Huge Thanks to Joe Stanik (23rdCo.)!

The class owes a huge thank you to Joe Stanik for a treasure trove of stuff that he sent for the website.

  • First, Joe sent some great June Week stuff:
    • The first item was Jimmy Carter’s speech from our graduation. Thinking about how and where we should display the speech on the website led me to create a June Week section and have the speech as its own page. We added the speech with an interesting story from the Washington Post June 11, 1978 about the background to the speech and a photo of the President at the podium as well. If you listened to Bob DeStafney’s 2013 Cal Maritime commencement speech, you will know how much this means to him.
    • Joe also sent the Annapolis Capital on the day of our graduation and we added a separate page for it. I was thinking of only publishing those pages that had an article of the graduation rather than all the pages, but Joe suggested the whole paper because of how interesting it is to see the ads for the stores and businesses of Annapolis that we used to know. The articles on our graduation include:
      • On page 1 and continued on page 8, is a story about Jimmy Carter being the first grad to return as President as well as a summary of his major Soviet foreign policy speech.
      • On page 23, is a story about our top three grads, Jonathan Will (8th Co.), Jim Butler (23rd Co.) and Steve Petri (10th Co.).
      • Also on page 23, is a story about the 20 local grads in the class
    • Finally, on page 28 is a great story about the father of Mike Kalnoske’s (32nd Co.), Bernard Kalnoske, the Annapolis Chief of Police, who for the first time in 25 years would be purely a spectator for the Academy graduation in order to watch his son graduate and be commissioned.
  • Possibly most amazing in Joe’s email was a link to a Bonanza episode where the Cartwrights save a young Albert Michelson and Ben helps him get into the Naval Academy. How cool is that? Did anyone else know that existed? I remember the Bonanza series but don’t remember that episode or probably any episode for that matter. That link was added to the “Interesting and Fun Links” page.
  • Finally, unknown to me, Joe is a published author and he shared that he has had three books published and is working on a fourth. Joe is the third author in the class that I was made aware of and that seemed to be the critical mass required to start the Class Authors page. The two other authors at the time were Luke Ridenhour and Sam Tangredi. Two Sundays ago we announced on Facebook the creation of the Class Authors page and made an appeal for other authors and our classmates identified seven more! John Hemry has published 43 books and Robert Lamont has published over ten! If you haven’t seen the page, we’ve included the cover art for all the books including Luke Ridenhour’s Over the Horizon whose cover art was done by Vinnie DiGirolamo. The Class Author page is located under Classmates section right after Professional Writings page.