Larry Wolfe When you first meet Tom Kasunic, you’d guess “stand out athlete.” And you’d be right. Tom was captain of his high school football team, earning All-Catholic, All-Metro and Honorable Mention All-State honor, while playing for Austin Catholic Prep in Detroit. He was also an All-League baseball player for the Friars. Later, he played…
Larry Wolfe The word “inspirit” means to instill courage or strength of purpose, to hearten, to inspire and to encourage. Dan Bradfield recently opened a company in Casa Grande called Inspirit Gymnastics to provide gymnastics training for children and teens, but he teaches much more than tumbling, vaulting and the use of parallel bars; he…
Larry Wolfe Billy Kee is a native of Paris – that would be Paris, Arkansas, not Paris, France. Billy’s father and two older brothers went from sharecrop farming in Arkansas to custom farm work in Casa Grande in September 1956; three months later Billy, his mother and the rest of the family joined them. The…
Larry Wolfe Mike Levine’s Dad always said, “Don’t say you don’t like something unless you’ve tried it.” Well, as you’ll realize after reading this profile, Mike certainly has tried a lot! Born in Portsmouth, Virginia, Mike was a Navy brat as a youngster, moving from Virginia to Japan to Houston to Hawaii and finally to…
Larry Wolfe Wesley, Iowa, is the hometown of two really good ballplayers. One, George “Showboat” Fisher, played in the major leagues in the ‘20s and ‘30s while the second, Dick Bleich, currently plays in the Sun Lakes Senior Softball League. Wesley’s a small farming community thirteen miles east of Algona in northern Iowa. Dick was…
Larry Wolfe A native of Ashton, Iowa, Gary Brinkman’s family moved to Howard, South Dakota when he was a high school sophomore. He graduated from Howard High where he was on the Tigers’ football, basketball and track teams while playing summer baseball and golf. He then went to the University of South Dakota where he…
Larry Wolfe Even though Tim “TJ” Tjernlund graduated from Corvallis High School in Oregon, he considers Kalispell, Montana and Glacier National Park as his true home. It was there that he spent every summer from ages 10 through 20 while his father, a school teacher, worked at the park. He considers that experience life defining,…
Larry Wolfe A true dyed-in-the-wool Iowa Hawkeye fan (or is it dyed-in-the-nest?), Jeff Jay is a Cedar Falls native who graduated from Cedar Falls High where he was a member of both the Tigers’ baseball and hockey teams. He continued his hockey career at Bemidji State University in Minnesota where he earned a degree in…
Larry Wolfe Stan Weiss est originaire de Malartic, une petite ville miniere d’or dans l’ouest de Quebec. How’s my French? Definitely not as good as Stan’s. Stan is a native of Malartic, a small gold-mining town in western Quebec, where French is the first language of 90 percent of the population. He graduated from St.…