1929

This Twenty-Fifth Year of Class Notes opens with some pretty high-powered stuff:

Bob Brinkerhoff has just become vice president of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, Inc.; Art Rydstrom has been elected senior vice president of the Denver real estate firm of Webb & Knapp, having recently resigned as an executive of the Boettcher organization; Dan Marx' most recent opus, InternationalShipping Cartels, has just been published by the Princeton University Press; and so we will go on in a minute.

But first, let's look back 25 years to our first column of Class Notes written in the early fall of 1929 for the November issue of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE:

"Herb McCreery wins the prize for writing the first letter for this column. He and Hank Marshall are at Harvard Business School... Bob Monahan is at Yale School of Forestry... Bill Keyes, Freddie Breithut and Charlie Proctor took a 200-mile canoe trip through the Canadian wilderness... Bill Kennedy, Harry Enders, Dick Rogers, and Bill Alexander are working for the Gorham Manufacturing Cos. in Providence... Shep Stone sailed on the Bremen for three years of study in German universities... Wen Schuh is with the Aetna Life Insurance Company in Washington... Roger Turnbull is in the real estate and insurance business in Lynn... Al Finlay is in the Boston office of Scudder, Stevens, and Clark... Back in Hanover, Ben Leavitt is instructor in the zoology department... Earl Fyler, Sim Cantril, Frank Foster, Wayne Bryer and Bob Fairchild are back at Medical School Frank, as well, coaching the freshman line.... Weddings: Ellie Cavanagh and Marjorie Carroll, Read Arthur and Edith Lisle, Johnny Parker and Virginia Musk, Pinky Flannery and Ruth Donaldson... Soup Lockwood sails for Batavia and his post of government inspector... Stu Palmer is teaching civics at the New Haven J.H.S.... Eddie Walsh is in Jersey City making tin cans for the American Can Cos.... Bob Lyle is teaching English and Latin at St. George's and coaching the football team. ... Mike Sherman is instructor of Math and coach of football at Peddie School, ... and Ka-1 Michael is assistant coach of swimming at Yale."

And now in September 1953, what of the young men of 1929?

John Laffey is a welcome addition to Boston, where he is now district group manager for New England in charge of Group Annuities and other forms of group coverage for the New England Mutual Life Insurance Cos. WenBarney, resident partner in Winchester, Va., of the CPA firm of Leach, Calkins & Scott, had a call from Phil May, assistant secretary of the Aetna Insurance group of Hartford who also sent us a picture from the CPA magazine showing Kingsbury S. Nickerson, president of The First National Bank of Jersey City, emphasizing the CPA's role in today's economy as described in a newspaper advertisement placed recently by his Bank. Stu Palmer writes that he is still teaching at the Stamford, Conn., high school where he has been since 1929. His course is English but his activities involve a number of other things like the newspaper, publicity and a local magazine which he publishes. His wife, Cecile Graf, Connecticut '29, also teaches. Their son, Bart, finished his first grade at King School. Stu's principal sideline at present, however, is an espousal of a more realistic system of "grammar" which would replace the historic rules — "a pedant's paradise of the artificial and unattainable" and give our language something better, to wit: its own grammar. "Somewhere, sometime, someone is going to start teaching English as English and not as another language in disguise ..." It could be that it will be Stu.

There comes a time when our children are more interesting, or perhaps newsworthy, than we are. Whether that remark applies to the Spaeths at al may be arguable, but a headline from the San Francisco Chronicle of September 2 is some evidence: "Spaeth Tops BayQualifiers For U. S. Amateur' and continues - "Blond, bright Grant Spaeth, born at Oxford and reared at Stanford, will fly to Oklahoma from Portland as Northern California's No. 1 representative in the National Amateur golf championship. Spaeth, tall, crew-trim, 21-year-old son of Stanford's Dean of Law (his father taught in England before coming here) shot 71-73 over the California Country Club's fairways yesterday to lead four other qualifiers in a field of 26." Bob Monahan furnishes more evidence to the same point in reporting that young Norrie Carr and BobMonahan helped Hanover H. S. win its first Class B track championship last spring, with appropriate stories in the Valley News. And still further, Mildred Nighswander of Laconia H. S. has won state honors in the National French contest, placing first among 1726 students representing 47 New Hampshire high schools. The young lady also excels in debating and speech events and is one of five Laconia High students who took part in the National Forensic League tournament at Denver last June.

Bob Monahan is featured in an article in the June issue of the Ford Times which relates how, 25 years ago, a young forest guard brought about single-handed what is probably the largest mass arrest in New Hampshire's court annals. Outraged by a band of fifty gypsies who were peeling the white bark from his beloved trees along the bank of the Peabody River at the base of Mt. Madison, Bob arrested them all, his indignation out-weighing the fifty-to-one odds against him. Perhaps we can get the College Forester to fill in the details at Reunion!

Phil Hoffman was appointed co-chairman of the Essex County (N. J.) United Jewish Appeal campaign. Besides practicing law, Phil is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Jewish Community Council, member of the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Community Council, president of the Essex County Chapter of the American Jewish Committee and a member of the American Jewish Committee's National Executive Committee. During the war, he was assistant general counsel of the War Production Board and presently is acting as Hearing Commissioner for the National Production Authority. Phil has two children: David and Lynn. Lt.Comdr. Jack Pillsbury, who has been public information officer for the 14th Naval District since August, 1950, has been assigned to the 5th District in Norfolk, Va. According to press notices, Jack was regarded by Honolulu newsmen as one of the ablest Armed Forces press spokesmen ever to serve there. Before serving in Hawaii, Jack headed the press section of the Navy's office of information in Washington. Joining the Navy as a reserve officer in 1942, following 13 years on the Boston Globe, Jack saw action in Italy, North Africa, and Southern France and was assigned to public information work after the war. Jack has three children: Carolyn, a senior at Punahou, Judson, 15, a soohomore, and Joel, 7.

Jim Fassett, for the past four years commentator and intermission host for KRLB CBS' New York Philharmonic-Symphony broadcasts, has been spending this summer again recording sights and sounds behind the scenes at several major European music festivals and America's Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts, a technique which brings to his Sunday afternoon broadcasts authentic bits of European life and music-making in the music world, sound pictures of musical events all over the country, and gives a warm human background to the music which has been broadcast. Jim took three more years of advanced study at Harvard and first started writing about music as assistant to the late famous Boston music critics, Philip Hale and H. T. Parker, after which he joined CBS in 1936 as an assistant music director on the New York Philharmonic-Symphony broadcasts, became director in 1942 and supervisor of music for the network in 1944. He has been responsible for some of radio's outstanding musical programs, including "New Voices in Song," the Philadelphia Orchestra broadcasts from 1944 to 1950 and "Your Invitation to Music."

We are very sorry to report the death of Jack Loucks on July 29 and the death of CliffPurse on August 29. Obituary notices will appear in the In Memoriam section of the MAGAZINE.

Secretary, 75 Federal St., Boston 10, Mass. Treasurer, 1728 Beechwood Blvd., Pittsburgh 17, Pa. Memorial Fund Chairman, Air Reduction Cos., Inc., 60 East 42nd St., New York 17, N. Y.