Bill Fabrey:
CLASS OF 1959
Penfield High SchoolClass of 1959
Penfield, NY
Rochester Institute of Technology - EngineeringClass of 1966
Rochester, NY
Bill's Story
(Updated 3/21)
Dear fellow classmate:
After graduating from Penfield HS, I studied electrical engineering and electrophysics at Cornell, RIT, and Brooklyn Polytechnic. During that time, I married Joyce Warman, who came with me to the 15th class reunion, and ended up with 2 children and a divorce, although we remained friends. (Sadly, she died of cancer 10 years later.)
I worked for 40 years as a biomedical engineer. Married again, divorced after 22 years, but we remained friends, as per usual. (My ex-wife Nancy
Summer died three years ago). At the age of 60, I became engaged, and lived with a great lady Eileen Maher for the next 8 years, but before we could marry, she died of COPD, a lung ailment, caused by her chain smoking for 22 years before I met her. That was in Jan, 2008. I miss her very much. I am trying again, with a new partner, Sarah, since April, 2010. She is alive and well, and still my partner/friend!
In 1969, while an engineer, I founded a human rights organization for fat people, called NAAFA (which survives today). In 1991 I was one of seven co-founders of the Council on Size & Weight Discrimination (CSWD), of which I recently became the president, in the Fall of 2018. I was also a print magazine columnist for 12 years at the now-online magazine Radiance. Since 2008, I have also served on the membership committee (as chair or member) for the Association for Size Diversity and Health. This was all a consequence of the fact that my late first wife was a plus-sized woman who was miserable about her weight most of the time, and I was angry at how society tried made her feel inferior. Rather than sit on my anger, I used it to try to do something to decrease the bullying and stigmatization of larger-than-average people.
Last year the organization NAAFA just celebrated its 50th anniversary in Las Vegas, and gave me a humanitarian award. The BBC radio show "Witness History" got wind of it and did a nice nine-minute interview with me. You can listen to it on the BBC website for the show. This Classmates site will not let me put the full web address here. But you can find the BBC show "Witness History" and go to Monday, June 24, 2019.
Anyway, despite all these ...Expand for more
volunteer activities, I did not retire from engineering until 2006, and these days I work many hours a week running a mail-order company I and my second wife Nancy started in 1988 called Amplestuff.
If you remember me at all, you may recall that I was quite active in extracurricular activities, such as band, orchestra, photographer for the student newspaper, and so forth. Some of the old pictures used in the yearbook have appeared in various places.I was the tuba player during many assemblies and basketball games.
I have not seen most of my classmates since graduation, except for Bill Fleig and Matt Fassett. Maybe next year I will actually go to a reunion again. (Most years I have a conflict.) I recently had a great phone chat with class president Chuck Rothfuss. I live in Woodstock, NY. Yes, I have a few hippie friends, but most have died off long ago.
I have enjoyed reconnecting with several classmates from 60 years ago, and I hope to do so with a few more, while we're still alive and kickin'. Reconnecting has been made possible by this Classmates site, by Facebook, and the class email list admirably maintained by Chuck Rothfuss. Thank you, Chuck!
That's my puss (and that of my girlfriend/partner Sarah) you see in the photo--nothing special about it and I suppose it bears a faint resemblance to my yearbook photo from 1959.
I found a bunch of pictures I took in 1957-59 for the school paper. Several appeared in the yearbook at the time. I've had them digitized and hope to eventually post some of them here and possibly on the class Facebook site.
We are all, at our age, in a higher-risk group from severe reactions to the COVID-19 virus which as of this writing, is still unabated, but at least vaccines are being administered. I am stressed out about all this and lots of other things. Aren't we all?
I promise to respond to anyone who writes to me here. If you do, you might include your regular email address, which would save lots of time! I would post mine here, but Classmates detects email addresses and website URLs, and withholds them--probably to sell more memberships. Let me try giving you mine in a way that won't be withheld:
billfabrey at amplestuff dot com.
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