Reconnecting with Richmond
Claude G. Thomas, R’49
Leaving Richmond in 1951, Claude Thomas was chasing the fledgling mutual funds industry.
“In the early ’50s, no one had any idea what mutual funds were,” he says. “Today, it’s a $7 trillion industry, the greatest business in the world.”
Thomas has traveled full circle in those 55 years. He recently purchased a home in Goochland County, Va., and is reconnecting with his alma mater and some of the friends he made during his Richmond College days. In February he endowed a University scholarship that will be offered for the first time in 2007–08. He credits his wife, Mary, a former professor at the University of New Hampshire, with the idea of creating a scholarship to mark his 80th birthday.
Thomas joined the Navy soon after graduating from John Marshall High School in Richmond in 1943. After serving in the Asiatic Pacific area and at Quantico, Va., he ended his military career on a destroyer escort based off the coast of Kobe after Japan’s surrender.
He enrolled in Richmond in 1946 on the GI Bill, and he remembers attending classes in Quonset huts. He majored in economics and minored in math while running track and serving as president of Phi Delta Theta fraternity. He also was elected to membership in the leadership fraternity Omicron Delta Kappa. Graduating in only three years and taking the advice of the late Dr. Herman P. Thomas, professor of economics, he landed a job in mutual funds.
His financial career took him throughout the United States—from North Carolina to Florida to Massachusetts. He retired in 1991 as senior executive vice president of Massachusetts Financial Services and president of its marketing and sales subsidiary in Boston. His career kept him away from Richmond for many years, but he is looking forward to rekindling old friendships with classmates and fraternity brothers including Jack Jennings, R’49 and H’80, Lewis Booker, R’50 and H’77, Carlyle Tiller, R’48 and H’76, and Gordon Cousins, R’49.
“UR is producing wonderful people,” he notes. “I am absolutely amazed and delighted at the growth in terms of new buildings, the endowment and the accomplishments of alumni.”
Outwitting the bad guys
Jenna Solari, ’97
The jury was out in the biggest case of Jenna Solari’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps career, the murder of a 7-week-old infant. While she waited anxiously for the verdict, the young Navy prosecutor stayed calm by focusing on one thing—a photo of the gazebo overlooking Westhampton Lake.
Solari kept the snapshot taped to her counsel table. “It was always my very favorite place to go,” she explains.
The Wilmington, Mass., native has fond memories of Richmond, of people like Dr. Scott Allison, who now chairs the psychology department. “He was a great friend,” she says, adding that Allison’s early emphasis on using the Internet put her “leaps and bounds ahead of my peers.”
Solari landed a full scholarship to the University of Georgia School of Law and graduated as valedictorian of her class in 2000. “I think that speaks volumes about the University of Richmond,” she says.
She worked briefly as a law clerk in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Jacksonville, Fla., while the court was hearing Bush v. Gore, the case that would determine the outcome of the 2000 election. Then she enlisted in the Navy as a lieutenant and a JAG Corps prosecutor.
In January 2005, she took a civilian job as a special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS, “just like the TV show,” she says), carrying a gun and working cases “on the classified side, dealing with matters of foreign intelligence.”
It was exciting, but Solari missed having agents seek her legal analysis. So she jumped at the chance to become an instructor in the legal division at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Ga. She now teaches federal special agents, ranging from Pentagon police officers to Air Force special investigators, about topics such as Fourth Amendment, evidentiary and constitutional law, and subduing suspects as shown above.
But she has not forgotten the day she stared at the gazebo photo, waiting for the jury’s verdict. They sentenced Charles B. Swanson to life in Leavenworth for the suffocation murder of his 7-week-old daughter. It was “one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” Solari says, “and one of the most worthwhile.”
Leading the Equality Riders
Haven Herrin, ’05
The standoff came in Virginia Beach at Regent University, a college that prohibits homosexual conduct. Haven Herrin led the Equality Riders, young people who were protesting Regent’s “religion-based oppression.” They gathered at the edge of campus, where police officers waited for them.
Regent’s campus security chief told them they would be arrested for trespassing if they crossed a yellow police line. Herrin stepped across the tape and was escorted to a nearby police van.
Herrin’s arrest last March was part of a six-week bus tour sponsored by Soulforce, a Lynchburg, Va.-based organization that seeks “freedom for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people from religious and political oppression.” (See www.soulforce.org.) Herrin co-directed the tour, which targeted Christian colleges and military academies across the nation that discriminate against students who are openly gay. After getting arrested at Regent University (founded by Pat Robertson) and Liberty University (founded by Jerry Falwell), the Equality Riders were welcomed at most of the 19 colleges on the tour. Herrin was arrested again at the final stop, the U.S. Military Academy.
“The equality of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people is a justice issue that needs the voices, energy and creativity of young adults,” Herrin says. “I work with Soulforce precisely because they believe in the kind of activism that will get young adults involved in the gay rights movement.”
Herrin also is co-director of Right to Serve, a Soulforce campaign that challenges the military’s enlistment policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” In October, Richmond student Jacob Neal, ’07, organized a Right to Serve protest at a recruiting center near campus. He and Jessica Miller, ’07, attempted to enlist, but were turned down when they said they were gay. Neal also participated in the Equality Riders tour, which Herrin plans to expand to two buses in the spring.
Selling ‘humanoid’ robots
Matt Fisher, ’06
At commencement, Matt Fisher stood out among the grads, and not just because he is 6-foot-3. The 28-year-old business major is a military veteran who speaks Japanese, flies airplanes and imports robots.
Fresh out of high school, Fisher served six years in the Navy as an electronics technician. Then he enrolled in Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University to pursue commercial pilot training, but the Sept. 11 attacks and the resulting uncertainty in the airline industry made him rethink his career goals. He transferred to Richmond.
“I chose Richmond because it has one of the best business schools in the South,” he recalls. “And the language classes I took were amazing.”
Fisher became interested in speaking Japanese after visiting Japan during his Navy years. He worked hard at Richmond because he knew that business expertise and foreign language skills would be a powerful combination. During his junior year, he started a company called Kumotek (www.kumotek.com) to import “humanoid” robots from Japan and provide international trade consulting. The word “kumo” means spider in Japanese.
Fisher has signed distribution deals with several Japanese companies and with Dallas-based Hanson Robotics, whose “Einstein robot” looks, talks and moves like Albert Einstein.
Fisher’s goal is to create a market in the United States for robots that can be used in a wide variety of applications, including entertainment and education. Most recently, he started an educational program called Robot P.E.T.S. (Robots Promoting Education Through Science). The program is designed to help K-12 students focus more on science.
The company is already turning a profit, but Fisher says he has a long way to go to reach his goals. “I feel like I always work best,” he says, “knowing I’m creating my own future.”
