Family Celebrates Three Generations of Love for Rutgers
Rutgers legend has it that lovebirds who hold hands and stroll three times around Passion Puddle will quickly get married.
Laura and Vic Frederico never walked that circuit, but they did meet at Cook College, get married in Voorhees Chapel, and have their wedding photos taken at the pond between the Douglass and Cook campuses that College Ranker named as one of America’s most romantic university spots.
Their 2004 union represented just one valentine in their family’s romance with Rutgers.
Laura, whose last name was then Colodner and who today works for Rutgers as an agriculture and natural resources administrative coordinator, followed in her sister’s footsteps when it came to choosing a college – and finding love.
Her sister, Sue Colodner (now Miller), arrived at the university first in 1992 and was the first in the family to find her future spouse on campus. She and Drew Miller were married in 2002.
Now, each couple has a child attending Rutgers and two more at home who will consider applying to the university.
Recently, Laura and Vic experienced a full-circle moment when they returned to the place where they were married to see their daughter, Annie Frederico — a first-year political science major — perform with the Voorhees Choir.
“When I walked out of that chapel the first time, I never could have imagined we would be back there watching our daughter sing,” said Vic, a plant science graduate who is superintendent of the golf course at Tavistock Country Club.
Both sets of parents encouraged their children to attend their alma mater for a top-notch education that would keep them close to home. Staying in New Jersey seemed less appealing to the two students — until they realized its advantages. For instance, Annie recently returned to Moorestown to watch the Super Bowl with her family.
“Annie’s dorm room is 500 yards from my wife’s office,” Vic added, “so they have coffee or breakfast at least once a week.”
Likewise, with a job as a child study team social worker in Franklin Township, Sue is close enough to campus to regularly visit her son, Ethan Miller, an Honors College sophomore majoring in engineering.
That proximity brings back warm memories for the sisters, Laura and Sue. During their days at Rutgers, their mother, the late Karen Ahern — who had previously earned a master’s degree in social work at the school — not only worked nearby but lived in New Brunswick.
“There were frequent Sunday night dinners where the four of us would meet at mom's on Alexander Street for spaghetti with chicken,” Laura said.
The tradition meant a lot to Vic.
“I come from an Italian family, and Sunday nights were a big deal for me,” he said. “That was when we would spend time together, and to have that at college was really cool.”
Laura met Vic in 1997 at the Cook Student Center, where he worked at the information desk. Laura, who was majoring in environmental policy, institutions, and behavior, often stopped there for breaks while patrolling the Cook and Douglass campuses on horseback as a student security officer.
“We started chatting,” Laura recalled, “and eventually, he asked me to help him study for a final.
A month or two later, he asked me out on a date — to Old Man Rafferty’s.”
Sue met Drew, a psychology major who is now an IT director in the health insurance industry, when they both transferred from a challenging Spanish class into an easier one.
After she graduated, Sue remained at Rutgers to complete a master’s program in social work, which enabled the two couples to coexist in the university community for several years. Together, they went to parties at the fraternity Drew had founded, Alpha Kappa Lambda.
“We’d visit Sue at her apartment in New Brunswick,” Vic said, “and we all started skiing together, because their mother had a cabin in the Adirondacks.”
Now, Annie and Ethan are having similar experiences, sometimes even running into each other unexpectedly and often sharing car rides to and from campus.
With Rutgers constituting such a big part of the family’s fabric – Laura and Sue also have a brother, Kevin Colodner, who earned his medical degree at the former University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (which is now part of Rutgers) – it’s not surprising that the cousins ended up attending the university.
“We went to Rutgers football games when the kids were younger with a lot of Drew's fraternity brothers, and we have gone to basketball games recently, including the one in Madison Square Garden,” said Sue, whose family lives in Hillsborough. “We definitely have a sense of school pride.”
Meanwhile, Laura’s family “went to a lot of Ag Field Days,” she said, “because they had farm animals and plant sales and live music and food. We would meet up with friends who had graduated from Cook with us.”
Now, the younger generation could follow the family’s tradition by meeting their future spouses at Rutgers.
“I would love that,” Vic said. “One advantage of going to a university close to home is that they could meet somebody from New Jersey and decide to stay here.”
