1933
We have sad news for you. Bowman S. Ellis Jr., affectionately known to all of us as "Red," died suddenly and tragically Sunday afternoon, October 31, of a cerebral hemorrhage. We have not yet received full information about the circumstances of his death, but in a telephone conversation that Sunday evening Bob Niebling, Red's roommate for three years in college, told us that Red had been putting up storm windows, had fallen from a short ladder and had struck his head on a pipe. It was not known at that time whether he had become dizzy before his fall or whether he had lost his footing. He was immediately taken to a hospital, where he died an hour-later. His obituary will appear in the January issue. Red's death is a heavy blow to all of us and a serious loss to '33, of which he was always one of the most popular and respected members.
Burt Hack had a close call a couple of weeks ago. We received a phone call one night from Marian, his wife, that Burt was in the hospital here in Hanover with a concussion. We rushed up there and found Burt in pretty good shape, fortunately, but as he told us what had happened we came to understand much better than we had at first the comment he made when we first came into his room and asked him how he was. "Fine," Burt said, "but I have no license to be alive."
Burt has been working for the Whiting Milk Co. of Boston for the past couple of years. A year ago he was placed in charge of all their operations in the northern New England milkshed, including the supervision of a number of processing plants, collection and distribution points, and handling public relations with producers. A few months ago Whiting's acquired a large cooperative in northern Vermont, and Burt moved his headquarters to Bradford, thirty miles north of Hanover. As part of his new job Burt launched an ambitious program of arranging meetings with milk producers all through northern New England, and hit the road for a series of sixteen meetings. Bad luck caught up with him just after his sixteenth and last meeting, held up near the Canadian border at Newport.
Worn out after travelling several thousand miles in a few weeks, holding meetings, dashing hither and yon, Burt tried to find a place to bed down that night, but had no luck, so he decided to drive back. He remembers following the white line down the center of Vermont's winding roads, at one point losing it momentarily. The next thing he knew he woke up to find himself pinned down upside down in the wreckage of his car, bleeding profusely, unable to get out. He finally managed to extricate himself and to make his way across a field to a farm house, where he was given first aid until a doctor could come to sew him up. The next morning he was brought down to the Mary Hitchcock.
He found out later that he had run off the road, sheared off a telephone pole, and turned over three times down a thirty-five foot embankment, his car fetching up finally four wheels in the air above a mass of twisted metal. Burt's concussion had the doctors worried for a few days, but he was coming along fine when we saw him. His other injuries included a badly wrenched shoulder and assorted cuts and bruises, all of which were responding nicely to treatment.
The letter-of-the-month leather medal goes this month to one Robert M. Estes, a guy we once knew quite well during our brief torts and equity days at Harvard Law. We'd made a mental note some time back to try to raise this once blithe spirit from the labyrinthine shades of the legal profession, but he beat us to the draw. Practically reading my mind, Bob writes: This has been some fifteen years in coming and even now depends on my new son sleeping one more hour. Off his record the odds are still against this letter being writ. You are hereby formally put on notice (Gad, these lawyers!) of the arrival of a 6-lb., 14-oz. son, Mark Wilbour Estes, presented to me August 3 by my wife Priscilla (daughter of John G. Nelson '13) Businesswise I am ideally and happily situated as Counsel for General Electric's Electronics Department and their new $30,000,000 Electronics Park here in Syracuse (World Center for Electronics, it says). Associated with me is Stuart MacMackin '36. We are blessed with the finest private law offices in existence courtesy of GE acres of lush carpeting, glass walls, special lighting effects, inter-office com. systems, and air-conditioning, plus a gigantic private law library. (Joe Stalin just better damn well leave us alone until I get a little better grasp on this job.)"
"In the past ten years I have seen a lot of Hank Hawgood, Cambridge (Rockingham), Washington (Pimlico) and Cleveland, mostly. Was in Bridgeport with GE after I left the service (five missing years) and saw MannySprague, also Hal Smith, Jim Doherty, JohnMonagan, and many other ex-associates of 1929-1933 (four years I would like to try over again). Missed all the reunions.... mainly working too hard. Sorry, have to put a period to this. I'm being paged "
We have exercised our editorial privilege freely in quoting from Bob's good letter. We can use our need to save space, for example, to spare you certain comments about your secretary's possessing "certain rare qualities which so richly qualifies" him for youknow-what. But we think you should know that Bob broke our heart when he casually mentioned the fact that Pan (Priscilla, Bob's wife) was breaking forty on a nine-hole course five weeks before the baby came. Here, for two years now, we've been slicing, hooking, and topping, with nothing more serious than a slight rubber tire around the middle to handicap us, and we've yet to break fifty. Pan is Mt. Holyoikje '44, Yale Nursing '47, and copped the local tennis title last year.
We've staged a couple of small '33 reunions at Bedlam Manor weekends of home football games this fall. The Deweys, Blacks, D'Arcy's, and Judds '34 gathered after the Colgate game. The highspot of that evening was Dewey's mournful tale of his trials and tribulations converting the family mansion (Victorian) into a modern house, a recital of delays and seemingly endless outlays of lettuce that led the mordant Juddy to pin the moniker Caspar Blanding Dewey on Bill. The Columbia game this past weekend brought a number of classmates to town. We caught a glimpse of Hal Mackey, met Merrill and Barbara Worthen. The Manchesters, Don andMuggs D'Arcy, Mrs. D'Arcy, Don's mother, and Pam, their oldest daughter, joined the Theriaults at the Manor for a bean supper and a very pleasant evening.
Other intelligence this past month: HenryHird Jr. took to wife Doris Louise Jones of Allendale, N. J. on October 22. Henry is in the textile business. Ed Redman, from headquarters at the-Dartmouth Club in N. Y. C., sent word that our erstwhile pioneer in the Venezuelan oil, fields, Don Phinney, is drilling horizontally instead of vertically these days, and that he has shifted his field of operations to Pittsburgh, where he is Project Engineer for B. Perini & Sons, Inc., contractors for the Squirrel Hill Tunnel job. A note from GayMilius apprises us of the birth of a daughter, Carroll Ann, on September 18. So far the new addition does not seem to have slowed Gay down a bit in his capacity for acquiring and pursuing avocations at a merry clip. In addition to his law practise, Gay is very active in the Naval Reserve where he was recently promoted to the permanent rank of Lt. Commander. He was also recently elected Alternate Director of the American Radio Relay League for the Hudson Division. Gay reports a visit from Arch Lade recently. Arch is living in Chestnut Hill, Mass. Just missed seeing Paine Knickerbocker, who made a flying visit to Hanover a few weeks ago, stopping overnight with the Bill Gahagans '35.
Secretary, 20 Valley Rd., Hanover, N. H. Treasurer, 2812 Grant Bldg., Pittsburgh 19, Pa.
