1921
Summer has gone by without a single story of 1921 men lying in hammocks. They may be out straight, but it is the high velocity of their progress which is news. Everyone, except an occasional young and callow graduate, accepts the fact that '21 men are the most mobile in the history of Dartmouth. Their almost fabulous energy seems to have been inherited by their offspring.
Who as a more seasoned aviator has logged more miles than Add Warner? After only six months at Dartmouth he left to go into aviation. He finished his flying training at Fort Worth, and by a strange coincidence he is still flying out of Fort Worth but in his own private plane. For 41 years he has been a pilot. Yet planes are a minor interest; oil, a major. See Who's Who in Commerce and Industry.
Cliff Corbet has done some rugged vicarious travelling. His son Barry, who went to Dartmouth for two and a half years, responded to the challenge broadcast by Brad Washburn that the greatest remaining pioneer ascent in North America was the south face of Mt. McKinley. With two ex-Dartmouth men (Jack Breitenbach '57 and Pete Sinclair '58) and a Stanford man (Bill Buckingham), all three guides, in the late spring Barry drove the 2,600 miles over the Alcan Highway to Anchorage, took the train to Talkeetna, flew on to Kahiltna Glacier, and two days later (June 19, 1959) they had reached the top, established a new route, and made mountaineering history. Their descent by the West Buttress route took nine days, six of which were spent just sitting and thinking about food and hot baths, bad weather, and the plane to pick them up. Barry, who got his legs in shape in Jackson, Wyo., where he is a qualified ski instructor, has now returned to the Tetons where he will earn his living as a guide and teacher of rock climbing.
No one can deny that Patricia, daughter of John and Priscilla Sullivan has adventurous blood. Though she took off conventionally enough for a month in Rome, in Istanbul she met a classmate, and the two spent a month exploring Turkey. They were the first tourists in Cyprus after the revolution, and then she went on to Crete and spent another month in Greece. To vary the picture, she moved into Yugoslavia for three weeks to explore what iron curtains do and do not conceal, and then with elation she breathed Scandinavian air through the open window of a car moving through Norway and Sweden. She had good talk with the captain of a trawler in Galway when he ferried her out to the Arran Islands. Finally she showed her unconventional conventionality by spending the summer in London and England, Edinburgh and Scotland; and now she is demurely sitting at the feet of her Georgetown University professors in graduate school.
The problems of producing yearly a million barrels of beer and ale brewed in Buffalo, Findlay (Ohio), Covington (Ky.), and Tampa (Fla.), are what face Ed Luedke, Vice President Finance of the International Breweries of Detroit. To cut down on his traveling, Ed is planning to settle in Buffalo where the main accounting is centered and where his treasurer and controller are located.
John Woodhouse moves horizontally on business and vertically for pleasure. Still with the Atomic Energy Division of du Pont, he finds that his problems are increasing in complexity in the United States and foreign countries. Hardly ever static before, he is now on the go more than ever. He assists various government committees in a variety of difficulties and is chairman of other committees for the National Academy-National Research Council and the Armed Services. As for the vertical activities, John and Ann took a break on an extended business trip to Denver to climb in the Rocky Mountain National Park, notably on Hallett and Long's Peak, but because of snow they failed to reach the top of either. Summer would not be summer for the Woodhouses if they could not escape at least once in July, August, and September from Wilmington to climb to the tops of various White Mountain peaks for a new look at our old world.
The ever-restless and ever-creative Werner Janssen has done more than tour Yugoslavia and give concerts in Belgrade, Bucharest, and Vienna. He has completed the direction of the musical score of the Russian-language production of Serge Prokofiev's opera, "War and Peace," based on Tolstoy, probably the most difficult and the biggest undertaking of its kind in the history of music. It had a chorus of more than 100 voices, the 96-piece Vienna State Opera Orchestra, and the entire ensemble of the National Opera of Belgrade which Werner brought to Vienna for this recording. More than 250 persons were involved in the production, not including recording engineers and similar personnel. Twentieth-Century-Fox Newsreel has taken six minutes of recording session and run it in more than 1,000 theatres throughout Europe. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the United States is expected to release its version some time this autumn.
Speed-Demon Randy Childs hopes to ski next winter but not as usual. In the debilitating August humidity he made a rash statement that with his old carcass he could not afford to point his boards straight down and let them whistle to the bottom. The probable reason for such bizarre conservatism is that Randy wants to see his stepson Lee Tibbets, six feet tall, 210 pounds, a football player, who turned down Colgate, Brown, Penn, and Michigan, play at Dartmouth. Bob Blackman is interested.
By the time you read this, Dave and Edith Bowen may have roughed it in a Volkswagen along the Maine coast to Nova Scotia and Cape Breton.
Gordon Merriam leaves Damariscotta twice a year to go to Washington to meet with members of the State Department Executive Reserve of which John Masland, Dartmouth's Provost, and Andrew Foster '25 are members.
Dave Seegal, who is on so many medical committees and who has such heavy hospital responsibilities in and about New York that you would think that he would never be able to get away, spent some time in Europe this summer partly for pleasure.
But some '21 men faced illness and frustration. Rog Wilde came down with diverticulitis and was forced not only into bed for longer than even a Simmons man likes to admit but also into a hospital equipped no doubt with the invalid version of Beautyrest. He faces the possibility of an operation but hopes to be able to persuade himself to live sensibly and avoid it. Though Reg Miner had four weeks of vacation he could enjoy only two, for he fell victim to some sort of a flu virus, and as a result he and Sylvia could not take possession of their cottage on Little Sebago Lake in Maine where they annually renew their friendships with their four grandchildren. Ted Hartshorn discovered last spring that he had glaucoma and during June underwent surgery in his left eye. Henry Palmer was operated on in July for double hernia.
You may think that Al Dunn has water problems, but they loom less large than budget problems. New Year's Day for the Government is July 1. The Federal System, as Al quasi-humorously explains it, is to spend all the remaining appropriation for one year by June 30 and then after preliminary bouts with the Director of the Bureau and the Secretary of the Department get the money for the new year allotted by July 1. Al spends half of the rest of the year trying to get the maximum appropriations through the Bureau of the Budget and Congress.
Now a resident of Cambridge, David, son of Pud Walker, has been receiving favorable comment for his paintings in the exhibition called "Travelling Scholars, 1959" at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, devoted to showing the impact of other cultures on five young New Englanders. This autumn Dave will hang a one-man show in the Nova Gallery, Boston. Robert Taylor in the Boston Herald describes four of Dave's paintings: " 'Pineapple Plantation' reduces a complex subject to an airy interplay of line and wash, while 'The Forest' implies surrealist depths. He excels at tropical subjects, but the canvases called 'Knoxville, 1915' and 'Seine and the Belgian Flats' contain a remarkable extroverted formal pattern of movement and rhythmic grace."
Fred Benton, Vice President of the Philadelphia Transportation Co., left Dartmouth in 1919 because, as he himself says, he was too immature to appreciate what was being offered him intellectually. It is curious what has happened to his children. His son John who had no interest in Dartmouth because of a rheumatic condition was graduated from Haverford magna cum laude, went to Princeton Graduate School, spent a year in France on a Fulbright, and got his Ph.D. in medieval history last spring. He married the daughter of the Chairman of the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin. Now after two years of teaching at Reed College, he has stepped into his new academic position at Penn. Fred's daughter, Mary, Oberlin '48, M.A. from Temple, married in Geneva a brilliant Ukrainian, now an associate professor at La Salle in Philadelphia, and Mary, now mother of a boy and a girl, teaches math at Germantown Friends School. And how does Fred feel about all this? He says, "It is odd, that with my academic failure, both children are so fixed in the academic field. My only consolation is that they would not be there if the old man had not been around. And maybe when I retire, I'll go back to college. I could get my B.A. fifty years after matriculation which would be some sort of a record!"
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