Delta Chi: Alumni Updates

The editors of the eDelt, our communication to Michigan Delta Chi fraternity members, have implemented a new bi-monthly section called “Alumni Updates.” Our plan is to keep members in the loop in the forthcoming years by letting others know what is going on in their lives. Our success depends on having YOU tell us what is going on with you and others that you have communicated with. It doesn’t need to be earthshaking, just a note.  It can be long or short. (If you can’t think of a topic, we might suggest the following as possible topics for updates: Where you are living, who do you work for and what do you there, who are you living with and what children do you have, what hobbies are you pursuing and what do you do for exercise.)   We have decided to use pictures in the future if you would like to.  Here is our July effort which we hope you enjoy.  Direct your material to Frank Morrey ’64 at  [email protected]  or Keith Hellems ’62 at [email protected] 

Bob Sielski ’64   Editor’s note: We are continuing to monitor Bob’s progress as a 78-year-old marathon runner who has run in 39 states.  The following are taken from his Facebook page. 

 

Feb. 7, 2021 — I ran (walked?) the Melbourne Florida Marathon this morning. The course consisted of two 13-mile loops going north along the Indian River, crossing it going east on a causeway and bridge, going south along a residential road, and completing the loop by heading west over another causeway and bridge. During the first loop, thunderstorms developed and the course was closed, so I was only permitted to complete a half-marathon of 13.1 miles. I could have gone at a faster pace, but I was pacing myself for 26.2 miles. I finished number 209 of 224 overall. To maintain social distancing, they did not give out age-group awards. However, as I was the only male 75 or over, I would have taken first place in that category by default (although there was a 76- year old woman who finished four minutes ahead of me).

February 13   I ran the Brevard Zoo’s Rafiki Run 3K this morning with grandsons Forest and Cameron. They left me in the dust, but I did finish #557 of 966 overall and #3 for my age group. I was beaten by one four-year-old, and one five-year-old, but better for them.

April 20 — I finished the Golden Driller Marathon in Tulsa, Oklahoma last Saturday, April 17. My time was more than 12 minutes faster than in my last marathon in November 2020, so I can’t complain. I finished number 215 out of 228 overall and number 139 out of 141 males. And I was number 1 for males over 75 by default. This makes my 37th state, so I have only 13 more states to complete.

States remaining: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York

I plan to run marathons back-to-back in New Jersey and New York on June 8 and 9, 2021, but those will be slow 26.2-mile events with no time limit.  

I mainly run marathons, unless there is a local 5K event for a charity that I want to support.  The 3K run with my grandsons on February 13 was to support our local zoo, and then I did a 5K the following Saturday for support of an Autism charity.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, many events have been canceled, but I flew to Tulsa on April 15 with little difficulty, and the Delta Airline plane was about ¾ full.

I also swim and bicycle, and am planning to enter a sprint triathlon on May 16 here in Cocoa, Florida.  ¼ mile swim, 12.5-mile bike, and 5K run.  I am still working part-time as a consultant to the U.S. Office of Naval Research, but that has not involved traveling for more than a year, as the government is very restrictive on travel and open meetings for employees and consultants.

May 16 

I finished the Space Coast Triathlon this morning, Sunday, May 16, 2021. (1/4-mile swim, 12-mile bike, 3.1-mile run) I finished # 187 out of 190 overall. There were a bunch of other old geezers there too, and I was #6 of 7 males 70+.

June 8, 2021  — I finished two marathons yesterday, June 8 in Stokes State Forest, New Jersey, and today, June 9 in Port Jervis, New York. Yesterday I finished number 34 of 48 overall, and today number 18 of 29 overall. That makes a lifetime total of 57 marathons in 39 states.

John Levinson ’73  — Kathy and John Levinson have now been married for 44 years and plan for many more.  We began married life in Portage, Michigan in 1977.  We bought our first house on Austin Lake and spent four years there before moving to the Detroit area due to Rockwell International closing the plant that John worked for in 1984.  I spent several years working for privately held companies in the area but the first two did not work out.  One company was a company that did “outsourcing” before that term became popular.  Through that process, I personally made the first flywheel for the Jeep 4.0L six-cylinder engine when it was first introduced in 1985. 

After several years another Delta Chi from my generation (Dan Maher – thanks once again Dan) called and suggested that I look at working for one of two companies that he was working with during the mid-1980s while he was with Deloitte.  The rest is history as I went to work for the Orley Family in the plastics business based in Whitmore Lake, just north of Ann Arbor.  This worked well as my wife went back into public accounting with a small firm in Bloomfield Hills and our second lake house was in the middle in Commerce Township.  We bought the lot in 1984 and had our current house built in 1985.  Kathy’s firm was later merged into Plante Moran and she retired as a tax partner in 2012.  My stay with the Orley family at RheTech (a plastic compounder) has continued for 33+ plus years – starting as the VP of Control & Administration for 20 years and then on April 1, 2007, as President and CFO until January 2015. 

I was a minority shareholder with seven Orley family members (but the only owner actually working at RheTech) when it was determined that it would be a good time to sell before the auto industry went down again.  It was a very rewarding experience and we were sold to HEXPOL a publicly-traded Swedish company.  Things have gone very well working for the Swedes and still having a great deal of energy, I have stayed far beyond what I thought would happen.  I still operate with them the same way I did with the Orley family – the old-fashioned way – a handshake and not a contract.  Retirement will happen someday but I still enjoy the challenges at work and the people all tell me that they want me to stay so I am still working.  Someday the time will be right to step away but I am not sure when that will be.

My wife and I built a second home on Lake Huron on her family property so we try to spend several weeks there each year – it is about a 2.5-hour drive.  I still golf (left-handed now for any of you that remember me as a right-handed golfer), waterski, horseback ride, kayak, go to Michigan football, basketball, and softball games.  My streak of going to all football games home and away ended when COVID-19 and The Big Ten would not allow any non-family members to attend the games.  My streak continues again starting September 2, 2021, as I have already purchased tickets for all twelve home and away games.  The streak will re-start at 544 games against Western Michigan.  This is the longest current active streak for Michigan football game attendance and I will go until I can no longer go.

I continue to serve on the Delta Chi Alumni Corporation (the House Corporation) as Treasurer and have no plans to step down from that role at this time.  However, for any of you younger Delta Chi Brothers that read this – please consider offering your time and talent and pay it forward for the people that came before you and helped provide the experience that we all got because someone cared and offered their time and talent

David Gormley, ’87: I continue to enjoy my work as a trial judge in Delaware County, Ohio.  It’s a growing suburban county just north of Columbus, and I handle both felony criminal cases as well as a wide variety of civil cases.  I’ve been a judge since 2008, and I was re-elected to a new six-year term in November 2020.  I communicate often with several of our Delta Chi brethren, and I look forward to joining John Heathfield from the UM Class of 1986 along with Nick Markus and Marty Heger from the Class of 1987 at a football game in Ann Arbor in October.  My email address is [email protected]

Paul Giuliano, Ph.D. ’08 (U. Southern Calif. Chapter)    I was born and raised in Mission Viejo, California, near the southern part of Orange County, to a family of Italian-American transplants from New York City, the first in a few generations not born in New York or Italy. My younger brother and I grew up in a nice suburban neighborhood with good schools and lots of young families. I took an interest early on in aviation and space and, when it came time to plan for college, decided to study Astronautics and Space Technology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles beginning in the Fall of 2004.

It was a small department of energetic individuals. I began cutting my teeth in the engineering world by working for Ph.D. students around the Astronautics and Aerospace departments. I started out with routine jobs like cleaning out vacuum chambers, organizing lab space, performing simple data analysis, or working the machine shop into the late hours of the night, often buddying up with other young students in my class. By the Spring of 2005, a core group of us had successfully begun the USC Rocket Propulsion Laboratory so we could apply all of our newly acquired skills in a student design team setting. After a lot of hard work and labor and a failure on the first attempt, we successfully launched our first self-made carbon-composite rocket “Del Carbon” in October of 2006. Fast forward to the present day, USC RPL is the world’s premier undergraduate research group for experimental rocket technologies and in 2019 set the record for the highest altitude ever reached by a student-built and designed vehicle, the first to pass the Kármán line.

While we were getting RPL going in 2005, I was also beginning to attend social events at USCs fraternities in order to feel out the social scene. Fraternal organizations were foreign to my family (beyond Italian-American-focused ones) so I approached them with a bit of skepticism. During the Rush of Spring 2005, however, I found myself completely enjoying my time with the brothers of Delta Chi and decided to accept an offer for initiation. I joined USC DX’s Alpha Lambda class in Spring 2005, a small yet fun group of four brothers. That summer I headed off to Italy for a summer session of abroad courses for an Italian Minor and then proceeded to move into the DX house as soon as I returned in August.

With 30+ brothers living in the house during any given year, there was never a dull moment. Busy with design teams, clubs, and keeping my grades up, I never ran for a chapter officer position. However, it was suggested by our ABT President at the time that the Interfraternity Council might be a unique way to get a new perspective on Greek Community at USC. I followed his suggestion and was accepted into the IFC Executive Board in 2007 along with another DX brother who was voted in as IFC President. Not only was it an excellent way to meet and network with other fraternity members throughout The Row but we were able to bring a little extra dose of prestige to the DX Chapter that year with extra IFC presence.

After a few more years of undergraduate study as well as some enriching summer research opportunities at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Princeton University, I was neck-deep in the analytical and experimental research of electric propulsion devices, having also worked on these devices for a Ph.D. student in the Astronautics department for a few years. These were the types of plasma propulsion systems found in satellites that utilize electric and magnetic fields to ionize gases and provide the impulse required to move (or not move) in orbit. As it turns out, the University of Michigan had excellent graduate programs, groups, and laboratories in both the experimental and computational research of electric propulsion. I applied and was accepted into Prof. Iain Boyd’s computational group as a Ph.D. candidate in 2008 and moved to Ann Arbor that summer.

Accustomed to the idyllic weather of SoCal, I was often presented with the question of “You’re moving where?! But it snows in Michigan!” I found, however, that I enjoyed the Michigan seasons, both hot and cold. Funny enough, the Rackham Graduate School held a few sessions of “Students from Southern Latitudes” early on in my first semester to check in on our ability to adapt — I would often attend sessions surrounded by students from California, Texas, Florida, or from other latitude-challenged regions such as Cuba, Jamaica, or Central America. At its conclusion, they handed us a $100 gift card to the local outdoor shop and said “buy a real jacket!”

Early on in my first semester, I decided to drive over to the DX house to meet the brothers. I had never met any brothers from the Michigan chapter (or any other Midwest chapters) and knew no one outside of my new graduate program so I was excited to expand my circle of friends through our brotherhood. I can’t remember the exact details but I’m fairly certain I showed up, asked if they knew Kimball, and started chatting — if I recall correctly, it was Chris Bence who greeted me at the door. They invited me in and I could tell we were going to get along.

The president at the time was Ben Wachtel and I instantly befriended many of the other seniors who were basically my same age — Andy Rolph, Evan Smith, Alan Mayer, George Bekris, to name a few. Throughout that semester, I attended some social events with the brothers and I discovered that they didn’t have a “BB”, a Chapter Advisor, the most recent one having graduated a semester or two ago. I expressed interest in helping them out and it was in October 2008 that they welcomed me as the chapter’s newly-minted “BB”.

I found that it was helpful to the chapter to have some extra eyes on their operations and chapter life — I was able to apply many of the things I had learned through IFC or the various SoCal Region DX chapters in observing how a variety of types of fraternities kept their ships afloat. I was also able to meet with some of the most involved alumni to get an idea of the status and history of the chapter — Al Knaus, Frank Morrey, John Levinson, Jeff Schoenner, Joe Burak, Kevin Worth, to name a few.

At the time, the ABT was scattered across the nation, some within driving distance to Ann Arbor and some out of state. The Housing Corp was in a similar state though sometimes it seemed like the ABT and Housing Corp were blended together into a group that they named the “Alumni Corp” — I was worried about the state of the ABT and HC not only because of liability reasons (the ABT an HC should be separated and autonomous to protect the chapter’s assets) but also because I sensed a general malaise that the students felt not connected to their alumni advisors.

By January 2009 I began reaching out to the alumni network to raise the idea that we should strengthen the ABT. Later, into the Fall of 2009, we had successfully scheduled a few ABT-specific meetings, calling on as many alumni as we could, and had established somewhat of a regular cadence — this was an important step in creating a stronger connection between the chapter and the alumni, in particular regarding the topic on everyone’s mind, the elusive “new house” that was always discussed. This continued with moderate success for a while and in 2010 my two-year term as BB was up. I had some new obligations in life (having recently married my wife whom I met on the front patio of USCs chapter house) and I wanted to be able to focus on the ABT while letting another alumnus step in as “BB”. I was pleased when Chris Bence stepped up to the plate.

After my graduate studies were completed in 2012, I accepted my first job in the private sector at the Boeing Satellite Development Center in El Segundo, CA. I was accepted into a rotational program for high potential candidates and was able to work on nearly every subsystem of various geostationary communications satellites over the course of 2 years. I landed as the Lead Systems Engineer on some novel RF concepts and testing methods, some of which I can talk about and some I can’t. My favorite memory there is being suspended over a two-story tall, three-billion-dollar satellite in a cleanroom anechoic chamber while holding a new test probe near sensitive microwave components.

By 2016, my daughter was born and the commute across Los Angeles was starting to make the new family life suffer. I soon accepted an offer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, a mere 15-minute commute, door-to-door. JPL was a wonderful place to work on once-in-a-lifetime programs — they really do live up to their slogan, “Dare Mighty Things.” I became the Deputy Lead Systems Engineer for a complex optical system, a unique device that supported both the Astrophysics and Exoplanet Program Office as well as the National Security Program Office. My background being very much focused on microwave technology up to that point, I quickly learned the value in a healthy understanding of the way a system converts photons to electrons, whether that be in the microwave or visible/infrared spectra.

Beginning during my time at Boeing and throughout my work at JPL, I began lecturing and advising at my old stomping grounds, the USC Astronautical Engineering department, as an Adjunct Professor. I maintained and taught the underclassmen curricula for the “Introduction to” and “Foundations of” Astronautical Engineering courses for freshman and sophomores. Basically, fresh high school grads would arrive with their hearts set on “astronautics and space” and it was my job to teach them about what that actually meant. Not only was it enjoyable to have them dive into the material, industries, and history of space technology but it also scratched my itch for mentoring and advising. The fact that I had graduated from that same department only 8 years or so prior meant that there was an extra layer of understanding that paid dividends in establishing wholesome connections with the students.

In late 2019, my wife received a big leadership opportunity in the Bay Area so we decided to move our family to San Jose, CA. Realizing that this might be a good time to take advantage of the unique opportunities presented by Silicon Valley, I decided to take a technological detour into self-driving cars. I accepted a program management role with the rideshare company Lyft in their autonomous vehicles division, Level 5, in Palo Alto, CA. It was a great opportunity to dive into technologies that had largely been tangential to those I had been exposed to in the space industry thus far — machine learning, sensor fusion, and autonomous control loops. It was an excellent opportunity to learn how to work in a scrappy, fast-paced software environment while still leaning on the engineering rigor and complex systems engineering discipline learned in the Defense industry.

As we all know, 2020 turned out to be a strange and difficult year. Working remotely full-time for Lyft was enjoyable but I began to crave the unique difficulty of space technology. An opportunity presented itself in early 2021 to join the space startup company Planet, one of the earliest private space imaging startups in the NewSpace scene with the capability to image the entirety of the Earth daily with over 200 tiny satellites. The company was expanding into larger, more complex spacecraft and needed an engineering lead to getting a new product off the ground — I soon joined on as the Payload Lead for a new class of hyperspectral imaging spacecraft (my current role as I write this) which is being developed in partnership with the nonprofit Carbon Mapper organization and NASA-JPL. Our mission is the pinpointing of methane super-emitters worldwide as well as the creation of humanitarian- and climate change-related products in a wide range of spectral domains. It’s an exciting, impactful mission and I’m thoroughly enjoying the work and teams. Throughout this entire process of coping with pandemic (and soon to be post-pandemic) life and career maneuverings, my son was born in early 2021, rounding out our nuclear family.

My more intimate involvement with DX has waned since my activities with the Michigan Chapter. When I moved back to Los Angeles in 2012, there was a core group of us young USC DX alumni who were attempting to breathe new life into the Southern Cal chapter’s ABT and Housing Corp and their relationship with the undergraduates. However, within a few years and after a handful of issues the USC DX chapter had its charter revoked, inflicting a blow to the trust and motivation of the few of us who were trying to do the right thing. With my growing family and professional responsibilities, it’s been difficult to drum up the motivation to dive back in immediately — that being said, I know I will always find a way to come back to DX to serve mentor, and lead the young men who continue to carry the DX badge in the same way that our alumni mentors did for us as young men.

Top left: in cleanroom attire at NASA-JPL (tall one); Right: headshot in 2021
Bottom L to R: composite 2008, USC rocket staff, Paul as “BB” with Zach Jones at 2010 International DX convention is New Orleans