Julie Wheeler Fraser

After graduation, I attended the College of William and Mary and decided towards the end of college to enter the ministry, enrolling at Princeton Seminary. While at Princeton, I met and married my husband, Gordon. I was ordained a Lutheran pastor in 1984, and served an urban congregation in New Jersey for 10 years. In 1995, our family moved to a small college town in rural western Pennsylvania where Gordon assumed a position in college fund-raising.

From this base of operation, Gordon continues to work as a development officer, though now for the University of Pittsburgh. Across our time in western PA, my work has included serving on staff at the local Lutheran congregation, as campus pastor at Thiel College, and on the staff of the NWPA Synod (ELCA) as Assistant to the Bishop for Social Ministry Concerns. I completed my Master of Sacred Theology degree in 2004. Since 2005, I have served as the chaplain at Bethesda Children's Home in nearby Meadville. There I am the pastor to 76 teenagers from Pennsylvania's inner cities who come for residential treatment of behavior problems and mental health concerns.

We hear every night at the dinner table of the daily drama and angst of current high school life experienced by my two teenagers, and I imagine I felt the same way and/or created drama aplenty of my own between 1971-1975. I do have some unpleasant memories--among them the hot pants and short skirts pictured in the photos my mother brings out periodically to show my teenage daughter when we are arguing about clothes! But all these years later, what I mostly choose to remember are the good things: a nice new high school, teachers who were kind, modular scheduling, the Drill Team, the Knight Knotes, a spring trip to France with the French Class, dances and proms, and a variety of friends with whom to share these experiences. I don't return to Roanoke very often, but it's been nice when I do to run into former classmates and catch up. I hope your lives have turned out well and happily in the years since as has my own.