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2005 Award Recipients

2005 Outstanding Young Alumni Award
David Muir ’95
David Muir is a correspondent and anchor for ABC News based in New York. He contributes reports to World News Tonight, Good Morning America, and other ABC News broadcasts. David was at the anchor desk for a series of special reports on the surprise early handover of sovereignty to the new Iraqi government as well as Saddam Hussein’s first court appearance after being captured by coalition forces. In addition, he anchored ABC’s coverage of the ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy. During the 2004 presidential campaign, he reported from Manchester on the New Hampshire primary and anchored coverage of the debates for ABC News’ interactive digital channel, ABC News Now. He has also done extensive reporting on severe weather, traveling to Florida to cover Hurricanes Frances and Charley and to California to report on the deadly mudslides.

Before joining ABC News in August 2003, David was an anchor and reporter for WCVB-TV in Boston, starting in May 2000. While there, he received the regional Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting, the National Headliner Award for his coverage of the war in Iraq (he spent a month covering the war and was the only television reporter from Boston in the Middle East), and Associated Press honors for his work tracing the path of the September 11 hijackers. His anchoring and reporting of breaking news also earned top honors from the Associated Press.

David joined WCVB-TV after spending five years as an anchor and reporter at WTVH-TV in Syracuse, New York, his hometown. He filed reports from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Gaza City following the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, earning top honors from the Radio-Television News Directors’ Association. He also anchored the station’s coverage of President Clinton’s impeachment trial from Capitol Hill. The Associated Press honored him for best enterprise reporting and best television interview. The Syracuse Press Club recognized him as anchor of the best local newscast, and he was voted one of Syracuse’s best local news anchors by the readers of the Syracuse New Times.

A magna cum laude graduate of Ithaca College, David attended the Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown University and studied at the University of Salamanca in Spain.


2005 Outstanding Young Alumni Award
Brigitte Bloch Rudman ’95
Brigitte Bloch Rudman graduated from Ithaca College with a B.A. in sociology and psychology. She moved to Manhattan, where she began working as the advertising coordinator for a hot, new start-up fashion and beauty magazine, Mode, the fastest-growing start-up in magazine history.

Enamored with the city’s multicultural flavor, burgeoning fashion scene, and thriving nightlife, Brigitte started cultivating the contacts for which she is now known. In 1998 she left the magazine industry to work for Donald Trump as the public relations manager for his beauty pageants, jointly owned with CBS. Trump flew her to Trinidad and Tobago for the 1998 Miss Universe Pageant to run the international press office for the live telecast.

After her stint with Trump, Brigitte freelanced as a marketing/PR guru for some of Manhattan’s most celebrated personalities in business, entertainment, and fashion. In the fall of 2001 she attended a dinner party where she met a world-renowned attorney. She sent him her résumé and a letter, proposing she do in-house PR for his top class-action firm. Within days she got a call and has been working ever since at Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman.

Brigitte interacts with the press daily and has become well known among those in the financial and legal arenas. Her firm is the lead counsel in several high-profile cases, including those involving Disney, Martha Stewart, Tyco, Enron, Lucent, and Merck.

2005 Outstanding Young Alumni Award
Karen Smith Simon ’95
Karen Smith Simon is the manager of regional health services for Vail Valley Medical Center in Vail, Colorado. She manages the daily operations of an indigent care clinic, an urgent care center, a trauma surgery practice, an infusion center, and the affiliated physician offices.

Karen was selected for this alumni award for her work at the Eagle Care Medical Clinic. The clinic provides family practice, prenatal, and pediatric care solely to low-income under- and uninsured residents of the Eagle River Valley. Under Karen’s leadership over the past four years, Eagle Care has grown by more than 50 percent and now handles more than 6,000 patient visits a year. She initiated a pediatric program, an R.N.-training program, bilingual childbirth classes, a pharmaceutical-assistance program, and a breast- and cervical-cancer-screening program. Karen also spends much time writing grant applications and advocating for patients to ensure their access to a comprehensive range of health and social services.

Karen moved to Colorado from San Francisco in 2001. While in California, she earned a master’s degree in public health from the University of California, Berkeley. She spent four years as a consultant to public agencies and nonprofit organizations, offering program planning and evaluation services and raising millions of dollars in grants for health care and social service programs throughout the Bay Area. She next worked as the manager of health care quality for the Pacific Business Group on Health, the nation’s largest health care purchasing cooperative.

Karen majored in health services administration while at Ithaca College. She is now pursuing a master’s degree in bioethics at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Her research interests include justice in the allocation of health care resources and end-of-life issues. She lives in Avon, Colorado, with her husband, Eric ’95, and their daughter, Rachel.

2005 James J. Whalen Meritorious Service Award
Robert A. Ryan
The late Robert Ryan, professor emeritus of history, taught at Ithaca College for 42 years, the longest of any faculty member in the history of the College. He was one of Ithaca’s most beloved professors.

A native of Cleveland, Robert earned his bachelor’s degree from the Adelbert College of Western Reserve University. He received his master’s and doctoral degrees from Western Reserve. After teaching at Alfred University for a year, he came to Ithaca College in 1956, a time when the liberal arts program was growing. He was instrumental in creating the history major, and a decade later he designed the history honors program. He was department chair from 1969 to 1979 and again in 1985–86. Robert taught courses on ancient history as well as modern Germany and the Holocaust, an area in which he developed a great interest during the 1980s. He retired in 1988, but continued teaching an occasional class until shortly before his death on March 8, 2000, at the age of 69.

Robert contributed many ideas for strengthening the quality of education at Ithaca. He served on various committees, including the School of Humanities and Sciences Curriculum Committee and the Summer School Advisory Committee, and he mentored more honor students than any other member of the department. He also served as the history department’s library representative for two decades, ordering several thousand volumes to build the history collection. A familiar figure at Bombers football games, he frequently invited students to his home.

When Robert died, special assistant to the provost Bill Scoones said Ithaca College would most remember him for the services he brought to the history department, to his students, and to the entire College. “He was the kind of person who makes a real difference,” Scoones said. “He was an extremely fair-minded individual who really loved the College.”

Robert left a generous bequest to establish both the Robert A. Ryan History Scholarship and the Robert Ryan Professorship in the Humanities. The scholarship supplies financial assistance for students majoring in history. The professorship provides a three-year stipend and reduced teaching time to support a specific scholarly, pedagogical, or curricular project.

2005 Professional Achievement Award
Anthony J. Maiello ’65, M.M. ’67
Anthony Maiello majored in music education, earning both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Ithaca College. He also studied at the National Conducting Institute, in Washington, D.C., under the direction of Leonard Slatkin, musical director of the National Symphony Orchestra.

Anthony’s many professional credits include clinician, adjudicator, and guest conductor of all-state, all-state sectional, regional, district, all-county, and all-city ensembles, with appearances throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, and the Bahamas. He conducted musical activities for the gold medal ceremonies at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid and for the New York State Music Camp and Institute. He has served as New York State Music Association adjudicator; clinician for Yamaha and for Warner Bros. Publications; president of the International Association of Jazz Educators–New York State chapter; and musical director for Music Festivals International. He is an elected member of the American Bandmasters Association and ASCAP, as well as a member of the National Band Association, College Band Directors National Association, New York State School Music Association, Virginia Music Educators Association, Virginia Jazz Service Organization, College Music Society, and American Symphony Orchestra League.

Anthony has taught extensively in the public schools. He has also served as professor of music and chairman of performance at SUNY Potsdam’s Crane School of Music, where he taught advanced instrumental conducting, applied clarinet, and woodwind and percussion technique. Under his direction, the ensembles at Crane and George Mason University have commissioned many new works and made numerous recordings and appearances in the United States and Canada. He is the author of Conducting: A Hands-On Approach and coauthor of Belwin 21st Century Band Method.

Anthony travels widely, adjudicating music festivals, guest conducting, and presenting clinics, lectures, and workshop. He is currently professor of music and director of instrumental studies at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia, where he conducts the symphony orchestra and wind symphony and teaches several conducting courses. He has also served as associate conductor of the McLean Orchestra, in McLean, Virginia, and has been appointed an honorary conductor of the United States Navy Band.

2005 Lifetime Achievement Award
Gavin MacLeod ’52
Gavin MacLeod is best known for his 10 years as Captain Stubing in ABC’s smash-hit series The Love Boat. Gavin also spent seven happy years costarring in the award-winning television series The Mary Tyler Moore Show. As Murray Slaughter, the acid-tongued news writer, he was nominated twice by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as best actor in a comedy series.

Gavin made his Broadway debut in A Hatful of Rain with Shelley Winters and Ben Gazzara. He returned to Broadway in 1962 to great acclaim in a Theatre Guild–Paul Gregory Production of The Captain and the Kings with Dana Andrews and Lee Grant. His musical appearances include Barry Manilow’s Copacabana, Showboat, Annie Warbucks, Carousel, High Button Shoes, I Do! I Do!, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Gypsy with Kaye Ballard, Gower Champion’s revival of Annie Get Your Gun with Debbie Reynolds, and No, No, Nanette with Nanette Fabray. He starred in the Canadian premier of The Sisters Rosensweig and has been seen throughout the United States in productions of Generation, The Seven Year Itch, Chapter Two, Mass Appeal, Moon over Buffalo, Lend Me a Tenor, and Never Too Late with Marion Ross, as well as a national tour of Love Letters with Michael Learned.

His film debut was with Susan Hayward in the Oscar-winning I Want to Live! Among his numerous film credits are Compulsion with Orson Welles, Operation Petticoat with Cary Grant, High Time with Bing Crosby, Pork Chop Hill with Gregory Peck, The Party with Peter Sellers, War Hunt with Robert Redford, The Sand Pebbles with Steve McQueen, Kelly’s Heroes with Clint Eastwood, Time Changer with Hal Linden, and Checking Out with Peter Falk.

Gavin has performed hundreds of roles on such television shows as McHale’s Navy, Hawaii Five-O (he played the lascivious Big Chicken), The Dick Van Dyke Show, Hogan’s Heroes, The Big Valley, Perry Mason, To Catch a Thief, Ironsides, Run for Your Life, The Untouchables, Hotel, Oz, Murder She Wrote, Touched by an Angel, JAG, King of Queens, and Robert Anderson’s award-winning The Last Act Is a Solo with Olympia Dukakis.

Gavin was honored in 1992 as humanitarian of the year by the Gift of Life Foundation. He has been a spokesperson for Feed the Children and an honorary citizen of Boys Town. The Shriners selected him as their man of the year in 1982. He is very proud to have received an honorary doctor of fine arts degree from Ithaca College in 1982.

Since 1986 Gavin has been the international spokesperson for Princess Cruises, one of the seven leading cruise lines in the world. Gavin and his wife, Patti, appear weekly on Trinity Broadcasting Network in their series, Back on Course, a five-time Religion in Media award-winner. In 1992 they were the recipients of the International Communications Galaxy of Fame award. The MacLeods reside in Pacific Palisades, California. They are proud of their seven children and nine beautiful, brilliant grandchildren.

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