An Olympic rower, a playwright and a video game designer were inducted into the Alumni Wall of Fame at Lake Forest High School on April 21.
Pioneer Press spoke with each of the three honorees before the induction ceremony. They shared their life stories and the high school lessons that led them down their respective paths.
Carol Brown, Olympic rower
Carol Brown, who graduated in 1971, competed with the first U.S. women’s rowing team at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. She describes her senior year at LFHS as transformative.
“I got involved with an environmental recycling program called CLAW (Clean Land Air Water),” Brown said. “It wasn’t without a lot of opposition and angst and time and teamwork that we built it into a school club.”
Students took on shifts. When there was broken glass in a parking lot or papers blowing around, a student would deal with it.
“It taught me things I didn’t realize at the time,” Brown said. “What is commitment and teamwork and building a group of people you can trust to follow through. All the things that were part and parcel of being on an athletic team.”
This was in the early days of the environmental movement. For early celebrations of Earth Day, the club was able to bring in national speakers.
“The head of the Sierra Club came to Lake Forest and he stayed at my house because we didn’t have any money,” Brown said. “It was just a fledgling organization then.”
Brown credits her experience in leading CLAW with distinguishing her from other applicants to Princeton University.
It was at Princeton that she got involved with team sports.
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“There was a law in Illinois banning girls sports when I was in high school,” Brown said. “Until Title IX passed when I was at college.”
Brown enjoyed being outside and on the water so she joined the crew team.
“We had a very strong team spirit because we were not welcome at the boating house,” Brown said. “We weren’t allowed to use the bathroom at the boat house. The more the men said you can’t do it, the more the women said ‘don’t tell us no, just get out of our way.'”
In her junior year she qualified for the U.S. women’s rowing team, the first time the U.S. fielded a women’s team.
“The European countries had been competing on a very high level in international competition for years,” Brown said. “We didn’t know how fast they were, that they were on [performance enhancing] drugs.”
The team came in third in the 1976 Olympics, winning a bronze medal.
Brown competed in the next two Olympics and is still active with an Olympian and Paralympian alumni association. After the 1984 Olympics, she first worked in economic development in Seattle and for the last 15 years has done finance and operations work for nonprofits.
Currently, she works at the University of Chicago where she supports fundraising for medicine and biological sciences.
Her advice to current students at Lake Forest High School is to try something new and give it your best shot.
“The finish line isn’t always where you think it’s going to be,” Brown said.
That willingness to try new things may have led to this new honor.
“She is a strong woman from a time when these things were not so common,” said Joy Murawski, who chairs the Wall of Fame Committee.
Ann Noble, playwright
Ann Noble, who graduated from Lake Forest High School in 1989, was interested in theater by age three.
“As a little kid I was always performing plays and writing plays,” Noble said. “I’ve always been a sort of storyteller.”
At Lake Forest High School she took part in every play from her sophomore year through graduation.
“I was on the pom-pom squad,” Noble said. “There were AP classes. I had great teachers who were smart and challenged me. A lot of kids don’t have arts and we had a ton of it.”
Noble earned a bachelor’s degree in theater from Northwestern University and then attempted to find acting work in Chicago.
“I was very disappointed,” Noble said. “I felt there was no way into the theater scene there.”
Around that time she wrote a play titled “And Neither Have I Wings to Fly.” She submitted it to area theaters. It gained some interest, but Noble wouldn’t have any control over how the play was done.
So instead, she co-founded Seanachai Theatre Company, which still exists although the name was changed to Irish Theatre Company of Chicago.
“It was such a big hit and ran for ten months,” Noble said. “We actually made money on it.”
In 2003 Noble moved to Los Angeles.
“My plays in Chicago had garnered enough success that I was able to get an agent,” Noble said. “She wanted to bring me out to LA to pitch TV ideas. Like many people who move out to L.A. you move out with all these hopes and dreams and find out its it’s not what you hoped for.”
So she went back to theater.
Today she is a member of Anteus Theatre Company in Los Angeles, which does classical theater. She’s had eight plays produced and has acted in numerous productions both in Chicago and Los Angeles.
She also worked on two web series.
“I write a lot about family,” Noble said. “How the microcosm of family affects everything. I write a lot about death. About how family members deal with death or until death.”
Noble also volunteers as a teacher of Shakespeare and storytelling to incarcerated youth and recently released young adults.
“You can give them a safe place to tell their story,” Noble said.
While Noble is successful as both a playwright and actor, she says she doesn’t make a lot of money.
“I heard a commencement speech by (author) Neil Gaiman,” she said. “‘If you want to be an artist, make good art.’ You have to be comfortable living on the margins. I’ve stopped worrying about monetary success. If I follow my path, I always get provided for.”
Her takeaway for present students at Lake Forest High School reflects that belief.
“In this day and age we have a warped idea of what success means,” Noble said. “It’s a great thing to have money and security but if you are willing to not have complete security, you can do great things.”
Murawski said the Wall of Fame Committee admired Noble’s “creative commitment to her art” and mentioned the school had recently produced her adaptation of “Little Women.”
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John Vignocchi, video game designer
John Vignocchi, who graduated in 1998, turned an interest in video games into a career.
It all started when he was a student in the early 1990s at Lake Forest Country Day where he and a small group of people created a website about video gaming
After he transferred to Lake Forest High School, he continued to run the website, which turned into a small business.
“Nothing in school ever interested me,” Vignocchi said. “I was always into computers and I was always into video games.”
A gaming entity called IGN picked up his website and paid Vignocchi ad revenue.
As part of running the website, Vignocchi would interview game developers at Midway Games of Chicago, which developed such games at Mortal Kombat and NBA Blitz. That turned into an internship.
“I was doing everything from taking notes to picking up executives dry cleaning to giving my feedback on the latest and greatest games,” Vignocchi said.
After he graduated from Lake Forest College, Midway Games offered him full-time work. He did production, design, product strategy and – get ready to be envious – play testing of new games.
In 2008, he left Midway and worked briefly for a video game start-up before moving to the Disney Corporation. At Disney he helped produce Disney Infinity, which has brought in more than $1.5 billion in revenue, according to news reports.
Vignocchi’s takeaway for present day students at Lake Forest High School is to follow their interests.
“Everyone should be following their dreams and the things they are passionate about and staying true to themselves and their character,” Vignocchi said.
“He excelled pretty quickly into a profession that is pretty relevant to students today in the technology world,” Murawski said. “He was an innovator as well.”
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