RHS Hall of Fame Presentation for Guy Peterson

January 10, 2019

 

     Good morning! My name is Pam Morey Houfek and I am a graduate of Riverview and a Hall of Fame Board member. I will facilitate the induction of two Riverview High School graduates: Mr. Guy Peterson and Mr. Chris Wheeler. 

     Special guests attending with Guy are his wife, Cindi, and his mother, Joan Peterson. 

     Special guest attending with Chris is his brother, Scott. 

     For both inductions, their friends, Cheryl Stanzione and Kim Wheeler are here. 

     In addition, I would like to recognize the Board members of the Hall of Fame who were able to come this morning: Jo Ivey, Patricia Martin, Mike Sweeting, and Gary Sprinz.

     The purpose of the RHS Hall of Fame is to recognize and honor outstanding RHS graduates for their personal and professional lifetime achievements that extend the legacy of Riverview High School. Following each presentation, our honorees may wish to make a few comments and are very interested in answering questions. We will have about 15 minutes for each induction as students need to return to regular classes at the end of this period.

    Our first honoree is Guy Peterson.

    Mr. Peterson graduated from Riverview High School in 1972 and is a lifelong Florida resident.  He received his Bachelor of Design Degree in Architecture with Honors from the University of Florida in 1976.  He went on to earn his Master of Arts in Architecture Degree with High Honors from the University of Florida Graduate Design Program in 1978.

    As President and Principal Architect of Guy Peterson | Office for Architecture, Inc., he directs a wide range of activities for the firm including overall responsibility for project design. A modernist in his approach, the language of his architecture is honesty and simplicity.  His work is poetic, human, evokes emotion, and comes from the heart.  Through his use of color, indigenous materials, light and shadow, he has derived an aesthetic that results in a clean, sustainable and delightful architecture.  

    Mr. Peterson has received over 90 design awards and special recognitions for his work since the inception of his practice in 1980.  Most recently in 2016 Mr. Peterson was awarded the AIA Florida Gold Medal. This is the highest award that AIA Florida can bestow on one of its members and only one may be given in a year.  In 2013, Guy Peterson | OFA was awarded the AIA Florida Firm of the Year Award.  This award is in recognition of their contribution to the architectural profession in design, education, community service and their support of the AIA. Mr. Peterson became the only architect from Florida to be elected into the prestigious College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 2003. He became one of the youngest architects in Florida in 1998 to win the Medal of Honor for Design from the Florida Association of the American Institute of Architects. 

    Among the numerous awards, Mr. Peterson has received, several notable ones include:

·     the Distinguished Architecture Alumnus Award from the University of Florida School of Architecture, 

·     the prestigious Civic Achievement Award from the American Jewish Committee, and

·     the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Sarasota Architectural Foundation.   

    In the fall of 2008, Mr. Peterson became the Ivan H. Smith visiting professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Florida and in 2009 he joined the faculty full time as an Adjunct Associate Professor. Mr. Peterson currently serves as Adjunct Associate Professor for the new University of Florida Citylab Sarasota.  This is a satellite graduate program for the University of Florida Graduate School of Architecture.  In April of 2017, Mr. Peterson was inducted into the Sarasota Community Video Archives Hall of Fame. This is considered one of the most prestigious community awards given in Sarasota.   In 2018, he was selected by Florida Trend magazine as one of its FLORIDA 500, the 500 most influential business leaders in Florida. 

      Mr. Peterson belongs to a number of professional and community organizations.  He is an active member of the University of Florida School of Architecture Professional Advisory Committee, a member of the AIA Florida Regional Fellows Committee representing the Florida Gulf Coast Chapter of the AIA and is a past Trustee for the Florida Foundation for Architecture. He also serves as an advisor to the Center for Architecture Sarasota, a community partner with the University of Florida Citylab Sarasota whose focus is the preservation and celebration of the built environment. 

     Mr. Peterson is now rounding out his busy career by dedicating time to pursue his interests in travel, reading, spending time with family and hiking.  Today we celebrate all these life-time accomplishments and induct Mr. Peterson into the RHS Hall of Fame as a renowned graduate of the Class of 1972.

 

 

 

Riverview High School Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame

Induction 2/20/2020: Tom Shroder

 

         Tom Shroder was born in New York City in 1954, the son of a novelist and a builder, and the grandson of MacKinlay Kantor, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his civil war novel “Andersonville.”  After his family moved to Sarasota, Tom attended Riverview High School his sophomore and junior year. In 1972 he did forego his senior year at Riverview and enrolled in the University of Florida.  Here he became Editor of the 22,000 circulation student daily newspaper despite the fact that he was an anthropology major.  After his UF graduation in 1976, he wrote national award-winning features for the Fort Myers News Press, the Tallahassee Democrat, The Cincinnati Enquirer and the Miami Herald. At the Miami Herald he became editor of Tropic magazine, which earned two Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure.

          Tom Shroder has been an award-winning journalist, writer and editor for nearly 40 years.  He was the editor of the Washington Post Magazine between 2001 and 2009.  He oversaw staff writer Gene Weingarten’s two Pulitzer Prize-winning feature stories, Fiddler in the Subway (2008) and Fatal Distraction (2010). Shroder’s The Hunt for Bin Laden (2011) based on 15 years of reporting by the Washington Post, became the #1-selling Kindle Single on Amazon.com.

 Mr. Shroder is an accomplished author. In 1999,  he wrote a classic study of the border between science and mysticism: Old Souls: Compelling Evidence From Children Who Remember Past Lives. In 2011 he was a co-author of  Fire on the Horizon: the Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster.  In 2014 he was the sole author of Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy and the Power to Heal, which is a mind-altering account of the resurgent research into the medical use of psychedelic drugs.   His most recent book, ghost-written for Robert O’Neill, the The Operator Firing the Shots that Killed Osama bin Laden and My Years as a SEAL Team Warrior, which spent seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His new book The most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived: A True Story of my Family, chronicles his search to discover the truth of the life of his grandfather, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist MacKinlay Kantor. 

In addition to being an author and editor of narrative journalism, Shroder is one of the foremost editors of humor in the country. He has edited humor columns by Dave Barry, Gene Weingarten and Tony Kornheiser, as well as conceived and launched the internationally syndicated comic strip, Cul de Sac, by Richard Thompson. With humorist Barry and novelists Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard, he concocted and edited “Naked Came the Manatee,” a satirical serial novel that became a New York Times bestseller.