sula is deputy assessor for the Lisle Township assessor's office. His annual salary on the board will be $70,620, and his term will run to mid-January 2006.
Updike donates Maxwell letters to the U of I Two-time PulitZer Prize-Winning novelist John Updike has donated to the University of Illinois the last letters written to him by Illinois author and editor William Maxwell. Maxwell was a Lincoln native and a 1930 alumnus of the U of I. From 1936 to 1976, he was the fiction editor of The New Yorker, where he and Updike became close friends. During his 40 years at the magazine, Maxwell edited not only Updike, but also John Cheever, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams and others. He wrote six novels and three collections of short stories. He dictated the last of the eight donated letters, but died on July 31, 2000, before it could be postmarked. The letters will be kept in the university's rare book room and special collections library, which has held Maxwell's papers since their donation in 1997. The letters date from February to July 2000. According to librarian Barbara Jones, they show Maxwell's thought processes and his concern for his writers. Maxwell speaks openly of his dislike of the current New Yorker. The letters also accent Maxwell's own love of reading and writing. He speaks to Updike about the difference between major and minor writers and their reading habits. Maxwell, a consummate reader until the end, wrote that the solitary dislike he had concerning death was that he could not go on reading. 36 / February 2001 Illinois Issues http://illinoisissues.uis.edu PEOPLE
Chicago nonproiits under new management Three Chicago-based nonprofit groups will take on the new century with new leaders at the helm. Terrance Norton has been named the first new executive director of the non-partisan Better Government Association in 30 years. Norton replaces the former director, Terrence Brunner. This is Norton's second stint with the government watchdog association. He came on board in 1979 as the general counsel. He had become the group's assistant director when he left in 1989 to become a law professor at ITT Chicago-Kent College of Law. In the past 10 years, Norton has become an independent authority on issues of government corruption, appearing in major newspapers and on such television shows as CNN's Burden of Proof and NBC's Nightly News. Todd Dietterle is the acting president of the Woods Foundation of Chicago. He is standing in for Jean Rudd, who has stepped down as the foundation's president. When Rudd first took the position in 1980, she became one of the first women to head a foundation in the Chicago area. She says her "conviction is that philanthropy is a field that has to be constantly changing with new energy coming in all the time." After 20 years, she says, it's her time to change as well. She does not expect that she will return to philanthropy. Rather, she wishes to address nonprofit issues directly. Rudd had previously worked for The Foundation Center and the Phelps-Stokes Fund in New York. The Woods Foundation, with an $84 million asset base, supports the work of nonprofits concerned with urban issues. The foundation hopes to have a replacement for Rudd by April. Deborah Leff, president and CEO of America's Second Harvest, will leave her post to pursue a more policy-oriented role sometime this summer. America's Second Harvest is the country's largest domestic hunger relief organization. Leff has been president since February 1999. She was an Emmy-award winning producer for ABC News from 1983 to 1991 and was the president of the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation from 1992 to 1999. She will remain the acting president until a search committee can find her replacement. Illinois author wins Newbery medal Decatur native Richard Peck has won the highest award in children's literature. The American Library Association announced last month that A Year Down Yonder, the story of a young woman whose family sends her from their home in Chicago to live with her downstate grandmother, has won the 2001 John Newbery award. The book is a sequel to A Long Way from Chicago, a 1999 Newbery finalist. It is the first time a sequel has won the prize.
38 / February 2001 Illinois Issues http://illinoisissues.uis.edu |
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