Hometown: I was born in Pipestone, a picturesque town in southwestern Minnesota near the South Dakota border, but moved at age 2 to Moorhead, on the North Dakota border. In both places, my dad was the high school principal.

When did you become a member of UMRA? In the spring of 2021 when I learned that Dr. Frank Cerra, my dear former colleague, was president.

What was your very first job? I babysat for neighborhood families—for 50 cents an hour, which actually added up to be enough for me to buy a 3-speed bike at the local Coast to Coast hardware store plus hard contact lenses.

What was your occupation when you retired from FT work? For several decades, I edited scholarly manuscripts and produced publications for the Department of Surgery (and I still do occasional work, mostly writing, mostly pro bono).

Where were you when you first learned of the Watergate break-in in 1972? I had graduated from high school earlier that month and was focused on an upcoming trip to Disney World during its first summer of operation, but I vaguely recall the early murky reports from NBC’s John Chancellor as well as in the newspapers and Newsweek. I remember the exact moment in August 1974 when I learned that President Nixon had resigned: I was up north working as a counselor at Concordia College’s Spanish camp when a kitchen staffer heard the news bulletin on the radio and breathlessly relayed it.

If you were an Olympic athlete, what would you like your sport to be? I would’ve loved to complement my yellow ribbon in intramural tennis with a gold medal in the Olympics! Utter fantasy, of course. Pre-Title IX, my otherwise superb high school had no girls’ tennis team or coach. A girlfriend and I puzzled out the scoring and rules of the game from the “T” volume of my family’s encyclopedia set.

Do you have a favorite place on the U of M campus? I always loved walking on the Washington Avenue Bridge (on the outside lanes, even in winter), high above the Mississippi. Having grown up camping at Itasca State Park, I had often scampered barefoot across that same waterway at its headwaters—and couldn’t believe how big and deep and mighty it became by the time it reached the Minneapolis campus.

What is a fun fact about you we might not know? In October 1991, at a medical writers’ conference in Toronto, I had just finished teaching a workshop on punctuation strategies and was taken aback by how crowded the hotel lobby was. I stood there perplexed for a few minutes when a wild roar went up, and in strolled a shyly beaming Princess Diana, tiara and all, just a few feet in front of me, with a largely ignored Prince Charles lagging far behind her.

What is something you currently enjoy doing with your time? Every chance we get, my husband and I fish from our kayaks on our favorite lakes in the Cities and up north.