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By Brent Hoffmann, Class of 2005

After retiring from a successful 40-plus-year career as an engineer and manager, you’d think that a newly minted docent would be content to, well, just lead tours.  But not Ron Tevonian, class of 1999, who was awarded emeritus status in 2020.  In addition to leading our historic, modern and Millennium Park tours, he created new websites for seven non-profit organizations including that of the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s docent site.

“For the docent site,” said Ron.  “We started with an on-line mirror of the monthly Docent News – strictly as a tool for informing docents. Over time the site migrated toward active support of operations functions. Among them were behind-the-scenes management of the DPRP process, the establishment of online accounts for the payment of fees for enrichment events, and directories of docents and tour assignments.

“My first website was for Holy Name Cathedral, which we joined shortly after relocating to Chicago,” he continued.  “When I offered to build the website, less than half of the churches in the archdiocese had a web presence.  There was a need for increased outreach to the congregation and to the large number of visitors to church.  So, introducing a website was the logical thing to do.”

Holy Name was one of the original sponsors of the Career Transitions Center of Chicago.  Ron said, “I became a volunteer job coach for the Center, which helps individuals, typically white-collar and professionals, get re-employed.  And I developed and maintained the website that includes a public portion to support the staff as well as the public.”

Executive Service Corps

His fourth website was for the Executive Service Corps of Chicago, where Ron became a member of the board.  “The Corps assists local nonprofit organizations in areas where its volunteers have special expertise.  In my case, I specialized in finding the value in data, particularly in interactive web-based data systems.”

Volunteerism runs in the Tevonian family.  Ron’s wife Dee, a volunteer at the Art Institute of Chicago, chaired Community Associates.  “I built and managed a private web-based system for them that included membership and program support hosted a large library of documents and forms required for operations,” he explained.  “The system also helped manage event registration.”

Most of Ron’s websites served as new directions – demonstrations of concepts –for the organizations they served. “They were hand-made and customized to suit the evolving needs of the users,” he explained.  “Once the organizations recognized the values of an online presence, they were ready to move to professionally developed and managed web services that avoided dependence on one person who’d developed them as a hobby.”

The Bell System

Ron was born in Brooklyn and grew up in the Queens borough of New York City.  He pursued a college preparatory curriculum at Brooklyn Technical High School. “I got hands-on experience in shop courses that included metallurgy, printing and electronics,” he said.

After earning a B.S. in electrical engineering at Polytechnic University of Brooklyn, he joined Western Electric, then part of the Bell System.  “I enjoyed a great variety of assignments,” he continued.  “They included research and development in product testing and repair, manufacturing process development, and large-scale software development for Bell’s long-distance telephone network. And my assignments took me all around the country — to Princeton, New Jersey, Oklahoma City; Montgomery, Illinois.; Denver; and Naperville, Illinois.  He completed his career as the research and development director of Bell Laboratories in Columbus, Ohio.