Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 13, 1990 TAG: 9005130244
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DEBORAH EVANS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Among the 381 graduates at the Roanoke Civic Center Coliseum was Joseph Alisaukas, a former police officer turned horticulturist. Alisaukas also was one of four student marshals, a designation given to those students with the highest grade point averages.
Alisaukas, who believes he inherited his mother's green thumb, was a policeman in Chicago and Roanoke for nearly 15 years before he decided to pursue his interest in horticulture.
The 43-year-old Alisaukas jokingly calls himself "a career student." He attended seminary for about three years before becoming a policeman.
While a police officer, he took courses in sociology, psychology and family development.
Those courses prepared Alisaukas for a counseling job with Total Action Against Poverty, which he took because he wanted to be able to spend more time with his children.
Along the way, Alisaukas also earned a bachelor's degree in family and child development from Virginia Tech.
Horticulture is not only "a personal therapy or meditation" for Alisaukas, he plans to use his expertise in counseling the teen-agers he works with through Mental Health Services.
Alisaukas said that while he is finished with school for a while, he is always open to new challenges.
And challenges are what commencement speaker David M. Gring presented to Alisaukas and the other graduates during his address.
Gring, president of Roanoke College, borrowed lines from the movie "Dead Poets Society," to urge the graduates to "seize the day" and "make your lives extraordinary" by using their careers to tackle problems in health care, world hunger, human rights and the environment.
Because of inadequacies in the Medicare system, "from one end of Virginia to the other, we are unable to provide basic prenatal care and infant delivery to all of those who are in need."
World hunger has left the best minds and policy makers in a stalemate while millions die each year of starvation and malnutrition, Gring said.
"Even in this bread basket of the world, you are not immune from the ravages of homelessness and hunger that haunt the lives of millions of Americans, some of whom are our closest neighbors right here in the Roanoke Valley," he said.
The environmental science graduates were urged to find ways to stop what Gring described as the deterioration of the ozone layer, irreversible water and atmospheric pollution and the devastation of rain forests.
On human rights, Gring said "in our own country we are repeatedly embarrassed by our own neglect involving unjust distinctions made on the basis of gender, religion, color or race."
"This world cries out for the talents each and every one of you to work to make this world a better place," he said.
Sixty-four of the new graduates will join 177 other Virginia Western graduates already enrolled at Roanoke College, Gring said.
by CNB