Each year since 1963, the Centre College Alumni Association has recognized alumni for service to Centre and/or to others. The Young Alumnus Award, first presented in 1993, recognizes professional achievement, civic accomplishments and/or service to Centre among alumni who have graduated within the last 15 years.

Distinguished Alumni
T.C “Bud” Dedman ’38
Gordon Davidson ’49
Shelba Proffitt ’57

Young Alumni
Rhonda Reeves ’87
John Ellison Conlee ’90

Welcome to the Inn
T.C “Bud” Dedman ’38 is the Beaumont Inn. Grandson of the founders, he moved to the Harrodsburg, Ky., institution at the age of six. Except for his college years and three years in the Navy during World War II, he has lived there ever since. And although at 86 he’s turned over the inn’s day-to-day running to son and daughter-in-law Chuck and Helen Williams Dedman ’75 and ’75, he still joins his sister Anne Dedman Cherry ’35 every night for dinner at the Beaumont.

“The Beaumont Inn is more than a business to me,” he says. “It’s a personality. Working at the Beaumont Inn has been my life. I love the people, and I love fooling with the food. I just love the whole thing.”

With the help of his wife—the late Mary Elizabeth Ransdale Dedman ’40—Dedman took the Beaumont Inn from respected small-town hostelry to world-renown establishment with awards too numerous to count.

Dedman says that along with the inn, Centre, too, has always been part of his life. “My first remembrance of Centre College is my dad and all his friends talking about Bo McMillin [’22] and Centre beating Harvard in 1921,” he recalls. “After the University of Kentucky and Centre games, the line of cars bumper to bumper going back to Lexington and Louisville would take two hours to go through Harrodsburg. I remember that very well.”

His five children—Thomas Dedman ’65, Libby Dedman Young ’68, the late Anne Dedman Hunt ’73, Chuck Dedman ’75, and Nick Dedman ’75 (and most of their spouses)—all went to Centre, followed by two of his grandchildren.

As the citation honoring him noted, Dedman’s “devotion to Centre and . . . his legacy of gentility and genuine kindness” make the College proud to name him a Distinguished Alumnus.


Hometown Success
Gordon Davidson ’49 decided to become a lawyer when he played a district attorney in a junior high play.

“I kind of liked it,” he says of the role. “I made up my mind in the ninth grade what my career path would be, and I never wavered.”

After earning one law degree at the University of Louisville and another at Yale, Davidson spent a year clerking for Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed. He could have gone anywhere, but he decided to return to Louisville.

“I always had this idea that unless you made it in your hometown, you had never really made it,” he says.

“I had offers from New York and Chicago, and California, at a lot more money, too, I might add. But my wife and I wanted to come back to Kentucky and do something here.”

And so they did.

Davidson went on to become managing partner in Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs, the biggest law firm in the state. He’s been involved in almost every possible civic activity, from healthcare to downtown revitalization, and received almost every civic award, from the Louisville Chamber of Commerce’s Gold Cup to the Kentucky Bar Association’s Most Outstanding Lawyer award.

And although he never had further theatrical aspirations for himself, he did devote countless hours to supporting the arts. When then-Gov. Julian Carroll wanted to build a major arts center in the state, for example, he turned to Davidson to make it so. The result: The magnificent Kentucky Center for the Arts.

“I would say that’s been one of the greatest successes I’ve participated in,” Davidson allows.

Davidson has also devoted much of his considerable energy to Centre as a trustee, fundraiser, and all-around get-it-done guy. His wife is Gerry Geiger Davidson ’48; one of their two children is Stuart Davidson ’86.

“Centre was an important factor in my life and in my wife’s life,” he says. “Of course, it gave us the opportunity to meet, but it also gave us a philosophy of life that has endured with us and has made, I think, for the very, very happy life that we’ve had. If I had it to do over again, I would not go anywhere else.”

Defending America

A career in defense might seem an unlikely choice for a young woman from Eastern Kentucky in the 1950s. But it worked for Shelba Proffitt ’57.

For more than 30 years, she has helped develop the nation’s strategic missile defense program.

“Technology is my love,” she says, and her work has put her on the leading edge of defense technology. Currently she is the Army Program Executive Officer for Air and Missile Defense Huntsville, Ala., where she manages the Patriot missile project.

After studying chemistry and physics at Centre, Proffitt earned advanced degrees at the University of Alabama-Huntsville and Southeastern Institute of Technology.

She credits her first job in the defense industry to a Centre connection: Tom Neely ’51, who hired her and served as her research mentor at Thiokol Corp. “He’s the one who started me in missiles,” she says.

Proffitt was a member of Wernher von Braun’s space team and held key positions with the NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the Army. In 1990 she became the first woman named to the Senior Executive Service at the U.S. Army Strategic Defense Command, one of the Army’s highest civilian posts.

Yet Proffitt would rather mention the five years (1995-2000) she spent working with anti-ballistic missiles as program manager for the Army’s National Missile Defense Program. “We came up with the technology, built the interceptors and radars, did the field testing, and proved it,” she says. “This put us in a position to defend the United States.”

Proffitt attributes her success to hard work and education. “The professors at Centre opened doors for me,” she says.

“I’m from a coal-mining family in Eastern Kentucky,” she adds. “I am proof that you can do anything you want if you just work hard enough.”


Media Mogul
In 1992 Rhonda Reeves ’87 was working for the Center for Law and Justice, hanging out in the Lexington music scene, and, as she noted in her fifth-year reunion questionnaire, “collecting PEZ dispensers.” In her spare time she did a bit of freelancing for a little alternative monthly called Ace.

Nine years later Ace is a weekly with 52,000 readers and a Web site.

And Reeves is its owner, publisher, and editor. She bought the paper in January 2001 from Village Voice Media (as in the New York Village Voice).

Much of Reeves’ life during this time is—quite literally—an open book. Just pick up a copy of Reality Truck, Vol. 1. Ostensibly a collection of her Ace columns, it also serves nicely as a rather personal diary.

And since she is a writer, perhaps it’s best to turn to her own words:

“Growing up in the shadow of the southern literary tradition (and having completed both my bachelor’s and master’s concentration in the southern literary renaissance), I have always felt some pressure to probe my soul to see if the great American novel is in there somewhere.

“It turns out, it isn’t.

“But I do believe I owe at least part of my storytelling impulses to the South’s rich literary tradition, and for that I’m grateful.

“A career in journalism to me has proven to be the next-best-thing to being a full-time student—which is probably the career I’d choose, if I had endless reserves of time and money.

“As a writer and editor and publisher, this job is a never-ending education. Over the years, I’ve now taken crash courses in everything from public policy to agrarian economies to domestic violence to welfare reform and local issues which range from arts administration to baseball stadiums to factory hog farming and historic zoning bureaucracies.

“I also have the unparalleled luxury of coming into my office and discovering that a new job awaits me everyday.

“Ace isn’t just what I do, it’s who I am.”


On with the Show
John Ellison Conlee ’90 began using his middle name professionally so as not to be confused with another actor called John Conlee (not to mention the country music singer).

But there was no confusing his popularity in the Broadway hit The Full Monty. Conlee’s performance as the chubby best friend earned him accolades from opening night. USA Today called him “irresistibly endearing.” Sidney Poitier came backstage to offer congratulations after a show. And Talk, GQ, and Vogue all lined up to put his image in their pages.

In May, Conlee received his first Tony Award nomination, for best featured actor in a musical.

“Being nominated for a Tony was great,” he says. “It was a combination of silly and deadly serious that I really enjoyed.”

It’s too bad that his nomination came the year The Producers swept all the awards. But never mind. With his talents, he’ll have plenty of chances ahead.

Conlee starts rehearsals for the London production of The Full Monty in January. (Travelers note: the show opens in March.) Fans on this side of the Atlantic can catch him at the multiplex in the John Cusack vehicle Serendipity. Conlee plays Artie, the cameraman.