Archive | 2015

Baudouin (Butch) F. de Marcken, 74 died Sunday, April 12, 2015. Born on October 21, 1940 in Louvain, Belgium as a U.S. citizen, Baudouin was the youngest of nine children of Alix de Kerchove d’Exarde and Gustave Richard Theodore de Marcken de Merken. He spent his early childhood during World War II in Belgium, and moved to the United States at the age of 12. He moved first to Brule, Wisconsin, then joined his family in 1953 at their home, Stonehouse, outside Lakeville, CT.

Baudouin earned a B.S. in Government in 1962 from Colby College, and a M.A. in Political Science in 1964 from the University of Michigan. After graduation, he joined as one of the first U.S. Peace Corps volunteers from 1964-1967 in Sarawak, Malaysia, where he worked as a teacher in the jungle towns of Saratok and Belaga, and where he met his wife Gail, a Peace Corps volunteer from Minnesota, when she traveled up-river to visit Belaga to buy food and supplies.

With deep commitment to economic development and improving the lives of people around the world, Baudouin served for 19 years with the Peace Corps, first as a volunteer, then as Deputy Peace Corps Director in Malaysia (1968-1971), and as Peace Corps Director in Chad (1972-1973), Mali (1977), Zaire (1978-1981), Morocco (1981-1982), Tunisia (1995) and the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia (1996-1999). Early in his career, Baudouin and Gail bought property on Bear Island Lake between Babbitt and Ely, MN, and built a beloved home for their family in the woods “Up North.”

For many years, Baudouin managed programs for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). From 1983-1987, he was the Regional Liaison Officer in Burkina Faso responsible for coordinating U.S. food assistance, disaster relief and rehabilitation programs. From 1988-1989, he was Mission Director in Madagascar, overseeing programs in agricultural policy reform and research, bio-diversity conservation, health and food assistance. From 1990-1991, he was Deputy Director in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and oversaw the restructuring of USAID’s programs in light of a deepening political and economic crisis. In 1992, Baudouin travelled to Russia as part of Operation Provide Hope, a U.S. effort to provide humanitarian assistance to the newly independent states after the fall of the Soviet Union. From 1993-1994, he covered Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania as USAID’s representative to the Baltics.

After his retirement, and as his health permitted, Baudouin continued to give time in community service, first in Latvia with an organization that supported street children. Subsequently, he and Gail moved home to Minnesota, where he volunteered with the North St. Louis County chapter of Habitat for Humanity, and as a tutor for students at the Northeast Range School in Babbitt, MN.

Baudouin was a devout, generous person who changed the lives of many people. We will miss terribly his Belgian accent, his offbeat sense of humor, and the smell of his pipe.
Baudouin is survived by Gail de Marcken, his wife of 46 years, and their three children: Carl de Marcken, his wife Marina Meila-Predoviciu and their daughter Nina de Marcken of Seattle, WA; Natasha de Marcken, her husband Aaron Sampson and their two children Mia and Leo Sampson of Washington, D.C.; and Paya de Marcken of Washington D.C.; as well as by six of his brothers and sisters in the U.S. and Belgium.

Gerald A. Pagano, 83, who spent 28 years with the U.S. Agency for International Development before retiring in 1987 as executive secretary to the administrator, died Aug. 20 in Arlington, VA. The cause was complications from pneumonia.

Mr. Pagano was born in New York City and served in the Coast Guard before coming to Washington in 1959. After retiring from USAID, he became deputy director for the Center for Immigration Policy and Refugee Assistance at Georgetown University. From 1995 until his retirement in 2005, he was director of personnel recruitment for Development Associates, an organization that bids on government contracts, primarily in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Anita Lanigan, 96, a contract manager with the U.S. Agency for International Development from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, died Aug. 4 at a hospital in Gaithersburg, Md. The cause was pneumonia, said a nephew, Vito Maggiolo.

Mrs. Lanigan, a resident of Gaithersburg, Md., was born Anita Maggiolo in the Bronx. She moved to the Washington area in 1940 and worked for the Census Bureau and the War Production Board. She later held positions with the Interior and State departments.

Tom Donnelly was born July 28, 1941, in Pittsburgh, PA. He passed away Saturday, September 26, 2015, after a courageous battle with cancer. Tom grew up in Lebanon, PA, and then moved to Winter Park, FL where he did his undergraduate work at Rollins College.

Following a year with the U.S. Latin American Co-op, Tom began a 30-year career with the USAID, serving in Ecuador, Mexico and Costa Rica, retiring as USAID Mission Director to Mexico.

Following his retirement, he resided in Winter Park and has been active in leadership positions with Rotary Club of Winter Park (Service Above Self Award 2010), Rollins College Alumni Association (Alumni of The Year 2008), and co-founded SHARES International (now Sharing Smiles), a program of Florida Hospital Foundation that provides free cleft lip and palate surgeries and pediatric dentistry to disadvantaged children in Latin America.

Tom is preceded in death by his parents and brother, Bill Donnelly. He is survived by brother, John Donnelly, of Dunellen, Florida, two nieces, a nephew, and two grandnieces.

Frederic C. Thomas of Berkeley, CA, an artist and author aged 87, died Sept 16.

He and his wife, Xandra Loud, married 62 years, lived abroad most of this time because his life-long interest and employment was in developing countries. He served as Peace Corps country director in Morocco and Somalia, USAID director in Jordan, and UNDP resident representative in Saudi Arabia and Haiti. He wrote “Calcutta Poor” 1997; “To the Mouths of the Ganges” 2004; and “Slavery and Jihad in the Sudan” 2009.

He was born in New York City, graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover, studied Arabic at Harvard and received his doctorate in social anthropology from University of London. He cared for dogs and cats and over the years. He loved music and sang with the Berkeley chorus and amused himself in quiet moments by playing an oboe. With acrylics, he painted scenes from his travels.

Robert Stone McClusky was born on Feb. 4, 1934, in Washington, D.C., to George Nesbitt and Janet Stone McClusky. His father’s jobs took the family to Oregon, California, Berlin (Germany), and finally back to the D.C. area. Bob studied at Oberlin College in Ohio and the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs, Princeton, N.J.

Helping people and communities around the world was of great importance to Bob. He worked for CARE, the brand new Peace Corps, and finally, the Agency for International Development. In the early 60s, he was assistant director of the Peace Corps staff in Afghanistan. The period was a much different, promising time for the country, when women as well as men, were honored and given education and teaching responsibilities.

At AID, Bob worked with the Center for Human Capacity Development. He contributed much time and energy to the design and development of a National Research Council-sponsored workshop called “The Transition to Democracy.” He also worked to strengthen workforce development. He saw how important community colleges were in the US, and he strove to implement policy dialogue about them in other countries.

After overseas travel in the 1960s, Bob met Nancy Dixon, whom he married in 1968. They lived in Chevy Chase and then in Bethesda, Md., for 41 years before retirement and a move to Kendal at Oberlin in Ohio. At Kendal he was an active resident. Bob served for two years as vice president of KORA, the residents’ organization, and participated as an actor and/or director of several public play-reading events.

Bob leaves his wife, Nancy; brother, Campbell; and two daughters, Maryanne (Mrs. T. E. O’Connor Jr.) and Lauren (Mrs. F. P. Hudson). The O’Connor family includes 11-year-old Jay and nine-year-old Alaina; the Hudsons have 12-year-old Robert and nine-year-old Kathryn. Cam has one adult son, Graham.

Family vacations and holidays have been highlights in Bob’s life. When Maryanne and Laurie were teenagers, school friends would often join the family for fun at Bethany Beach, Del. Bob loved the ocean waves and the beach! Often Thanksgiving or Christmas family reunions happened.

Bob was curious about his genealogy and he discovered that he had a living relative in South Africa and a cousin (many generations removed) living in Edinburgh, Scotland. Bob and Nancy made several trips to Scotland and the cousins became good friends.*

Norman Louis Brown (1923~2015) was born and raised in Atlantic City, NJ, and lived in Washington DC from 1957 on. He attended M.I.T. for two years before volunteering for the Army in 1943. He was stationed at Los Alamos, NM, where his job was to purify plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb. After the war, he returned to M.I.T., and then earned a PhD from Brown University.

Norman’s experience in the Army shaped so many of his later choices in life. He was proud at the time of his contribution to ending the war, but when he realized and understood the devastating death and destruction caused by the bombs, he became a peace activist. With his wife Janet Welsh Brown he participated in the March on Washington in 1963. They took their three children to protests against nuclear weapons and the War on Vietnam, from the earliest demonstrations organized by Women Strike for Peace. He continued to protest wars and injustice throughout his life.

Norman worked at G.E. in NY, then at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC, but with his marriage in 1957 and the birth of his first child, he shifted his career path, and in all of his subsequent jobs he applied his scientific training to the solution of human problems, at first addressing hunger, and later in the development and application of small scale and renewable energy technologies in developing countries. He worked at the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, the National Academy of Sciences, the Department of Energy, and the Agency for International Development.

After retirement from the government, he worked as a consultant for AID, the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and other international organizations. His work took him to Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Norman served on the founding board of the Shakespeare Festival, a free, professional-quality theater that held performances at the amphitheater on the Washington Monument grounds during the 1960s and ’70s, and he designed, built and ran the theater’s sound system in its second season. He served also on the board of Neighbors, Inc, which supported the racial integration of Washington’s Shepherd Park neighborhood, where the family lived.

Norman was a self-taught cabinet maker, plumber, carpenter, electrician and musician. He taught himself to play the recorder, and played music with friends in what he called the Lower Iris Street Chamber Music Society. Norman served on the founding board of the Selma Levine School of Music. He built two beautiful walnut bureaus which are still in use 57 years later. With family and friends, he built a second home in the woods in Pennsylvania, guided by a carpenter neighbor with whom he later went into business as a sheep farmer. He built his first computer from a “Heath Kit” in the early 1980s, and encouraged his colleagues and friends to join the computer age. He encouraged his children to undertake ambitious science projects, including a garbage-fueled home methane generator. He was always willing to advise and help neighbors and friends with repairs and other projects.

Norman is survived by his wife of 58 years, Janet Welsh Brown, and three children and their families: Leah Brown of Washington, Mira Brown of Boston and Ian Brown of Seattle. He is survived also by an extended and loving family. Norman died peacefully at home, early on November 7, 2015.