FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 04/08/2008

Bridgewater College Honors Five During Alumni Weekend

BRIDGEWATER, Va. — Five Bridgewater College alumni will be honored as part of the College's annual Alumni Weekend celebration on April 18 and 19.

Siblings John S. Flory Jr., Class of 1932, and Margaret "Peg" Flory Wampler Rainbolt, Class of 1937, will receive the 2008 Ripples Society Medals on Friday, April 18, at the annual banquet of the Ripples Society. The Ripples Society comprises alumni who graduated from the College 50 or more years ago, and the class of 1958 will be inducted into the Society that evening.

During the Alumni Banquet on Saturday evening, John R. Milleson, a 1978 graduate of Bridgewater, will receive the 2008 Distinguished Alumnus Award. The 2008 Young Alumnus Award will be presented to A. David Ervin, a 1991 graduate, and David R. Radcliff, a 1975 graduate of the College will receive the West-Whitelow Award for Humanitarian Service.

Alumni Weekend opens Friday morning, when all alumni of the College are invited to participate in special activities, which include a juried student show in the Cleo Driver Miller Art Gallery and a scavenger hunt in the Reuel B. Pritchett Museum.

Alumni seminars on Saturday include "Why Lincoln Matters: His Enduring Legacy" by President Phillip C. Stone at 9 a.m. and "Trouble in Paradise: Burma and Nepal" by David Radcliff at 10 a.m. The seminars are free and will be held in Bowman Hall, Room 101.

Reunion luncheons will be held in the Kline Campus Center for the Classes of 1933, 1938, 1943, 1948, 1653, 1958, 1963 and 1969.

A tour of the Bridgewater College Equestrian Center, along with a riding demonstration, will be held from 2 to 3:30 p.m. in Weyers Cave, Va.

The BC softball team will take on Virginia Wesleyan College at 2 p.m. and the field hockey alumnae will play at 3 p.m. on Mapp Field.

The weekend ends with a program on Sunday, April 20, by the Concert Choir, the Chorale and the Handbell Choir at 7:30 p.m. in the Carter Center for Worship and Music.

For more information about Alumni Weekend, please contact the Alumni Office at (540) 828-5451.

Information about the honorees:

In 1935, John Samuel Flory Jr., became an accountant with Loener Granite and Marble Co. in Harrisonburg, Va., where he worked until 1937.

Flory moved to Chicago where he was an accountant for the firms of Franklin MacVeigh & Co. and Illinois Zinc Co. and took accounting courses at Northwestern University School of Commerce in Chicago.

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In 1943, he married Helen Hunt Humphreys, who died in 1958. From 1943-53, Flory served as controller for Illinois Zinc Co. and also worked as secretary for that company from 1953-58.

In 1958, Flory returned to Bridgewater, Va., to preside over the Bridgewater Plow Corp., a job he held until 1963. During that time, he served two terms on the Bridgewater Town Council and, in 1963, married Helen Crumpacker Flora. Moving back to Illinois, Flory worked as controller for Don L. Dise Inc. in Aurora until 1981 and as controller for Primus Corp. in Aurora until 1985.

In 1985, Flory founded Coldwell Banker-Primus, a real estate firm that became a leader in the industry in northern Illinois and southeastern Wisconsin. He retired in 1990.

Flory has been intensely active in church and community organizations, serving on the board of administration and various committees of the Bridgewater Church of the Brethren, as deacon of the First Baptist Church of Oak Park, Ill., and elder of the First Presbyterian Church of Aurora, Ill.

He also is past president, treasurer and Paul Harris Fellow of the Rotary Club of Bridgewater and helped create and organize the Ashby Recreation Association.

After the August 2005 death of his wife, Flory returned to the town of his birth and currently lives in the Bridgewater Retirement Community

Following graduation from Bridgewater College, Margaret "Peg" Flory Wampler Rainbolt taught home economics at William Byrd High School in Vinton, Va.

Moving to Lancaster, Pa., she served as program director for teenagers at the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) and directed summer camp, a job she repeated in Fresno, Calif. Returning to Virginia, she earned a master's degree in counseling at what was then Madison College (now James Madison University) in Harrisonburg.

In 1965 she married John B. Wampler, a member of the Bridgewater College Board of Trustees and treasurer of Wampler-Longacre Foods, Inc. Wampler died in 1981.

Rainbolt remained intensely active in the life of her community. While a member of the First Church of the Brethren in Harrisonburg, she served on the church board and various committees, including the building committee for the new church. She also served for 15 years on the board of directors for the Bridgewater Home Inc., and was elected the first president of the auxiliary of the Bridgewater Home. Additionally, she was instrumental in helping start the home's gift shop.

She also served as assistant dean of students at Bridgewater College from 1951-53 and again from 1959-64.

In 1985, she married Richard Rainbolt, a newspaper editor and publisher. She has served on the Bridgewater College Board of Trustees and is a life member. She also was president of the Ripples Society. Richard Rainbolt died in 2001.

Rainbolt and her brother, Flory, have been instrumental in founding the Flory Fellowship of Scholars, an honors program begun at Bridgewater College in 2006 in tribute to their father, John S. Flory Sr., president of Bridgewater College from 1910-1919.

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John R. Milleson has spent 30 years in the financial and banking industries, rising through the ranks to become only the eighth president in the 122-year history of the Bank of Clarke County in Berryville, Va.

After graduation, Milleson became a staff accountant with the firm of Barbour, Drunagel & Renner, a position he held until 1980 when he joined Shenandoah Valley National Bank as an auditor. He stayed in that position until 1984 when he moved to the Bank of Clarke County as a loan officer. In 1985, Milleson earned his master's degree in business administration from Shenandoah University.

Milleson's rise in the Bank of Clarke County took him to positions as operations officer, chief financial officer, chief administrative officer and, in 1999, president and chief executive officer.

Milleson is active in both professional and private community organizations. He is a board member of the Virginia Bankers Association and is member and chairman of the board of Bankers Insurance LLC. Civic groups in which he is active include the Clarke County Education Foundation, as treasurer; Clarke County Lions Club, as member and past president; Evans Home for Children, as endowment committee member; Boy Scouts of America, as board member and volunteer; and board member of Top of Virginia (TOPVA) Chamber of Commerce and the United Way of the Shenandoah Valley.

Milleson and his wife, Bette Beveridge Milleson, have two children _ Josh and Alex. They are members of Grace Episcopal Church in Berryville, where Milleson serves as trustee and senior warden.

Allen David Ervin is president of Ervin Development Corporation, a Winchester, Va.,-based land development, commercial design and construction firm.

From 1994-2003, Ervin served as executive vice president of Lantz Construction Company of Winchester, a commercial general contracting firm. He founded Ervin Development Corporation in 2003, growing the company to over 50 employees by 2007.

Ervin also serves as vice president of Fountain Homes and Development Inc., a Winchester company specializing in residential design, construction, development and marketing.

Ervin's professional accomplishments also include earning his Class A general contractor's license for Virginia and West Virginia; winning the Chief Buildings Volume Award for 2004, 2005 and 2007; and claiming the 2007 Top of Virginia Regional Chamber of Commerce (TOPVA) Small Business of the Year award.

Ervin is active in his community. He is a member of the Rotary Club of Winchester, a board member of Abba Women's Resource Center and an active elder at Opequon Presbyterian Church. Additionally, he is a Sunday School and LOGOS teacher and serves on the Opequon Presbyterian Church Youth Council.

Ervin is also involved with Boy Scouts of America; Winchester Parks Foundation; Community Congregational Assistance Project; Evans Home for Children; Habitat for Humanity, and Winches

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ter baseball. He and his wife, Leigh, have four children _ Ali, Daniel, John and Katie _ and make their home in Winchester.

David R. Radcliff is director of the New Community Project in Elgin, Ill., a faith-based, non-profit organization with a mission to help Christians in the United States and society at large live responsibly and justly, particularly towards the Earth and people at the margins of global society.

Radcliff, a native of Blue Ridge, Va., graduated from Bridgewater with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and religion. He went on to earn his master of divinity and doctor of ministry in peace studies from Bethany Theological Seminary in Richmond, Ind. From 1989 until 2003 he was director of Brethren Witness for the Church of the Brethren General Board.

In August 2003, Radcliff and others founded New Community Project. NCP has a network of more than 5,000 people in the United States and beyond, and has program partners in seven countries. The organization sponsors learning tours to four continents, supports girls' education, reforestation and malaria prevention, provides a wide variety of print and Web-based resources, and has a program staff of nine people.

Over the past 20 years, Radcliff has led learning tours to areas of the world where people and/or the Earth are at risk from war, hunger, exploitation and environmental degradation. Destinations have included Iraq, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Sudan, North Korea, the Amazon region of Ecuador, Nepal, Burma and Arctic Village, Alaska.

Since 1990, Radcliff has served as closing speaker at the quadrennial National Youth Conference of the Church of the Brethren. He also teaches in the continuing education and distance-learning department at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, and he is a regular contributing writer to the Church of the Brethren magazine, Messenger.

He is a member of the Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren. Radcliff has two children, Miriam and Daniel.

The West-Whitelow Award was established in 2002 to recognize exceptional humanitarian service as demonstrated by Naomi Miller West, Class of 1929, and Carlyle Whitelow, Class of 1959, who received the first awards in 2003.

Bridgewater College, a private, four-year liberal arts college, enrolls more than 1,500 students. Founded in 1880 and located in the Central Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, it was the state's first private, coeducational senior college.

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