With Class of 1964 Terrace gift, classmates pay tribute to the past and welcome the future
By Beth Morgen
A career epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, Diane Becker knows a lot about searching for things, so when she volunteered to help garner support for a gift the School of Nursing’s building addition, she applied her investigatory skills to finding people—lots of people.
Her detective work paid off. Working with a committee of Class of 1964 Nursing graduates and leveraging a plethora of search tools, Becker reached some 100 classmates about funding a terrace in the building addition. The vast majority of the class contributed with current and planned gifts, raising more than $500,000.
“You get a sense that the whole class pulled together,” says Becker, who also holds master’s and doctorate degrees from the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “A sense of unity is what we wanted to show and to have a legacy.”
The Class of 1964 Terrace is part of a 45,000-square-foot expansion to the School of Nursing’s Anne M. Pinkard Building that, while future-oriented, honors the school’s mission of preparing nurse leaders—something especially meaningful to Class of 1964 graduates.
“I just feel good to be able to contribute in a positive and concrete way,” says class member Lynne Wolfe, a nurse care manager for a behavioral health home program in Maine. “My hope is that the terrace will remind people of the history of the school—that it is built on the backs and life experiences of the classes that came before them.”
The Class of 1964 Terrace is situated off of the building’s fifth floor outside of the dean’s suite. Martha Hill, the school’s dean from 2001 to 2014, joined her 1964 classmates in raising funds for the terrace and contributed her own gift. To her, the space symbolizes the class’s cohesiveness and commitment. “We were a class that liked being together and enjoyed gatherings,” she says. “Supporting the terrace as a space and a place where you could celebrate the value of relationships that are formed within the classes and among the classes greatly appealed to us.”
A passionate JHSON alumna and expert in the prevention and management of coronary disease, Diane M. Becker, ScD, MPH, RN, passed away peacefully at home in Baltimore, MD on November 17 with family at her side.