Written in the Stars: IU Alumni Honored with Inductions into Unique Halls of Fame

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. The Songwriters Hall of Fame. These esteemed halls are familiar—and several IU alumni have been inducted into each. But that’s not what this story is about.

Instead, you’ll learn about a few alums who have been inducted into unique and lesser-known halls of fame across the globe, such as the International Polka Association Polka Music Hall of Fame and the Printing Industry Hall of Fame.

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At 8 years old, Jennifer (Hooker) Brinegar, BS’84, MS’96, announced to her friends and family that she was going to be an Olympic swimmer. The declaration might have sounded silly if her swim coaches, Charlie Hickcox and Gary Conelly, BA’74, weren’t Olympians themselves.

In 1976 at the Montreal Olympics, Brinegar’s self-fulfilling prophecy came to fruition when she was tasked with swimming in the 4x100m freestyle relay preliminaries for Team USA as an alternate.

She remembers the stakes. For days, the U.S. women’s swim team had been vilified in the press for swimming poorly, while their men’s counterpart was sweeping events. Kim Peyton, Wendy Boglioli, Jill Sterkel, and Shirley Babashoff were determined to pull off the biggest upset in swimming history.

But it would never happen if Babashoff had to compete in the 800m freestyle finals a mere hour before the 4x100m prelims. So, Brinegar was tapped to take her place.

“I was thrilled and honored to be asked by the coaching staff to do this for Shirley and the relay team,” recalls Brinegar, who ended up swimming almost a full second faster than her personal best.

During the 4x100m finals, the U.S. team was neck and neck with the East Germans. In the end, Babashoff outswam her opponent in the fourth wave of the relay by 0.28 seconds, effectively securing a gold medal for Team USA.

In 2022, Brinegar was inducted into the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Hall of Fame for her role on the 1976 gold medal-winning 4x100m freestyle relay team.

“First and foremost, this was a long overdue honor for perhaps the greatest relay win by Team USA,” Brinegar says. “In the 1980s, the International Olympic Committee and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee started recognizing relays as team efforts—awarding the preliminary athletes in sports like swimming and track the same medal won by their teammates in finals, which is why I was included in this honor by the USOPC [in 2022]. It’s the biggest honor I’ve ever received.”

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Fred Ziwich, BME’77, took his first accordion lesson at age 5, and now, 65 years later, he’s still making music—polka to be exact.

“I could read music before I could read English,” he says. “I guess I just took a liking to it as a young person and followed on with it.”

In 2010, Ziwich became the youngest person ever inducted into the National Cleveland-Style Polka Hall of Fame. That was followed by his induction into the International Polka Association Polka Music Hall of Fame in 2017.

Ziwich’s four grandparents and father were born in the former Yugoslavia, while his mother was born in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was raised. Between the U.S. Civil War and World War I, Cleveland saw a massive influx of immigrants from Europe, and the city embraced polka music.

Growing up, Ziwich heard the cherished melodies everywhere—on TV, at wedding receptions, at summer picnics. He was drawn to the joyous music and eventually formed his own band, International Sound Machine, in 1977.

Ziwich’s polka career has taken him around the globe. He has performed in 28 states, entertained on cruises, and played in Europe four times. To this day, he and his International Sound Machine bandmates still play at many Oktoberfests in Ohio and Michigan.

“I’m happy that I’m still performing on a regular basis,” says Ziwich, who turned 70 in March 2024. “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself [if I retired].”

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Nothing could prepare Stephen “Marty” Filipowski, BA’85, for his first attempt at the English Channel qualifying swim—a six-hour nonstop swim in cold water (60 degrees or under).

Filipowski has no recollection of it, but he was pulled from the water with hypothermia after roughly four and a half hours. He says it made him think twice about trying to tackle the Channel, but after working with his coach, he put on some extra weight—insulation, as he calls it—and got back in the water.

He completed his English Channel swim in 2013, but it was a rough day on the water. So much so, that he received the Channel Swimming Association’s “Most Meritorious Swim Award” because of how he endured through choppy waters.

In 2020, Filipowski joined the Australian Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame. The honor recognizes Filipowski’s many swims across channels worldwide, including the English Channel, the Catalina Channel in California, the New Zealand Cook Strait, the North Channel between Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the Strait of Gibraltar, which separates Europe from Africa. In 2023, he also completed the Derwent River Big Swim in Tasmania.

“No two solo swims are the same due to the weather, water temperature, tides, currents, swell, chop, jellyfish, etc.,” Filipowski says. “So, my goals are always to prepare for whatever conditions I might encounter on the day and to finish knowing I swam as well as I could.”

It wasn’t until his mid-30s that Filipowski got serious about swimming. He swam with Masters teams—a special class of competitive swimming for people 25 and older—in Atlanta and New York City, where he completed a swim around Manhattan, before moving to Sydney and discovering open-water swimming in 2005. Half a decade later, he followed his calling and began marathon swimming.

“For me, marathon swimming, particularly channel crossings, provides the opportunity to swim against myself instead of competing with others,” Filipowski says.

He’s most proud of his North Channel swim, which he completed on Sept. 5, 2018, in memory of his father—former Hoosier men’s football player and Little 500 rider Steve Filipowski, BS’59, who died on Aug. 28 of that same year.

“Receiving the news was tough for me, but I had to stay focused on the crossing and doing it for him,” Filipowski says. “It was only after I finished and during my journey to Alabama from Ireland to be with my mother that everything sank in. I still get emotional when I think about the swim. My dad was definitely watching over me.”

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Dean Kleinschmidt, BS’70, who grew up in rural Minnesota, loved sports as a boy, but asthma was a stumbling block.

When Kleinschmidt was in seventh grade, a coach asked him to enroll in a summer correspondence course that would put him on the path to becoming an athletic trainer. It’s a profession Kleinschmidt calls “glorified first aid with an emphasis on sports injuries.”

A few years later, IU Bloomington was one of the only schools in the country offering a degree in athletic training, so the decision to attend was an easy one for Kleinschmidt.

As a freshman at IU in August 1965, he immediately started working as a student trainer with the football program.

“I wouldn’t be where I am today if not for the foundation and background that Indiana University had to offer,” he says. “And it’s not just because of the sports—other people at IU took me under their wing. They knew I was sort of a lost child.”

At one point, Bill Armstrong, BS’51, former president of the IU Foundation, helped financially support Kleinschmidt when he was no longer able to afford an education at IU.

In 1968, Kleinschmidt landed a summer internship with the Green Bay Packers, an opportunity he says sold him on professional sports and the NFL.

Kleinschmidt eventually became the head athletic trainer for the New Orleans Saints—a position he held from 1971 to 2000.

“I thoroughly enjoyed every day of my 31 years with the Saints,” he says. “For me, it was never about the wins, it was always about the relationships.”

Over the course of his career, Kleinschmidt was inducted into the Louisiana Athletic Trainers Association Hall of Fame (1990); the National Athletic Trainers Association Hall of Fame (1994); the New Orleans Saints Hall of Fame (2002); the Southeastern Athletic Trainers Association Hall of Fame (2007); the Senior Bowl Hall of Fame (2008); and the Professional Football Athletic Trainers Society (2024).

“It is an incredible honor to be inducted into one hall of fame, for crying out loud, let alone these six,” he says. “I never set out with the goal of getting into the hall of fame, but it certainly is a huge honor. It’s really special.”

Following his stint with the Saints, Kleinschmidt returned to IU’s athletic training department and served as head trainer while his son Rhett Kleinschmidt, BS’05, MS’06, was a wide receiver on the IU football team from 2004 to 2008.

“Returning to the game of college football, plus returning to my alma mater at IU after 35 years in the NFL, was simply delightful,” he says, careful to distinguish the “game” of college football as opposed to the “business” of the NFL.

He went on to spend time with the Washington Redskins and Detroit Lions before “retiring.” But Kleinschmidt still gets his football fix as medical coordinator of the Manning Passing Academy—a premiere football camp for high school students in Thibodaux, La., hosted by former NFL quarterbacks Eli and Peyton Manning.

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David Henkel, MBA’71, was inducted into the Printing Industry Hall of Fame in 2022.

His father, Robert Henkel, purchased Illinois-based Johnson & Quin, Inc., a specialty printing company, in 1960, and Henkel became involved in 1977—joining the company as a sales representative tasked with finding emerging marketing opportunities.

Soon after, David met a market researcher who told him about laser printing, an emerging technology. He saw an opportunity to use a laser to image pre-printed forms, and Johnson & Quin’s business trajectory started to change through the use of a Xerox 9700 printer.

“We were the first source for pre-printed laser forms,” David told PIWorld.com. “And almost immediately, we started changing the company over to that new arena.”

In 1987, he was named president of the company when his father decided to retire. Today, David’s son, Andrew, serves as president, while David holds the position of CEO.

Johnson & Quin is 100 percent digital today, primarily producing marketing materials and high-value digital documents through continuous-feed production inkjet equipment.

“It’s very well deserved,” Andrew told PIWorld.com of his father’s induction into the Printing Industry Hall of Fame. “He has shown leadership in the industry and has been a good example of how people should treat people, customers, vendors, and their competition.”

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In a way, attending IU Bloomington was a rite of passage for Richard “Rick” Armstrong, BA’79, MS’81, EdD’93, who was inducted into the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps Hall of Fame in May 2022 for his role in overseeing the training of more than 17,000 ordnance soldiers annually.

Rick’s father, Oran Armstrong, MBA’50, was a World War II veteran who earned his degree from IU while on the GI Bill, and his brother, Bruce Armstrong, BS’69, MS’75, also attended the university.

All it took was one visit, and Rick was hooked.

“The IU faculty and staff rolled out the red carpet and, as you know, the campus is stunning,” he says. “In the end, it was an easy decision. A huge bonus is that I met my future wife, [Mary (Willems) Armstrong, BA’79] in one of my classes.”

Rick received an undergraduate degree in telecommunications before pivoting to study instructional systems technology through the IU School of Education, where he learned how to design instructional materials and strategies that improve the way people acquire, process, and share information.

While working toward his master’s degree, he was recruited by the U.S. Army and got a job at the U.S. Army Armor School in Fort Knox, Ky. After seven years there, he was accepted into an Army program that paid for one year of full-time academic study in instructional technology at a university of his choice, and given the distance to IU, his decision seemed obvious.

“For anyone interested in instructional technology I can’t think of a better job than developing and enhancing training for our country’s Army,” Rick says.

He spent 36 years working for the U.S. Army, serving as director of training and later deputy to the commandant of the U.S. Army Ordnance School from 2012 until his retirement in 2019.

Along with joining the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps Hall of Fame, Rick’s most notable accolades include the Secretary of Defense Exceptional Civilian Service Award, the Department of the Army Meritorious Civilian Service Award, and the Department of the Army Superior Civilian Service Award.

“It was an honor to work daily alongside the incredible men and women that serve in our military and also with our dedicated civilian workforce,” he says.