Emily Warren

Emily Warren received a $500 award from the Fr. Yunker Scholarship Fund in 2009. Although her family is originally from Springfield, Emily has lived in Pennsylvania since kindergarten. (Grandmother Sharon Darran, who still lives in Springfield, helped us locate Emily.)

Emily’s scholarship helped her study abroad in Rome, Italy for three months while a student of supply chain management in the A.J. Palumbo School of Business at Duquesne University, a Catholic university in downtown Pittsburgh, PA.

During Emily’s term in Rome, she toured many parts of Italy, as well as several other European countries. After graduating from Duquesne in 2011 with a B.S. in Supply Chain Management, she now works as a district manager for discount grocer ALDI, Inc., in the Pittsburgh area. (Many of us in Springfield are familiar with ALDI, as well.) Emily grew up and went to school in a small, northeastern PA town called Bloomsburg, where she graduated from Bloomsburg High School.

Diane D. Baksys of Springfield received a $1,000 Fr. Yunker Scholarship in 1979 for her studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she earned a B.A. in Psychology and an M.A. in Library and Information Science. Over the years, her career in library science has included positions at the Illinois Veterans Home, Quincy; Lincoln Land Community College; and the Illinois Department of Nuclear Safety.
Diane has also been a writer/editor for a local newsletter, Reiki Spirit, and for the Dr. Na Zhai Clinic in Springfield.
Many will remember her as a fellow member and officer of Springfield’s Lithuanian-American Club in its early days, during the late 1980s and the 1990s.
The fourth of six daughters, Diane is older than her identical twin sister, Pam, by only three minutes. She attended Blessed Sacrament Grade School from 1965 to 1974 and graduated from Southeast High School in 1978.
In her free time, Diane enjoys walking her pet Labrador retriever Shadow, reading works of fiction and psychology research journals, puttering in her yard, and doing creative writing. She is currently exploring academic programs in children and family therapy and bioenergetic psychoanalysis.

Elaine (Manning) Kuhn

Elaine (Manning) Kuhn of Springfield received a $1,000 Fr. Yunker Scholarship in 1974. It helped fund her associate’s degree at Springfield College in Illinois. Elaine went on to earn a B.A. in Spanish with a minor in English, as well as a secondary education certificate at Illinois College in Jacksonville.

The mother of three adult sons (James, Michael and Jonathan) and a grandmother of four, Elaine has been a Spanish teacher at Springfield High School for almost 20 years. Earlier in her career, she taught at Whitehall’s North Greene High School and at Williamsville High School. Along the way, she has been a world traveler, visiting 14 foreign countries, mainly in Europe and Central America. Another of Elaine’s special achievements was earning her master’s degree in Reading and Literacy from Benedictine University in 2007.

Years before Elaine ever heard Fr. Yunker’s name, her family had a tragic connection to the long-time pastor of St. Vincent de Paul Lithuanian Catholic Church. In the 1930s, her great-grandmother, Anna Sleveski Mazika, was killed by a hit-and-run driver on Ninth Street as she was walking home from confession with Fr. Yunker. The priest was one of the first to come to her aid.

Anna (Sleveski) Mazika and her grand-daughter Lillian Kavirt Trello, Elaine Kuhn’s great-grandmother and aunt

Elaine says she became a Spanish teacher because of the mysterious appeal of listening to her mother, Pearl Bernice (Kavirt) Manning, and aunt, Lillian (Kavirt) Trello, speak to their mother in Lithuanian. “Sometimes it was only words and phrases, and although I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, I always thought, ‘that’s really cool; they’re having such a good time.’ I think that’s why I had a special interest in foreign languages and travel abroad – why learning and teaching another language always appealed to me.” A Springfield native, Elaine attended St. Joseph Grade School and Ursuline Academy.