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My wife and I had a nice visit from my college roomie, Steve Sellers. At the start of his (our) senior year, Steve took what turned out to be a two-year break to volunteer at an Episcopal Church mission on the Atlantic coast of Guatemala. He came back to Middletown, graduated with the Class of 1969, and returned to Guatemala, where he met Martha Julia Garcia, a psychologist at INCAP, the Nutritional Institute of Central America and Panamá, a unit of the Pan-American Health Organization. He and Martha Julia married in 1971, so they were married for 54 years when she died in March 2025.

After earning his PhD in anthropology from Brandeis, Steve taught at Washington University in St. Louis for three years and then headed for the left coast to combine his social science know-how, his computer skills, and his fluency in Spanish working for a software start-up in artificial intellegence. After a few years in Palo Alto, he and his family returned to Boston, where, over the years, he worked for a series of companies (as he noted in an email to me, “Sequentially they were IntelliCorp, Gensym, Lilly Software, and SmartCloud, and I think all have by now been swallowed up by larger companies or expired”). 

Martha Julia had retired from her teaching position in child development at Tufts in 2012, and in 2015, she and Steve moved back to Guatemala. Steve’s daughter, Sylvia (a professor of history at Boston College), and her husband and son, and Steve’s son, Oliver (the commissioner for the Environment Department for the City of Boston and advisor to the mayor on the Green New Deal), and his partner, live in the Boston area. For now, Steve will stay in Guatemala, but he will visit Boston frequently. It was a treat to have him visit us in Greensboro.

Our classmate, Jeff Galloway, died February 25. Five days earlier his family announced that Jeff had undergone emergency neurosurgery for a hemorrhagic stroke, and they encouraged people to send videos of support. Many did, expressing hope for his recovery and thanking him for how much he had influenced them over the years.    

Just a month earlier, in January 2026, The New York Times ran a nice article about Jeff. It recounted the wonders of his running career, including that he was on the Olympic team in 1972; he ran marathons in seven decades; and that he had introduced the run-walk-run method that entailed alternating walking and running. It also noted that he was recovering from a devastating heart attack in 2021. At the time the article was written, Jeff was hoping to run the Hawaii marathon this coming summer, a race he won in 1974.     

After the Times article, but before he died, The Washington Post ran an article titled “What is Jeffing? This Walk-Run Technique Can Help You Get in Shape.”  It turns out the run-walk-run method, usually known as “The Galloway Method,” is also known as “Jeffing.” According to the article, “Galloway himself has no particular preference for which term is used. ‘I’m honored to be a verb,’ he said.” (To which, I would add, his honor is sometimes to be a gerund, but, hey, I’ll leave that to Carver and the other English professors.)

The obituary in Runner’s World noted that Jeff “founded running stores, running groups, running camps, and running travel . . . he was one of the sport’s most sought-after speakers.” He was, it went on to say, “probably the most influential single contributor to the evolving running movement in America.” His 1984 book, Galloway’s Book on Running (1984), is “probably the best-selling running-coaching book of all time.”

In 2020, on one of his speaking gigs, Jeff came through Greensboro, and I had a chance to spend some time with him. One of my friends, a serious distance runner, was quite impressed that I knew him (up there with the way I impressed my Deadhead friends when the late John Perry Barlow ’69 once came to town). What impressed me was how genuine and how kind Jeff had remained, just as I remembered him when we graduated in 1967. 

I was always the last person in our class alphabetically (actually, for three of our four years at Wesleyan, I was the alphabetical last for the entire undergraduate student body; our first year, there was a guy whose last name was Zwyvna, but when he graduated, I assumed and kept my place at the end of the alphabetical line). The first in our class alphabetically was Rick Aaronson (right before Andy Ackemann). Rick died on February 24, 2026. An English major and a tenor in the choir, after graduation Rick went to law school at NYU. Then, after nine years with the New York Department of Investigation, he moved to Canada where he spent the next 32 years, mostly working in the music business, first with CBS and then with a company he formed with two colleagues. He also was an accomplished mediator, first in Ontario and in Chicago, where he moved in 2010 to be closer to his children and grandchildren.  He ran triathlons (in 2015 he qualified for the world championships in his age group) and he remained an avid cyclist until about a year before his death. He is survived by his wife, Linda Loving, his three children, and his nine grandchildren. (For a more detailed account, see the obituary.) 

RICHIE ZWEIGENHAFT | rzweigen@guilford.edu