About Rebecca Boever
Articles written by Rebecca Boever
The Impromptu Marathoner
Personal injury attorney Marc Madonia ran 26.2 miles on a dareIt was only supposed to be an 8K. Yet there he was, Marc Madonia, running the entire 1997 Philadelphia Marathon, all because of a dare. “I agreed to do it, and I don’t know what I was thinking at the time, especially since it was six weeks away and I hadn’t trained,” says Madonia, now a personal injury attorney with Lewis & Daggett. Even though Madonia recalls it as a miserable experience, he was inspired by the support he received from complete strangers. “You can hear people …
Q&A with Charles Becton
Charles Becton takes nothing for granted. Consider his first words as he reached the podium to accept the presidency of the North Carolina Bar Association last summer: "Thirty-two steps! I counted them, and I wish everybody could have walked those 32 steps in my shoes. It is both the most glorious and most humbling of experiences to be escorted to this room, to this stage." Here, the Becton Slifkin & Bell personal injury attorney discusses coming of age during the civil rights movement, …
Oh, Her Humanity!
What’s more important than being a good lawyer? Being a good person, according to Swartz Campbell attorney Kori Connelly. With her labor and employment practice and seat on Habitat for Humanity Philadelphia’s board of directors, she’s accomplishing both. Connelly’s interest in Habitat started in 1997 after she accompanied a friend, Shelly Halloran, then-executive director of the organization’s Germantown affiliate, to a rough neighborhood filled with abandoned houses. Five …
Stadium Filler
Anthony Romano is pure Kansas City. Born and raised in KC, now he’s raising his own family there and spent the past year at any local sports fan’s dream job. In 2005 he was appointed to sit on the five-member Jackson County Sports Complex Authority. “A lot of my friends have said, ‘This is natural for you,’ because sports is my first love,” says Romano. “Kansas City is very special to me, too. I’m one of those guys who didn’t leave town.” Romano was appointed by the …
On the Road
In the middle of nowhere in Montana, John Blakely hopped out of his motor home to switch places with his wife, who had been driving, and check on the car attached to the back. Seconds later, standing on the side of the road, he watched his wife and motor home disappear into the distance. “I guess she misunderstood what I was saying, and when I got out and was back checking the car, she took off,” says Blakely. “She didn’t realize I was missing for at least 20 minutes. “I thought …
Of Mice and Men
John Burke and his knockout practiceMice: pesky, disease-ridden rodents leaving droppings in your kitchen cupboards, or benevolent, life-saving creatures? John Burke says the latter. He has seen firsthand the potential of a mouse to predict prescription-drug side effects, treat osteoporosis and prevent obesity. With an undergrad degree in biochemical engineering and a stint as a high school chemistry teacher, Burke would seem a natural for donning a lab coat and playing scientist with these mice. Instead, this Greenberg …
Being Ben Affleck
Thad Kodish had completed his first year at Emory Law School and was interning at Needle & Rosenberg when he received an offer he couldn’t refuse — the chance to work as an extra on the set of a Ben Affleck movie. “It all started off very benignly,” Kodish says about the call he got from a family friend to work on locally filmed Forces of Nature. But what started out to be a short-term gig nearly turned into three months when he was asked to stay and serve as the star’s …
Ain't No Mountain High Enough
It was 2 o’clock in the morning and Tom Henry was 18,500 feet above sea level in the Bolivian mountains, heading for the summit of Illimani on a ridge 2 feet wide. It was dark, so he had no idea that there was nothing between him and a 2,000-foot freefall. “We didn’t know what we were crossing,” says Henry. “The guides didn’t tell us.” The trip down was in the daylight and when the climbers, who were all attached to the same rope, came back to that 100-meter-long …
Daughter of the Revolution
Christine Walczyk celebrates pioneering women attorneysWhat would you do if you arrived at a new job and found there was only one bathroom — and it was for the opposite sex? Susie Sharp, the first female chief justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina in 1974, had to contend with just that. Before she was chief justice she was a superior court judge — the first female judge in the state — in 1949, and upon learning of her appointment, Burke County officials refused to alter the solitary bathroom, which consisted of a sink and a urinal. …
Son of the Vampire
Bela Lugosi took his famous father’s advice and steered clear of show bizThe entertainment business can suck the life right out of an actor. So when Dracula himself advised his son to stay away from the talent side of entertainment, Bela G. Lugosi heeded his father’s warnings. Lugosi, an intellectual property attorney with O’Brien Zarian, practiced in the areas of oil and gas, environmental construction defect and intellectual property for 32 years. But with a name like Bela Lugosi, he couldn’t ignore the lure of Hollywood for long. In 1994 he was one of …
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