Amazing alumni
Lori Uretsky, a 1998 graduate of Waynesburg University, stands in front of the Olympic Games symbol in August in Rio. She is the medical manager for the USA Field Hockey team.
James Jackson Purman
Margaret Leonice (Needham) Still
Laura E. (Weethee) Jennings
Lydia Ann (Weethee) Sparrow
Kraig Makohus
Kraig Makohus, CEO of Special Olympics Ohio, poses for a picture with athlete, Malayna Pelegreen, at the 2016 Special Olympics Ohio Summer Games at The Ohio State University.
Waynesburg University historian Courtney Dennis holds a copy of “Always be on Time” by Edward Martin. Martin graduated from Waynesburg and was a governor and senator for Pennsylvania.
As students settle into another fall semester at Waynesburg University, the possibilities that lie before them are endless. Truly, the sky is the limit. Some of the university’s alumni have made a significant impact on our nation’s history and around the globe, from Ohio to Canada and, most recently, the Olympic Games in Rio.
When Lori Uretsky started at Waynesburg University in 1994, she never imagined her education there would take her all the way to the Olympic Games in Rio.
The Hamilton, N.J., native graduated from Waynesburg with a sports medicine degree in 1998. Recently, she returned from Rio as the medical manager for the USA Field Hockey team.
“When I took the job two years ago, I was not thinking about the Olympics, I was thinking ‘I get to work with a national team,'” she says. “I feel like being at the Olympics is probably the ultimate thing.”
During her four years at Waynesburg, she played softball, minored in biology and learned the ins and outs of being an athletic trainer. She chose Waynesburg because of the programs they had and because of a new “state of the art” athletic training room that they had put in just before she enrolled.
“If I never went to Waynesburg, I wouldn’t be where I am now,” she says. “The education I got from Waynesburg is with me every single day of my job.”
Uretsky praises and credits Waynesburg professors, resources and the student body for her post-graduate success. She says the class sizes were small enough for people to really take an interest in her talents and goals.
“It’s the ground floor of everything that I do now, and it really helped me become who I am,” she says.
After leaving Waynesburg, Uretsky got her master’s degree in health education a year later from the College of New Jersey. She says she always wanted to work as an athletic trainer for a major division athletic program, which is exactly what she did for 17 years at colleges and universities all over the country.
She worked in all different sports, from rodeo to lacrosse and basketball.
“I think it’s really great to be able to have the relationships with the athletes that I have,” Uretsky says. “It’s very rewarding to help someone get better and see them perform again and be the best that they can be.”
For the past two years, she’s been with the USA Field Hockey team, and last month, that job took her to Rio for the Olympics.
“I absolutely love it,” she says. “I get to travel the world and work with the best field hockey players in the nation.”
The team trained for the Olympics out of Lancaster, Pa., and left for Rio on July 30. Uretsky, now 40, says seeing the volume of athletes, countries and media coverage was a new and exciting experience.
“I had a conversation with Michael Phelps in the elevator,” Uretsky says. “It’s kind of a whirlwind to be amongst the world’s best, and I’m just trying to enjoy all of it.”
With a family of five to support and a full-time job, Kraig Makohus decided to go back to school. It was not an easy decision, but Waynesburg’s master’s in business administration program made it easier for him. Now, he’s the CEO of Special Olympics Ohio, a position he’s wanted for nearly a decade.
“The program at Waynesburg and the small classroom setting was built for those types of people who are working full-time with a wife and children,”Makohus, now 47, says.
Makohus was working as the director of youth and satellite programs for Goodwill of Southwestern Pennsylvania when he decided to go back to school to gain more experience in finance management for nonprofit organizations.
He says that Waynesburg’s accelerated MBA program in leadership and human resources was meant for people like him, who were “already in the career track.”
“They had professors who were working in the field, and I was in a classroom with people who were vice presidents of larger companies,” he says.
Makohus who hails from Bethel Park, graduated from Waynesburg in 2006. He worked for Goodwill for 10 years, where he met his wife, Lori. They both had a passion to work with people with disabilities.
“It’s just a passion for some people,” he says. “It grabs you and you don’t know why.”
No one in Makouhs’ family had developmental disabilities, though his grandfather, who helped raise him, had physical disabilities when he got older. “Caring for him taught me about compassion and caring for other people,” he says.
After Goodwill, Makohus worked for the Spina Bifida Association of Western Pennsylvania, which provides services for individuals with disabilities, and teaches them to live independently.
A few years later, he took a job as the senior director of development with Special Olympics Pennsylvania. He spent six years in that role, before becoming CEO of Special Olympics Washington, D. C.
But Makohus wasn’t a fan of the “fast-paced, D.C. culture,” so he spent 13 months there before taking a job as the CEO of Special Olympics Ohio. He started in June and hopes to finish his career in that position. He and his family now live in Dublin, Ohio.
“I have a chance to step in and replace a legend, Bob Rickard, who was in this position for 37 years,” he says. “It’s just been the most gratifying thing.”
What started as an experiment at Waynesburg University in the mid-1800s quickly made history, as the first three women to earn a degree in Pennsylvania did so there.
According to Waynesburg University historian Courtney Dennis, three cousins graduated cum laude with bachelor’s degrees in 1857, making the college the first higher education institution in the state and only the sixth in the country to give degrees to women.
The women were Lydia Ann (Weethee) Sparrow, Laura (Weethee) Jennings and Margaret Leonice (Needham) Still. Dennis says they enrolled at Waynesburg at the request of family member, Rev. Jonathan Perkins Weethee, who also was the college’s second president. He invited them to enroll as part of an equal opportunity experiment at the school.
“The institution operated as two separate entities – a chartered college that granted degrees to male students and an unchartered seminary that issued diplomas to female students,” says Dennis, noting that she obtained the information from the school’s archives as well as external research. “But President Weethee took the ground-breaking step to also make the full collegiate course of study available to women.”
Still was born in September 1838, in Madison County, N.Y. Her father, Rev. George William Needham, has lineage that can be traced back to a Norman knight, DeNedham. Her maternal great-grandfather was Capt. Jonathan Titus, who served in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, Dennis says.
She married Henry Still, a Kansas lawyer and farmer, and had a daughter. In her 40s, Still started painting and sketching and was considered an artist, but she didn’t pursue a career for her art because she was in very poor health.
She died in 1912 at 73 years old, but her artwork lives on in the Paul R. Stewart Museum on Waynesburg’s campus, of which Dennis is the associate director. Jennings was born in Arthur, Ohio, in April 1853, married James S. Jennings, and had three children. She was 51 when she died in October of 1904, and she’s buried in Toronto.
Sparrow was born near Millfield, Ohio, in January 1839. She married Dr. Thomas West Sparrow and had five children. She was 87 when she died in Toronto in 1925, from pneumonia, Dennis says.
James Jackson Purman had no idea he would survive July 2, 1863, much less go on to gain a college degree from Waynesburg and become a lawyer and a doctor. It was the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, and he lay there in the grass, bleeding from both legs, which had been shot.
He called out to the enemy for help.
“A lieutenant from a Georgia regiment brought him a canteen of fresh water and poured some of it on his enemy’s wounds,” Dennis says. “He also cut off his boots to relieve the throbbing pain.”
Purman, a member of the 140th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, was carried off the battlefield by a Confederate officer, Thomas P. Oliver, who gave him food and took him to safety.
Purman lost his left leg as a result of the battle wounds. He was presented the Medal of Honor by Congress in 1896, because he had stopped to help a wounded comrade when he was shot.
After he was discharged from the surgeon, Purman attended Waynesburg and graduated in 1864.
“He became principal of Baptist Academy, which later became Monongahela College,” Dennis says. “He also studied law and was admitted to the Greene County Bar Association.”
Purman met his wife, Mary, and moved to Washington, D.C., where he went to medical school and served as the medical director of a Union veterans’ organization called the Grand Army of the Republic, according to Dennis.
Before he died in May 1915, Purman “had a long-time wish granted,” Dennis says. Purman met his rescuer for the first time since Gettysburg. They had kept in touch through letters, but in 1907, they met in Washington, D.C., where Purman introduced Oliver to President Theodore Roosevelt.