A pair of willing hands
Betty Ann Allen Dillon, W’48 and G’49
The bond between Betty Ann Dillon and her alma mater has been strong for nearly 60 years. She has served on the Board of Trustees (1978–82) and the Board of Associates. She has been a leader in the Westhampton College Alumni Association, Women’s Resource Center, Lake Society, Chapel Guild and Friends of Boatwright Library. She is currently a member of the Richmond Council (a University advisory group) and the University of Richmond Alumni Association. She also works with the advancement division on various projects.
“One of the strengths I’ve been able to bring is bridging different points of view,” says Dillon, a retired psychologist. “I often provide institutional memory.”
Her first full-time job was at State-Planters Bank & Trust, where she persuaded the bank’s leaders to begin recruiting promising women for their management training program. She later worked as a psychologist in prisons and juvenile detention centers and in employee relations with Virginia state government. Eventually, she developed her own human resources consulting practice.
Dillon married Bill Doub, R’49 and G’51, just a few days after they graduated. One of their two daughters, Donna Doub Lane, earned her degree from Westhampton College in 1988, and their granddaughter graduated in May from the Robins School. Doub died in 1977, and Dillon married Matt Dillon in 1985. He died in 2005.
Betty Ann Dillon has received distinguished alumna awards from the University and Westhampton College, and in 1983 she won the Trustees Distinguished Service Award.
In the broader community, she has volunteered with educational boards, church committees, Girl Scouts and the United Way of Greater Richmond and Petersburg. She also represented the Virginia Psychological Association for many years before the General Assembly. She currently is president of the Shepherd’s Center, an interdenominational organization that works to keep seniors independent as long as possible.
“I’m a pair of willing hands, as long as I believe the project is worthwhile,” Dillon says. “My hands have rarely been empty.”
Stars and Stripes forever
Carter Beard, R’87
Ask Carter Beard which ancestor founded his family’s company, and he puzzles over how many “greats” to insert before “grandfather.” Finally, he gives up and says, “My great-grandfather’s grandfather founded the company.”
Beard and his cousin, Randy, are the sixth generation to run Annin & Co., the world’s largest and oldest flag manufacturer. The company’s roots go back to 1820, when Alexander Annin opened a flag-making and ship-supply shop in New York City.
Some of the most famous U.S. flags have been made by the company, including the flag that draped President Abraham Lincoln’s coffin, the flag that Marines raised on Iwo Jima, the flag that astronauts planted on the moon, and the flag that firefighters hoisted amid the rubble of the World Trade Center.
Beard recently purchased a U.S. flag that the company made in 1870. He paid $850 for it on eBay. “That’s the oldest flag I’ve ever seen with the Annin name on it,” Beard says.
Today, the Roseland, N.J.-based company employs more than 600 people at factories in New Jersey, Ohio and Virginia. They make more than 15 million U.S. flags a year in addition to other types of flags.
As vice president in charge of operations, Beard was part of the team that oversaw Annin’s merger with its largest competitor in 1998. The deal gave the company nearly enough capacity to handle the surge in demand for American flags that followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Annin’s factories operated around the clock for many months.
“At times I can feel the weight on my shoulders,” Beard admits, referring to the responsibility of manufacturing a symbol of national pride that has sustained a company and a family for six generations. “But most of the time, it’s a lot of fun.”
One special memory is George H.W. Bush’s campaign stop at Annin’s New Jersey plant in 1988, but Beard quickly notes that the company tries to be apolitical. “The flag isn’t a political thing,” he says. “So we try to be the same way.”
Forgiveness, a novel idea
Holly Payne, ’94
Her road to forgiveness is paved with prose and broken bones.
In the 13 years since Holly Payne graduated from Richmond, serendipitous events—some frightening, all enlightening—have molded her into a successful writer.
The author of The Virgin’s Knot and The Sound of Blue is finishing her third novel, a narrative set in Payne’s hometown of Lancaster, Pa. The book traces an Amish boy’s struggle to forgive the hit-and-run driver who killed his five sisters. Payne was almost finished with the novel when she heard about the shootings of five Amish girls at their Lancaster County schoolhouse. As she watched the Amish community forgive the girls’ killer, Payne realized that writing her novel would be a journey of forgiveness for her, too.
A few weeks after graduating from Richmond, Payne was struck by a drunk driver as she stepped out of her car. Lying on the ground with a broken femur, hip, pelvis and rotator cuff, she looked to the sky and decided she would spend her life writing. She later founded Skywriter Ranch, a writing retreat in Crested Butte, Colo., and the Skywriter Series, workshops she teaches in San Francisco. (See http://skywriter.holly-payne.com.) Years later, as she finished her third novel, she decided to dedicate it to the drunk driver.
“I want to give him peace,” Payne says. “Forgiveness is a gift.”
A few months after the accident, she moved to Hungary to teach English, where she recovered with the help of crutches and a cane. Before she left Eastern Europe, however, she contracted spinal meningitis. She also found the inspiration for her first novel, The Virgin’s Knot, which was published in eight countries and won numerous awards.
Payne returned to the United States in 1996 and is an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts. She plans to travel to Bulgaria this summer to research a fourth book, which she has set in a monastery.
“I want to illuminate the endangered people and places of the world,” Payne said. “There’s so much wisdom in them. Storytelling preserves what we need to know to survive.”
Microfinance in the Congo
Nate Hulley, ’01
In the poorest nations of Africa, it is possible to change a life with pocket change, and Nate Hulley can give examples.
Hulley is managing director of Hope Congo, an arm of Hope International, a Christian nonprofit that works to alleviate poverty by providing small loans and training. Based in the capital city of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Hulley has acquired about 5,000 microfinance clients since 2004. The average client borrows $125, Hulley says, but far less money can make big differences to citizens of the DRC, which is recovering from a decade of civil war.
Hulley tells the story of one woman who borrowed $12. “She sells pepper and spices at a stall in the market. With $12 she added more stock to her stall and increased her sales and profits. With the profits, she renovated an addition to her mud house and began renting the room. With the rental income, she was able to send her son back to finish high school,” Hulley says. “She hopes to build another mud house with future loans so she can rent that house and send her son to college.”
The World Bank ranks the DRC among the world’s most difficult places to do business, but Hope Congo’s loan repayment rate is nearly 100 percent.
“Building trust is important in a country where so much corruption exists,” Hulley says. “People have been through ridiculously difficult things even at young ages. We hope that our work produces holistic life change [for] our clients. … So many clients tell us, ‘Before, my family ate once a day. Now we eat twice a day.’”
Hulley learned about micro-enterprise development at Richmond while taking an economics class taught by Dr. Jonathan Wight, associate professor of economics and international studies. Now Hulley applies micro-enterprise theory on a daily basis.
Hope Congo, Hulley says, “allows me a great opportunity to combine things that I’m passionate about, using my business degree in a way that helps me live out my faith and positively impact the poor.”
