Empire State College



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Empire State College

Empire State College

ALUMNI

 

AND



 

STUDENT


 

NEWS


 

  

 



  

VOLUME


 

31

 • 



NUMBER

 

2



 • 

SPRING


 

2006


Innovative Alumni

From Stately Stables to 

the Great White Way

2005 Donors Report

Joseph Moore

President



Kirk Starczewski

Director of College Relations

Publisher

Kirk.Starczewski@esc.edu

Maureen Winney

Director of Alumni and Student Relations

Managing Editor

Maureen.Winney@esc.edu

Hope Ferguson

Community Relations Associate 

Editor

Hope.Ferguson@esc.edu

Gael Fischer

Director of Publications/Designer



Debra Park

Secretary, Offi ce of College Relations

Alumni News and Copy Editor

C O N T R I B U T O R S

Laure-Jeanne Davignon

Assistant Director of 

Alumni and Student Relations

Hugh Hammett

Vice President for External Affairs



Jeremy Jones 

Executive Director,

Empire State College Foundation

Vicki Schaake 

Director of Advancement Services



Alta Schallen 

Director of Gift Planning



Renelle Shampeny

Director of Marketing 



Toby Tobrocke

Director of Annual Giving

 

W R I T E R S

Hope Ferguson

Suzie Ferrero

Elaine Handley



P H O T O G R A P H Y

Cover: Luc Van Muylem

Robert Mischka

Stock Studios

All other photos courtesy of our alumni, 

students and staff



P R O D U C T I O N

Jerry Cronin

Director of Management Service



Ron Kosiba

Print Shop Supervisor



Janet Jones

Keyboard Specialist

College Print Shop

Central Services



Empire State College Alumni and Student News 

is published by the Offi ce of College Relations at 

Empire State College 

One Union Avenue 

Saratoga Springs, NY  12866-4391 

518 587-2100 ext. 2250  •  www.esc.edu

C o n t e n t s

FEATURES


Upfront . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

An Innovative Marriage  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Steering Clear of the Norm   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Oh … It’s Magical  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Defi ning Her Life as a Producer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

AROUND


 

EMPIRE


 

STATE


 

COLLEGE


College News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Center News  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Alumni News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Back to You . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Empire State College

ALUMNI


 

AND


 

STUDENT


 

NEWS


 

VOLUME


 

31

 • 



NUMBER

 

2



 • 

SPRING 


2006

C

om

e t

o

 

S

a

ra

t

o

ga 

thi

s Su

mme

r!

Join us for 

Empire State College’s annual

Day at the Races

August 4, 2006.

See inside back cover 

for details.

  E M P I R E  

1

E

mily Dickinson began a poem with the line “I dwell in Possibility.” I think it beautifully 



sums up the privilege, joy and challenge of teaching and learning – especially when it comes 

to the creative possibilities.

 

Part of our work as academics is to help students enhance their critical thinking skills, skills 



that enable us to truly become lifelong learners. So we focus on developing our students’ higher 

order thinking skills: the ability to apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate ideas, to borrow from 

Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy. But I think critical thinking is not enough – we must demand of ourselves 

and instruct our students to be creative thinkers as well. The crucial and complicated issues we now face 

as a global community demand creative, constructive thinking.

Edward de Bono, a pre-eminent thinker about thinking, has written about the “intelligence trap” 

to which educated people are particularly susceptible. Those who feel overly confi dent about their 

knowledge only defend what they know, and do not look for alternatives or listen to discover other 

perspectives. Therefore, they don’t fully engage their faculties, and their minds become trapped and 

limited. As subject matter experts we academics need to guard against this phenomenon in ourselves and 

work not to engender it in students. One way to do this is to encourage and engage students in alternate 

thinking, or what de Bono calls “lateral thinking,” which goes beyond what we traditionally think of as 

creative to mean “the ability to change perception and keep on changing perception.”

Creativity of this kind engages both our intelligence and our imagination – and asks us to reject compla-

cency and to pay continuing attention to an evolving reality. I think it asks us to be fully alive. It is born 

of curiosity and enthusiasm and often results in innovative and surprising ideas and connections. Students 

often need only permission and a little encouragement to engage in divergent thinking – especially adult 

students, who have rich life experience from which to draw.

What keeps many of us from being creative is convention and training. We are used to thinking in 

certain ways about certain things. We get comfortable with the mental equations we’ve made, the bona-

fi de traditional and accepted ways of thinking about a subject. The American Management Association 

recently conducted a survey of CEOs, of which 81 percent said innovation is what is required for busi-

nesses to be successful in the future.

Highly creative students develop into highly motivated, independent thinkers and risk takers, who 

embrace complexity and understand the value of working through a process. I think of them as true 

intrapreneuers, people who are developing their refl ective, imaginative, cognitive capabilities, people who 

are emancipating themselves from what is expected, easy, predictable. These are people who often bring 

ideas together from different fi elds and make meaning in unconventional ways. Just such people work 

in bionics, a fi eld of engineering where products for human use are taken from structures in the natural 

world. For instance, the segmented facets of bee eyes that fi lter polarized light were the inspiration for 

infrared photography.

You will meet four such people in this issue of Empire State College Alumni and Student News

entrepreneur Gloria Austin, Broadway producer Jennifer Manocherian, composer Deddy Tzur and 

businesswoman Beth Gallmeyer.

UPFRONT

(continued on page 6)

UPFRONT

Breaking Out

By Elaine Handley, 

faculty mentor, English, Northeast Center



UPFRONT

E M P I R E

N

ext 


time 

you 


go to a grocery 

store and are 

standing in the 

checkout line, 

take a moment 

to look at the 

wire racks the plastic bags are stored on. And then thank 

Empire State College alumna Beth Gallmeyer’s company, 

founded by her husband Ed, for the convenience. 

 

“We do not sell widgets,” she explains. Instead, 



Gallmeyer describes what ESG Associates does as marrying 

a company to a process. 

 

So when an executive from Mobil Chemical wanted to 



make plastic bags to replace the paper then widely in use 

in 1981, he turned to Ed Gallmeyer during a golf game, 

and said, “Tell me about your company.” He went on to 

explain, “This is what we want to do.” Mobil Chemical 

hoped to manufacture plastic bags and make them de 

rigueur in the country’s retail stores, and he wondered if Ed 

knew someone who could get the job done.

 

“And of course you know the rest of the story, as they 



are in every store – both retail and hardware, carousel and

free standing, yard holders and restaurant sorter racks,” 

says Gallmeyer. Working with a wire manufacturer, ESG 

Associates “married the two companies together,” designing 

a prototype wire rack for the ease of storing the bags and 

slipping them off the racks to customers. 

 

As a retired vice president of manufacturing at Bausch 



& Lomb, and president of his own fi rm, ESG Associates, 

Ed was always looking for ways to bring two companies 

together in unusual ways. He brought the automation capa-

bility of Kodak to Bausch & Lomb, when the companies 

worked together for the fi rst time in 104 years of operation, 

to devise a way to automate the system for fi nding and 

discarding defective contact lenses. Prior to this, company 

workers had to “manually eyeball and pull out defective 

contact lenses,” said Gallmeyer.

 

Gallmeyer was part of her husband’s company when 



he developed “a very sophisticated” fi lament (lighted wire 

device) for copiers, which activated toner, baking it onto the 

paper to create the printed words as the paper moved from 

start to fi nish – at the push of the ON button. The company 

also “married” a German company that manufactured frac-

tional (very small) horse power motors to Xerox – which 

allowed smaller copiers to be made. 

 

Beth Gallmeyer has traveled through a variety of inter-



esting careers, after getting her fi rst job at AT&T in 1957. 

She and Ed met at Drexel University, where she earned an 

associate degree before going into telecommunications. 

She entered government service in New York after their 

marriage, then took time off to raise three children (one of 

whom, Scott, is now president of the couple’s company). 

She’s been a model and a cover girl (she’d model petite 

sizes on her lunch break for Casual Corner and Sibley’s) 

and worked in a top-secret job at an agency that made the 

tracking vans for the fi rst space shots. In 1986, Ed brought 

Beth on board with ESG Associates as vice president and 

treasurer.

 

Since her son Scott took over the fi rm, ESG Associates 



has developed a special material, nanotherm™, which 

protects electronic equipment’s printed circuit boards from 

overheating without the use of heat sink fans. And, although 

she can’t say too much about it yet, the company is working 

on a medical device that could be “a revolutionary item 

used for post-breast cancer and other diffi cult surgeries 

which require a lengthy healing process.”

 

The couple, who founded the company in Rochester, 



now lives in Florida. Since they’ve turned the day-to-day 

reins of the company over to their son (Ed is chairman of 

the board), Beth Gallmeyer stays busy as a chapter regent – 

or president – of the Daughters of the American Revolution; 

plays golf at their country club (they live on the 15th hole), 

and is a senior consultant with Mary Kay Corp. 

 

Her second degree – earned from Empire State College 



in 1996 after she retired, in business management, with a 

concentration in marketing and economics – “was just for 

fun, to see if my brain was still working.” 

m

An Innovative Marriage



Alumna Beth Gallmeyer ’96 and husband Ed 

marry companies to processes 



  E M P I R E  

3

loria Austin ’75 has been riding since she was a girl growing up in upstate 



New York, but it wasn’t until she retired from Paychex, a company founded 

by her former husband, Thomas Golisano, that she bought herself a horse 

and took up riding again. 

 

However, after she was thrown from a horse, she began looking for a gentler 



way to ride. “One of the reasons I got into carriage riding is age,” Austin said with 

a laugh. 

 

After seeing some people “sitting in what looked like a comfortable chair” driven 



by horses, Austin became a carriage-driving enthusiast. So she founded an associa-

tion for the sport – Austin Horse Park, home to her Continental Acres Equine Resort 

and the Austin Carriage Museum, located in Weirsdale, Florida. She also administers 

the Austin Foundation, which operates the Carriage Museum and Education Center, 

whose mission is “providing educational, cultural, historic and scientifi c activities 

devoted to preserving an understanding of the role of the horse and horse-drawn 

wheeled transportation.”

 

Carriage driving provides pageantry, with its period clothing and stylish hats, as 



well as an authentic experience that replicates a time when carriages were used for 

transportation, warfare and the transport of goods, Austin said. Those devoted to 

the sport belong to specialized clubs, and host competitions, which are generally held 

up and down the east coast and in Canada. Austin belongs to two clubs devoted to 

carriage driving and she holds championship titles, including North American Four-

in-Hand and Coaching Champion. One of those clubs, which she helped to found, is 

solely for women and now has 21 members in the U.S. and Great Britain. All of them 

own their own coaches and horses.

 

Austin compares enthusiasts to those who collect, restore and drive antique cars. 



Because of the expense of the sport, the fraternity of carriage driving enthusiasts 

comprises, by nature, those who can afford the horses, the carriages, the trailers,



Steering 

Clear 

of the 

Norm

Gloria Austin ’75 takes 

the reins of her girlhood 

passion for horses

Gloria Austin mastering the art of handling horse and carriage.

(continued on page 4)


E M P I R E

Steering Clear

(continued from page 3)

trucks, transportation and the travel, 

which includes jaunts to Europe. They 

are lawyers, lobbyists, descendants of 

America’s “families of fortune,” and 

smaller independent business owners.

 

Although women dominate the world 



of horses – Austin says that 85 percent 

of horse owners are female – the sport 

of carriage driving, especially with four 

horses to a carriage, is dominated by 

men. “For a woman, it’s particularly 

satisfying,” she 

says of the four-

in-hand driving. 

“I take pride in 

doing something 

that was histori-

cally reserved 

for men only 

– and garnering 

respect in the 

fellowship of 

men.”

 She 


described 

the feeling 

of guiding 

6,000 pounds 

of horse (the 

average horse 

weighs in at 

1,500 pounds) 

with one hand 

wrapped around 

the reins. “It’s 

unusual to see 

a four-in-hand 

carriage, but to see a woman [driving 

one] is even more rare.” 

 

An outgrowth of her interest in 



carriage driving is her carriage museum 

and education center, where she displays 

135 of the 170 antique carriages that 

she owns, and visitors are assisted by 92 

volunteer docents. Most of the carriages 

on display have been restored to their 

former glory. Of the people who visit the 

museum – senior citizens on day trips, 

4-H-ers and the occasional school group 

– few have particular knowledge of 

horses.

 

Austin, whose son has developmental 



disabilities, began her career in the 

nonprofi t fi eld, coordinating services for 

the mentally disabled for an agency in 

Rochester, at a time when agencies were 

working to deinstitutionalize patients and 

integrate them into their communities. 

Austin views this transformation as an 

unqualifi ed success. Her son now lives 

quasi-independently in a private home, 

assisted by a family who oversees his 

care. She also has a daughter who lives in 

Florida, as well as six grandchildren.

 

Austin earned her degree at Empire 



State College in community psychology 

in 1975, and went on to earn a master’s 

degree at SUNY Brockport. She chose 

Empire State College for her under-

graduate work because she was in the 

midst of raising her family and she was 

able to use her community and agency 

experience, along with her certifi cates 

and credentialing, toward her degree. 

She liked that she was able to raise her 

family, work, and earn her degree at the 

same time. “I’ve always prided myself 

on doing things independently,” she 

explains. “One of the great things Empire 

State College does is recognize one’s 

independence. You really get validated 

by the college and faculty.” Her mentor 

“was absolutely fabulous. He was very 

supportive. You felt that he was your 

ally.”


 

However, Austin did not remain in 

the fi eld of human services. She was soon 

off to New York to help open downstate 

offi ces of Paychex, a payroll-processing 

fi rm founded by Golisano in 1971, and 

now valued at more than $10 billion. 

She established an operating center in 

New Jersey and Long Island, and opened 

sales offi ces in both places, as well as 

New York City, Westchester County and 

Connecticut. Combined, these centers 

served the entire New York metropolitan 

area. 


 

Even though Austin no longer works 

in human services, she still feels strongly 

about giving back. She founded Horses 

Help Humanity, LLC, a division of the 

foundation that raises monies to support 

the use of the horse as a therapeutic tool 

to help people with emotional and devel-

opmental handicapping conditions.

 

Today, Austin says she keeps busy 



with her love of travel and of learning. 

Besides running her foundation and horse 

park, she travels for demonstrations 

and competitions, keeping two horses in 

Europe, where she travels twice a year. 

She also takes off two times a year to 

Asia. It fascinates her to learn how horse 

and wheel transportation played a major 

role in the rise and fall of civilizations, 

she said. 

 

She credits some of this love of 



learning to pursuing the independent 

studies of her undergraduate experience. 

“It helps you fi nd what your real passion 

is and encourages you to pursue your 

passion in a way that involves you in the 

world. Empire State College helped me to 

do that.” 

m

Austin at her carriage museum where the fi nery of former days is on display.



  E M P I R E  

5

W

hen composer Deddy Tzur ’97 was reached recently at his Venice, 



California studio, he was hard at work on a “cue” – music for a battle 

scene for a new video game, which is becoming the new hot area for 

commercial composers. For the Israeli-bred son of a diplomat, games are just 

one more channel for his adventuresome, thoroughly modern, global style 

that includes jazz, rock and roll, pop, Big Band, symphony orchestra and 

chamber music.

  His international, sophisticated approach to music is coupled with 

personal graciousness and charm, apparent even over the phone lines – 

which can’t hurt as he navigates the competitive and sometimes 

cut-throat environment of Hollywood. 

  Tzur comes from a family that shares an appreciation 

and aptitude for music – his mother and two brothers both 

have musical talent, he said, but he is the only one to turn 

professional. He began taking classical piano lessons at age 

fi ve – “apparently I asked for the lessons; I insisted,” he says. 

He then moved on to guitar – playing in rock and roll and 

funk bands, in addition to “a lot of jazz guitar.” At the age of 

16, while playing in a Big Band, and trying his hand at arranging 

music, Tzur found his true calling: composing.

  Like most young Israeli adults, Tzur served in the 

army. But after boot camp and basic training, he was 

allowed to devote most of his time to the Israeli Air 

Orchestra, which served as accompaniment for a 

host of world-class international performers. 

  Early in his career as a performer, he toured 

Europe, Asia, South America and North 

America, where he was exposed to “a lot of 

different musical styles and experiences,” 

which helped him to defi ne and refi ne his 

musical style and his own composing, 

he said.

   In 1996, upon the recommendation of 

one of his professors in Israel, he decided 

to travel to New York, and enroll in 

Empire State College. Because of his 

years of professional experience, 

he knew he was only a year or 

two away from a degree. At the 

same time, he wanted to experience 

America, its educational system, and 

study both the arts and liberal arts. 

“I think it was very valuable. I wanted to be 

in New York and to broaden my education, 

even on the musical side, even though I was 

fairly experienced by then,” he explained.


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