This is the ninth installment in the weekly Honored Role Series.
Beth Carpenter was never a “typical girl”. As a child growing up in Massachusetts, she loved making paper airplanes and building structures from kitchen utensils. She also questioned her parents and teachers about the physics of bridges, the earth’s orbit around the sun, and the origination of rainbows. Today, she pays her passion forward and helps students learn and understand the physical universe and Newton’s Laws of Motion.
This is the eight installment in the weekly Honored Role Series.
Before turning 10, Terry Tepper took the helm of the family’s 40-foot wooden yacht and steered into Barbados harbor, “My father handed me the tiller and said, ‘take her in’. He folded his arms, sat down on the bow and smiled. I backed the sails and steered her in. It was the greatest gift a child could receive — responsibility, confidence, and the first taste of empowerment.”
Four decades later, successfully at the helm of the U.S. Army’s largest medical facility, Womack Army Medical Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Colonel Terry Tepper Walters, M.D., reflects upon several horizons she navigated.
This is the sixth installment in the weekly Honored Role Series.
Pondering science, space, and astronomy inspires US Army Major Mindy Kimball, because she has long dreamed of becoming an astronaut. Many astronauts begin their space quests in the military, which is where Mindy hopes her quest is beginning as well.
Mindy grew up in a military family, attending Vanden High School at Travis Air Force Base in California. As the daughter of a retired Air Force officer and granddaughter of a retired Army Air Corps officer, Mindy understood and embraced the military and its associated discipline. Serving in the Armed Forces were initial steps in her trajectory into space travel and exploration.
This is the third installment in the weekly Honored Role Series.
Before kindergarten Stephanie Ahern drafted her life plan; graduate high school, attend a good college, earn a masters degree and then a doctorate, like her father a metallurgical engineer, work for a year or two and than get married. That is as far as she got. Today Ahern, 36, a major is the US Army, accomplished precisely what she set out to do.
Between 1980 and 2008, 3,245 women graduated from West Point and have served selflessly in the Nation’s armed forces. Most of them, whether or not they still wear the uniform, are ordinary women with extraordinary stories of perseverance and integrity. They are soldiers and wives, mothers and daughters. They are doctors, lawyers, teachers, clergy and entrepreneurs. They are athletes and artists, cancer survivors and coaches. And they are all volunteers.
The first day of kindergarten is a momentous day for both child and parent. The weeks and days leading up to the first day of school have been filled with anticipation and excitement. Visits to the school, meetings with teachers, introductions to the principal, shopping for a new outfit, learning bus riding procedures, and packing, unpacking and re-packing of the mandatory accessory — the backpack.
The day before the first day of school, a few parents of the soon-to-be- kindergarteners organized a pizza picnic. After catching up on summer adventures, one of the excited moms asked me, “Are you going to go to school in the morning and take pictures?” Puzzled I replied, “I had not thought about it. Carly is taking the bus. I am going to the bus-stop and planned on taking a few snapshots there.” Politely, but firmly, she told me that there is only one first day of kindergarten.