Today's Featured Biography

 
Eric Freyfogle

My journey from Decatur in 1970 took me first to college in Pennsylvania, to Lehigh University in Bethlehem, where I majored in history and benefited from an Army ROTC scholarship. My Army training included summer camp in 1973 at Fort Riley, Kansas, where I got to hang out with classmate Nick Greanias, also in attendance. I went on to law school at the University of Michigan. In 1976 I married classmate Jane Moore, who was just completing her graduate degree in social work at Indiana. We settled in Alexandria, Virginia, while I was assigned to the Pentagon, as an Army JAG officer, doing work for the Army General Counsel. After that 4 year tour ended we moved to Indianapolis, where I worked as an associate in a downtown law firm and Jane continued her social work career. My academic leanings soon got the better of me and three years later I joined the faculty of the College of Law at the U of I in Champaign. We bought a home in Urbana, where we lived for 15 years before moving to a second home, also in Urbana. So we've been rather sedentary.

My law teaching and the scholarship associated with it has mostly had to do with property law, natural resources (esp. water and wildlife) law, environmental law, land use and the like. I've been active in the work of conservation groups for years, mostly in Illinois but with a recent stint with the National Wildlife Federation. My basketball playing, alas, never improved, but I still shoot around on the court regularly. Particularly since shifting to a more part-time status at the law school, I've had more time to devote to various activities, including fingerstyle guitar playing and birding (though I'm not at all in the league of Joe Milosevich when it comes to birding). Jane and I have had the good fortune to do a fair amount of international travel, including lengthy stays in South Africa and Cambridge, England. Our two children, Luke and Anna, both came to us by adoption from South Korea, and we've visited that country with them twice. We make an annual pilgrimage to the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota for canoeing and lakeside reading. Otherwise we are deeply rooted in the Champaign-Urbana community and enjoy occasional visits back to Decatur. We are anxious to see classmates at the reunion, and very grateful to those who are organizing it.

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Click here for a PDF File of group photos from the 2021 Reunion
Photos from SDHS Reunion 2021 2MB.pdf