The Harvard Alumni Association Awards were established in 1990 to recognize outstanding service to Harvard University through alumni activities. This year’s recipients were to be honored on October 18, during the Harvard Alumni Association’s board of directors’ annual fall meeting in Cambridge. Highlights of their many contributions are mentioned below.
Paul R. Corcoran Jr. 54, of Waltham, Massachusetts, has cochaired his last four class reunions and, throughout the early 1980s, held various HAA posts, including that of HAA director. He is a former president of the Harvard Club of Boston and has served as a member and adviser of the board of directors for the Harvard Student Agencies. He is also the former owner of the Harvard Shop in Harvard Square and was, until 2003, director of Port Financial Corp., the holding company for Cambridgeport Bank. | |
Frank H. Duehay 55, M.A.T. 58, CAS 65, Ed.D. 68, IOP 82, of Cambridge, a former assistant dean and lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has also served as director of graduate programs in educational administration and as associate director of the Harvard Summer School. He has a long association with Phillips Brooks House Association and most recently led a successful $7.8-million capital campaign for that organization. For more than three decades, he held elected office in Cambridge, including three stints as mayor. He is currently chairman of the board of trustees for the Cambridge Health Alliance. | |
Karen Spencer Kelly 80, of Philadelphia, the first African-American woman to serve as president of the HAA, is also a former Radcliffe trustee who aided in that Colleges metamorphosis into the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was selected chief marshal of her class, has served as president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Philadelphia, and is a past member of the HAA committee that nominates Overseer and elected director candidates. She is a partner at the law firm of Kelly, Monaco & Naples. | |
Frederic P. Smith 56, J.D. 59, A.M. 62, of Los Angeles, has been a member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Southern California since 1964, and joined its board six years later. As treasurer of the club, he increased its fundraising for financial aid for students, and later, as club president, helped arrange celebrity benefits to further benefit that cause. (Due to his efforts, then and now, the clubs donations to Harvard have increased from $1,000 every three years to $55,000 a year.) He is the 1997 recipient of the clubs John Harvard Award for Distinguished Community Service, and in 2002 was given the HAA Outstanding Club Contribution Award. A retired intellectual-property attorney, he is also involved in the Boston Latin School West Coast Alumni Association. | |
Sidney M. Spielvogel, A.M. 46, M.B.A. 49, of New York City, has been chair of the Graduate School Annual Fund for a decade, and a member of the Graduate School Alumni Association Council, almost continually, since 1983. A volunteer solicitor, he regularly participates in phonathons, organizes career information panels, and hosts two annual events at the Harvard Club of New York, where he is a member. He was also gift chairman for his fiftieth Harvard Business School reunion, and is chief agent for the Class of 1949 HBS Fund. An investment banker, he is a managing director of Corporate Capital Consultants Inc. | |
Ciji Ware 64, of Sausalito, California, has been involved in University affairs for many years, most notably throughout the 1990s as the first female graduate of the College to serve as president of the HAA and as president of the board of the Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Southern California. In addition, she helped create two notable, musical, scholarship fund raisers: Puddin on the Ritz: Hasting Puddings Greatest Hits, starring Jack Lemmon 47 and John Lithgow 67, A.D. 05, and Bravo Bernstein! with ringer Gene Kelly. An author, she has written five historical novels and has been a reporter and commentator in Los Angeles for 23 years. |