4 Alliance grads named Distinguished Alumni

Alliance High School has honored four more graduates as distinguished alumni.

Students took part in the ceremony Monday, both in the audience and performing special music.

Receiving the honor were 1961 graduate Sarah Morris Brown; 1961 graduate Valerie Vanaman; 1959 graduate Joyce Crain; and 1968 graduate Lionel Grimes. The Distinguished Alumni Committee has honored alumni since its first induction in 1967. Over the years, nearly 100 people have received the distinction.

The 2023 inductees were:

Sarah Morris Brown

Brown graduated at age 16 from AHS in 1961. She spent her freshman year at Mount Union College before transferring and graduating from Barnard College at Columbia University in 1965 with a bachelor's degree in history. In 1968, she graduated from Case Western University School of Law, where she was one of only two women in a class of 120. She and Charles E. Brown married and had three children – Charles III, Hannah and Duncan. She worked as a stay-at-home mother while her children were younger, but as they got older, her engagement in public service grew. Brown successfully co-chaired a 6-mill levy campaign for Alliance City Schools and was elected to two terms on Alliance Board of Education. She was president of the board in 1991 when AHS acquired the A-7 Navy Corsair jet, which has been a prominent feature of the school’s campus since.

Brown played a key role in helping to facilitate the auctioning of the closed Franklin School to create a Head Start program at the building. She was also a founding member of the AHS Top 10% Banquet and has served as a board member for the Alliance High School Alumni Association since its inception 35 years ago, including serving as board president for 25 years.

Brown served 25 years as an elected member of the Ohio Republican Party State Central Committee and served as a delegate to four Republican Presidential Conventions.

Joyce Harmon Crain

The 1959 graduate of Alliance High School received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in painting from Bowling Green State University, and a master’s of fine arts from George Washington University in conjunction with the Corocoran Museum in Washington D.C. Among many honors over the years, Crain received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships.

She has excelled in three-dimensional designs using unique materials to illuminate artistic and architectural spaces. Her works have been displayed in many museums, such as the Cleveland Museum of Art. She has also been commissioned by IBM, Apple Computer, AARP, Texas Instruments and UPS Worldwide Logistics. Her work can be seen at JFK Airport, Knoxville Convention Center and the Center for the Arts Fellowship in Chandler, Arizona.

Lionel “Dowdy” Grimes

The 1968 Alliance High graduate was a successful athlete during high school, earning letters in football, basketball and baseball, along with being named an All-Ohio Football Selection. He chose to continue his education and football career at the University of Wyoming. Fourteen Black members of the team were removed from the team after asking coaches for permission to take part in a planned civil rights protest on campus. The group became known as the “Black 14.” After his departure from the University of Wyoming, he attended Findlay University, where he played baseball. Following graduation, Grimes was presented with the opportunity to play for the Pittsburgh Pirates, but he chose to take the corporate route and accepted a position at Ford Motor Co.

Grimes was honored with the Barrier Breaker Award from the National Consortium for Academic and Sports at the University of Central Florida in 2017. In 2019, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the African American Diaspora Studies at the University of Wyoming for his vision, contribution and dedication to the struggle of Black liberation. He was selected as the 2022 Alliance City Schools Pathfinder Award recipient and had the opportunity to present to students at Alliance High School and Alliance Middle School about his experience growing up in town and as a member of the Black 14.

Valerie Vanaman

A 1961 graduate of Alliance High, she continued her undergraduate education at Ohio State University before attending the OSU College of Law in 1964. In 1967, she was designated by the Federal Office of Economic Opportunity as one of the 50 Reginald Herber Fellows to work in legal services following law school. Vanaman traveled to California for the fellowship and worked with the Legal Aid Foundation of Long Beach. During her career, she was a teaching fellow at Harvard Law School in the mid-’70s, and worked with the Children’s Defense Fund. Most of her law career was in California. She is a founding partner of Vanaman-German LLP, the largest law firm in California providing representation for children with disabilities.

Since the beginning of her career, Vanaman has represented people who need help obtaining services from private and governmental agencies and providing legal representation to families with special services. She has received many awards throughout her career, including the Reginald Herber Smith-National Legal Aid Defender Association award for outstanding service and achievement advancing the cause of equal access to justice in 1979 and the Civil Rights Award in 1997.

This article originally appeared on The Alliance Review: 4 Alliance High School grads named Distinguished Alumni