Payback time
Dr. Richard “Dick” Baylor, R’44
Twenty years ago, Dr. Richard “Dick” Baylor retired to Virginia’s Northern Neck after serving in the Army Medical Corps and practicing internal medicine for 36 years in Richmond and Suffolk, Va. When the local medical society asked if he wanted to be classified as active or inactive, he unhesitatingly chose to be active.
While vacationing on the Northern Neck over the years, Baylor had seen its dire need for medical and dental care, and he dreamed of providing free health care to the region’s uninsured, working poor. In 1993, during his presidency of the Northern Neck Medical Association, his dream started to come true when the Northern Neck Free Health Clinic opened one night a week.
Now the facility operates full time, with 400 volunteers delivering $5 million worth of health care last year. Ninety percent of the practicing physicians in the five-county region volunteer at the clinic. Baylor has worked there five days a week, initially as president, then as medical director, and now as a board member.
The American Medical Association recently honored him with the 2009 Jack B. McConnell, M.D., Award for Excellence in Volunteerism for outstanding service to the clinic. He shares the accolade by saying, “This never would have happened if I didn’t have support. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a good education and good friends. Now it’s payback time.”
Practicing medicine runs in Baylor’s family. His grandfather was a Confederate army doctor. (His other grandfather sided with the Union.) His father, orphaned after the Civil War and raised in a Masonic Home, secured scholarships from the United Daughters of the Confederacy to pay for Baylor’s education at Richmond. Baylor has given back to the University, as well as his community, by creating a bequest scholarship to benefit pre-med students.
—Sarah McComas
South of the border banking
Karen Wimbish, W’75
Banking executive Karen Wimbish took a roundabout path to Latin America. She cites timing and flexibility as the keys that led to her position as president of Wachovia Securities Latin America Group. But Wimbish built the foundation for her career at Richmond, where she majored in mathematics and economics.
“I loved my years there,” she says. “They rank up there as the best years of my life.” Wimbish maintains close ties to the University, and in March she gave the annual Stanley L. Watts lecture for the Robins School of Business. She stays in touch with many of her classmates and joins a dozen UR alumnae on annual vacations. For their 50th birthdays, they went to Italy. This year, they plan to gather in St. Louis, where Wimbish now lives.
She had no idea she would end up working in international finance. Her math abilities helped her land summer jobs with NASA, but she decided that applied mathematics was not the career for her. Instead, she became a management trainee with United Virginia Bank, which became Crestar and then SunTrust. She spent 17 years there working as a retail banker and a credit analyst.
Wimbish left for a job as financial officer and treasurer of the former Judith Fox Co. to learn more about small business. “I found I was not a small business person,” she says. “In small business you could do anything you wanted, but the problem was you had to do everything.”
So in 1996, she joined the investment advisory subsidiary of Wheat First Securities, which was sold in 2000 to First Union, which merged with Wachovia in 2001. Five years after the dust settled, Wachovia asked Wimbish to take over its Latin America Group. From her St. Louis headquarters, she manages 450 to 500 employees in New York, Miami, Puerto Rico, Central America, and South America.
—Andy Taylor
Multidisciplinary man
L. Preston Bryant Jr., G’88
Preston Bryant, Virginia’s secretary of natural resources, was hurting when he began graduate school at the University in 1986. He had just contracted Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammation of the digestive tract. The painful condition made him postpone plans to study abroad.
“I wasn’t quite ready to pick up and move halfway across the world,” says Bryant, explaining his dilemma upon graduating from Randolph-Macon College with a degree in English. “The University of Richmond offered a very reputable program in the humanities, which was going to feed nicely into what I would be doing.”
So he hobbled across the UR campus on crutches as he coped with Crohn’s, all the while pursuing a multidisciplinary course of study from philosophy to modern political thought to romantic literature. “I’m a big believer in the value of the liberal arts,” he says.
As the Lynchburg, Va., native considered a career in college administration, “U of R played a very significant role for me. It allowed me to stay active academically while I had a bit of a prolonged recovery from Crohn’s disease. … But I recovered nicely and moved along.”
In 1988 he earned his master’s degree in the humanities from UR, then relocated to the University of London, where he earned a master’s degree in British literature from Royal Holloway College.
Returning to Lynchburg, he entered business development at Hurt & Proffitt, a large civil engineering, surveying, and planning firm. He also launched a political career, quickly progressing from Lynchburg City Council to the Virginia House of Delegates.
In 2006, Gov. Timothy Kaine appointed him to the cabinet position. One of only two Republicans in Kaine’s Democratic administration, Bryant laughs about his future plans. “One thing you know about taking a cabinet job is that in four years you don’t have one,” he says. “That’s the only certainty.”
—Chip Jones
Trash to treasure
Christa Donohue, B’96
Christa Donohue vividly remembers her Richmond accounting professor asking for a show of hands: “Who wants to run your own business?” She was the only person in the room with two hands neatly folded on her desk.
Her career plan was more conventional: nice safe salary, good benefits, and a generous expense account. She definitely wanted to leave the stress of work behind at the end of the day. But sometimes, she says, you can be so focused on your plan that you miss opportunities.
After Donohue graduated from the Robins School, she joined the Peace Corps as a small business advisor. She later worked for a consulting company, then a dot-com startup. She completed a master’s degree at Georgetown University and took a job at the Loudoun County Small Business Development Center.
“After helping lots of other people start and grow their businesses, I decided it was time to take the plunge,” Donohue says. She founded Reworks, a company that combined her business interests with her creative side. It sold a variety of products from recycled materials, including handbags from license plates, jewelry from bottle caps, and clocks from vinyl records.
One of the most challenging aspects, she says, is finding reliable sources of discarded raw material to meet the growing demand for eco-smart products. Customers include specialty shops, wholesalers, and individuals—people who want to make a statement with their personal possessions.
In August 2006, Reworks merged with one of its suppliers, Green Glass, based in Weston, Wis. The company now has 10 employees, including Donohue and her husband, Brian Roome.
—Leigh Anne Kelley
