Denise Smith Caldon

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My over eighteen years of higher education administration included my work with the Chancellor at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, VP at Mercer University and fifteen years in the Office of the President at Macon State College.

I am the proud Veteran's Widow of a Navy Seabee - whose death in 1996 was certified by the VA as "service-related due to exposure to Agent Orange" while serving in Vietnam. Our oldest son is a Digital Media graduate from GCSU and lives in Macon. Our daughter is a Psychology graduate from Valdosta State who married her college sweetheart. They have blessed me with three incredible grandchildren. Our youngest son is a Naval Chief Petty Officer who was deployed on the USS Stennis, recipient of the “2004 Commanding Officer’s Personal Excellence Award” in Charleston, SC and now a Navy Nuclear Engineer Instructor at Bremerton Naval Base in Washington State.

I co-designed a toy in 1982 that many of you may have had in your homes. I sold the rights to GRACO Children's Products and it was distributed worldwide for 17 years.

I am currently writing a book about our family's sixteen year journey with the VA which was featured nationwide in June 2012 at the website: http://americanwidowproject.org/stories/a-vietnam-veterans-widow/

I recently moved to Monteagle, TN to be closer to my three young grandchildren as the scenery is very much "a little bit of Heaven."

My identical twin sister, Dianne Smith Clark, and Patty Watson Kovacevich, Jamie Iseman Harper and Pam Brackett were commonly known as the "Five Musketeers" as you rarely saw one without the other at any function, party, SOS meeting or weekend. We are still in communications with each other. Patty (who lives in California) and I have kept in contact over the years and speak on the phone often.