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Paragon January 2024 |
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Quaker Steak & Lube on January 26 |
Upcoming Events January March April July |
| A Message from the Secretary |
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Brothers, We hope you all had a wonderful holiday season, and that you enjoyed our House-aversary email detailing the history of Thomas Nilges, who was the active president when we purchased the house on December 30, 1954. We learned a lot about the history of the house in 2023, and we hope to keep extending our knowledge in 2024. Please read and respond to “Help Us Tell Our Story” later in this issue to contribute to our shared history. Part of our history is on our walls in the form of composites. We have located copies of the 1965 and 1969 composites. It is time to get them back on our walls, but we need your help to do it. Read more in “Composite Replacement is Within Our Grasp!” Of course, a composite is just a face on the wall until you hear some stories to go with those faces. In this issue, we’re pleased to give you the chance to “Meet John Kobak ‘58.” Although we have built up a lot of history over 82 unbroken years at Case, the Ohio Alpha Beta Alumni Association is not just here to talk about the past. We'd love for you to join us at some of our upcoming events, so save the date now! Details will follow in future issues. 1. Alumni sponsored rush event at Quaker Steak & Lube - Friday, January 26 It takes a great deal of effort to keep the board moving smoothly and in alignment with the actives. We are always looking for volunteers. Just a few hours a quarter could make a significant impact. We need technical expertise to drive our web site and back ends, and we can always use people to assist with organizing house improvement projects and planning events. If you’re not sure how you can help, we’d be happy to discuss some options. Reach out at secretary@ohioalphabeta.org. We would like to thank Will Woodfint and Smyan Thota, who served on the board in the Fall 2023 semester as the active president and alumni chair, respectively. We appreciate your time and effort to the cause. We are pleased to welcome Nicholas Ojeda and Callum Curtis, who will be stepping into those roles for the Spring 2024 semester. And last but not least, three active brothers graduated from Case Western Reserve University in December 2023. We’d like to congratulation Isaiah Taylor, Gage Bunker and Will Woodfint on earning their CWRU diplomas. |
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L-R: Isaiah Tayler, Gage Bunker and Will Woodfint |
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Yours in the Bonds, Nathan Kossover |
| Save the Date: Quaker Steak & Lube on January 26 |
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For Spring Rush 2024, the Alumni Board is sponsoring a dinner at Quaker Steak and Lube in Sheffield, OH, for the Actives and specially invited Potential New Members (PNMs). Please join the Ohio Alpha Beta chapter in this important recruitment event on Friday, January 26, and help demonstrate that brotherhood is for life. Place: Quaker Steak & Lube, Sheffield (4900 Transportation Drive, Sheffield, OH) |
| Composite Replacement is Within Our Grasp! |
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In our last issue, we noted that we had obtained copies of the 1965 and 1969 composites from David Cesaratto ‘68 and Mike Urbancic ‘70. We have found a vendor who can make a high quality scan of these personal sized composites and blow them up to a larger size. We can’t scale them to the original size due to data quality issues, but we can make them look really good on the wall at a much larger size than the personal copies that were lent to us. Between scanning the image, printing it, and framing it to the same quality we used for the 13 composites we repaired last year, our vendor estimates that it will cost $500 to replace each of the 1965 and 1969 composites on the wall. With your support, we believe we can get this work done before Founder’s Day in April. Please click on the composite images to donate to their replacement. |
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We would very much like to find copies of the following composites so that we could one day apply the same processing to them. If you have a personal copy of any of the following composites that we could use, please contact Nathan Kossover at secretary@ohioalphabeta.org.
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| Help Us Tell Our Story |
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We’d love to hear your stories about the “old days” of the house, whether those were in the 1950s or the 2010s or anywhere between. Tell us your stories at secretary@ohioalphabeta.org. We’d particularly love to hear stories about the following:
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Dora Dix’s 8th and Final Appearance on a Composite |
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| The Garage Gets a New Roof |
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Our final major home improvement project of 2023 was completed in late December. We hired a contractor to tear off and replace the roof of the garage. To be perfectly honest, we have no idea when the garage roof was last replaced, but multiple inspections showed that while the roof wasn’t leaking yet, it was only a matter of time until water started coming in. During the tear-off replacement, the contractor found multiple layers of old roofing dating right back to the slate roof from the original construction back in 1915. This project cost $9250 and was a planned part of the Alumni Association’s budget for the current fiscal year. Since we already removed the trees over the garage as part of our insurance remediation efforts in late 2022, this new roof should only have to contend with normal weather-related wear and tear, and should be good for many decades to come. For those who are curious, multiple inspections have confirmed that the roof of the main house is in good shape and does not need to be replaced in the near future. We know that it was replaced in the early 1990s by a group of actives working as the fabled “Matt Construction Company.” Either the main house roof has been replaced again since then and we don’t have it in our records, or those brothers A substantial part of our budget for projects of this nature comes from your donation. Thank you. |
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| Meet John Kobak ‘58 |
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John Kobak ‘58 was the most senior member of our fraternity at our Homecoming event. He wrote in after our October Paragon with an update. Let’s turn it over to John: After reading Maynard Isabell’s profile in the October 2023 Paragon, I realized I was living a similar parallel life. Maynard actually knew my wife Peggy in grade school and high school in Rocky River, Ohio. I first met her at a Phi Kappa rush party in 1955 while she was a high school senior. We were engaged in 1958 when I graduated with a mechanical engineering degree. I initially accepted a job at Ford in Michigan, but after I thought it over I took a job a NASA instead so I could stay closer to home since Peggy & I were not getting married until 1959. |
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| In 1960 when Maynard was going to Florida to work for Pratt & Whitney, I was the project engineer testing and developing new capabilities for P&W’s RL10 rocket engine in NASA’s high altitude wind tunnel. I loved NASA and spent my entire 36 year career there in Cleveland. |
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| One of my final projects was proposing and getting funding for the first Space Station’s Power Systems Test Facility at NASA’s Glenn Research Facility in Cleveland, shown here upon completion in 1989. |
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| Another late career project was upgrading the world’s largest vacuum chamber in Sandusky, Ohio in 1994. |
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Outside of NASA, Peggy and I were active canoeists and eventually got into whitewater kayaking. It was 1970 and not many kayaks were available, so we started to build our own. I started to sell all the equipment needed for the sport from my home as a part-time business. The business grew and in 1985 my son took it over right out of college and moved it to a commercial store with a big barn to house all the kayaks. He ran it until 1999 when he opted to sell the company. In 1994 I retired from NASA. My goal now is to be retired for the same number of years that I worked at NASA. Peggy & I loved sailing and considered buying a sail boat but settled on a motor home. We went to Alaska for the summer; we then spent 12 winters in Mexico with our RV. I also lead kayak trips in Canada, Central America and Ecuador. |
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| We finally decided Mexico was getting too far to drive our motor home so we now spend our winters in Florida where we do a lot of bicycling. Peggy loved our tandem bike and we rode hundreds of miles together. |
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Peggy passed away in 2021 after 62 years of marriage from stage IV cancer. I am still kayaking, bicycling and driving my RV to Florida for the winter. During the summer months I live in Cleveland in the same home I designed and built back in 1961. We have 4 children who still live in NE Ohio and 12 grandchildren who are all moving away after college and are now starting to have great grandchildren. Sad to say, none have taken up either whitewater kayaking or biking. You can follow my ongoing adventures at https://khflorida.blogspot.com/ or my kayaking photos at https://www.keelhauler.org/khcc/webmasphoto2.htm. Yours in the Bonds, John Kobak ‘58 |
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The Ohio Alpha Beta Alumni Association exists to connect the over 1000 alumni of the Phi Kappa Theta Ohio Alpha Beta chapter at Case Western Reserve University through events, newsletters, and other gatherings. Our subsidiary organization, the Ohio Alpha Beta Housing Corporation, exists to own, maintain, and improve the Ohio Alpha Beta Chapter House located at 11016 Magnolia Drive, Cleveland, OH, 44106. Please add @ohioalphabeta.org to your contact list to ensure delivery of the Paragon. 11016 Magnolia Dr
Cleveland, OH 44106 United States |
