Twenty years into a successful career as an executive with Eastman Kodak's health care division, Catherine Burzik could have stayed right where she was, but the company she'd been devoted to all those years was moving in a new direction, and she wondered if it was...
As a teenager, Marta Prada Peláez found herself in foreign territory. Leaving her family"s home in bustling Bogotá, Colombia, she was to continue her education under the careful watch of nuns at a convent school off the map in a tiny Minnesota town not far from the...
Linda Hardberger has her sights set on a watery horizon. "In a year and a half, we'll be back on that boat," she says with firm determination. She is referring to the 42-foot craft on which she and her husband, Phil Hardberger, spent more than a year sailing the...
Years ago, if you'd told Ursula Pari about the job she has today, she'd have insisted that you must be thinking of someone else. As the 5 and 10 p.m. TV news anchor for KSAT, Pari is familiar to San Antonio viewers. Delivering the day's top news stories, she's...
As I prepared for my interview with Diane Gottsman, the founder and director of The Protocol School of Texas, my mind started whirring. Earlier that morning she had changed our meeting from a coffee locale to breakfast at a restaurant. I didn’t think anything of it at...
Dr. Karen Fields' right arm is in a cast, so she offers her left one in greeting. She is a bit embarrassed to explain how the arm got broken but eventually confesses that she was trying to ride a trikke, the new three-wheel contraption with no pedals that can be,...
On the wall of Elizabeth Ames Jones' office in Austin is a huge geological map of our state showing what's normally hidden from view — the underground terrain. Jones, who is the chair of the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC) seems to derive genuine pleasure from...
One of the first things you notice upon entering Sonia Rodriguez's office is a model of the human spine and hipbones. It's not something you expect to see in a lawyer's office, but it is relevant to her line of work. "Right now I represent an individual who was...
As a teenager, Carolyn Labatt dreamed of a career in investments. To be sure, it wasn't a typical "What will I be when I grow up?" sort of vision, especially for a girl coming of age in the early 1970s. But her grandfather had been a stockbroker, and she was attracted...
Like her father, Suzanne Cheever Goudge never assumed she would work for her father out of college. With her bachelor's degree in accounting from the University of Texas in hand, she applied at various accounting firms, but elected to stick with her first love, the...
Artists and former advertising executives Lionel and Kathy Sosa might have invented a new concept. The house they renovated downtown at 126 Lavaca St. is a little gem, where art, living quarters and a business showroom coexist in perfect functional and aesthetic...
For Erin Barry, home is where you live right now. Married to San Antonio Spurs guard Brent Barry, she's followed her husband as his basketball career has placed him on five different teams in 11 years. With each new city, she's determined to cultivate the sort of...
The little world of childhood … is a model of the greater world. The more intensely the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Carl Gustav Jung Nothing...
Ana Maria Lecea, founder, presi-dent and CEO of Professional Performance Development Group, believes overcoming obstacles and turning them into opportunities is the world's best confidence builder. And she is a very confident woman. "Women have had to overcome...
Kay Chiodo knows firsthand that bread cast upon troubled waters may indeed return after many days. She has spent much of her life responding to the bread of kindness that a little group of deaf kids gave her when she needed it most, and the returns have been enormous....
Colleen Derk's face is a familiar one to many San Antonians: She hosted a local TV home and lifestyle program and a movies and entertainment segment for a local TV network affiliate, among other projects that kept her in the public eye. While she was recognizable, her...
Five mornings a week she is the anchor of the News 4 WOAI Today show and host of the station's San Antonio Living, this city's No. 1 lifestyle program for women. "Then, in the afternoons, I turn into a taxi," she jokes. That's when she becomes just "Mommy" to her two...
If her family had paid closer attention to the road signs along the way, they would not have expected Julie Smith Nelson to follow the example of her mother, a traditional, if somewhat feisty, stay-at-home mom. Nelson, who has always had her own ideas and the drive to...
