1921

This is the true and almost tragic story about Mrs. Willis McDuffee when in her home town of Rochester, N. H., she ventured forth on a rainy night in October to mail a letter of thanks to a 1921 class officer. You recall that she, the mother of Franklin McDuffee, and Maud Wheelwright, his sister, were honored guests in Baker Library during the Holy Cross weekend when Franklin as man and poet was remembered by the presentation of "Dartmouth Undying" with comments by Harry Chamberlaine, George Frost, Ellis Briggs, and Edward Connery Lathem, Assistant Librarian. Let Mrs. McDuffee, that charming, witty, and spritely woman well along in her eighties, tell the story:

The mail box was so close to my home that I left my front door open. Suddenly a reckless driver, who had lost control of his speeding car, swerved on two wheels and left me no choice but to run backwards on an icy crossing or to lose my life. I chose to run but slipped and fell backwards with a terrible thud. Prostrate on the icy concrete walk, the rain pouring down on me, I blacked out from the shock but suddenly heard a voice, "Is there anything we can do for you?" "Oh yes," I groaned, "Please mail my letter to 1921. Don't let it get wet." Whereupon I released my precious burden into unseen hands. The next thing I knew I was in an ambulance heading for the hospital where I remained six weeks.

Still in North Africa, Bob Wilson continues to earn his living by selling rugs, fruit dates, copperware, blankets, and olive oil. A fascinating new sideline is 100 locomotives priced at $500,000 apiece, but as Tunisia is now all Diesel Bob might make a deal with a 1921 man providing good bank references to let him have one at $350,000. Bob sold off 15 airplanes in 1952, but locomotives arc tougher to move. He plans to stay indefinitely in Tunis, Paris, or Marseilles. "I have often thought," he writes, "that ripe old age would solidify me, make me more wise, more contented, but nothing like that has happened. If anything, the driving mechanism is more discontented than when I left a sleepy New England town and started via Dartmouth to roam the world. I never wanted to be a sailor, but here at 60 I am even more of a roamer than a sailor."

St. Vincent's Hospital likes Abe Weld. Welcoming him back in December, it promised him as entertainment another operation with festivities to last over December 25 and January 1, but Abe managed to get home for Christmas and New Year's. Here is how. The new operation, for nothing malignant, thank God, which was to be done with fantastic delicacy of touch, required, alas, two cleavages. Number one was performed December 17. It seems that Abe has very aristocratic blood, it's nitrogen 35 instead of a bourgeois 15, and it refuses to be hoipolloied even if the surgeon promises Houdini subtleties. After recuperation in Jackson Heights for some weeks, his blood appeased by royal treatment, Abe will bow in again for Number Two, Operation Excision, to be followed by complete recovery and squash games with Ort Hicks.

Bob Mayo has a talented daughter Phyllis, who not only gets around but stimulates her father and mother to do likewise. On the stage in New York for over a year, she signed on for production work with CBS and then with the Army Special Services as a civilian entertainment specialist. As such, she spent five years in Europe, and thus Bob and Polly found a perfect excuse to plan a ten-week journey about the Continent. When Phyl sojourned for a year in Arizona, her parents dropped down to see her, and they included a swing around Mexico. During the past year she has been gracing Fort Ord, Calif., and you can hardly register surprise that Bob and Polly shot off to the West Coast.

Like Bob Mayo, Doc Fleming has quit private flying but for a different reason: the Idaho countryside is too rugged for single-engine planes.

Ellwood Fisher had a good winter vacation visiting his son Woody at Fort Knox, Ky., where he celebrated his 21st birthday. Elwood found him in an excellent frame of mind, glad to be getting his military service behind him, alert as ever, taking his tough existence in stride, and hoping for an assignment in the Food Supply Branch of the QMC. It is no wonder that Woody longs to return in April to Dartmouth; he is a popular and respected member of the class of 1960.

The Christmas card from Sandy Sanders welcoming a 1921 man for golf in Texas in 70 degree temperature arrived in Hanover just after the mercury had dropped to 20 below zero.

Perhaps the warmth in the South will do some good to Joe Folger, now on sabbatical leave from Dartmouth where he teaches Spanish, and to Marian, both of them dogged by physical disabilities in the past year or two.

Frank Livermore has no regrets at having put up for sale his beautiful home in New Canaan, Conn., and settling at 124 Dartmouth St., West Newton 65, for now he and Barbara are back among old friends, and old friends are best. Frank's work is unusually interesting and challenging. He prepares Home Economics educational programs teaching teen-agers, future homemakers, the merits of food products. He not only creates the text material but also effects distribution of the educational unit to every school and college of the country teaching Home Economics and to every student in these classes. Frank is deliberately finding more time for gardening, bridge, canasta, domestic repair jobs, and social activities at the Brae Burn Country Club just down the road. Frank sees something of Tom Cleveland, who lives around the corner; and Betty Cleveland is one of Barbara's best friends.

Connie Keyes reports that Jimmy in addition to running a paper route is President of the Student Co-Operative Association in his Washington school. He played on a Little League baseball team which came in first. Connie tends to say Dartmouth when you say Jimmy.

With an accounting background and with her own law office, Pearl, the wife of Newc Newcomb, has been handling estates and trusts, drawing wills and other legal documents, and handling sales of real property. She does not care about trial work but in court she has been very effective. She reformed one bad man who refused to pay his wife alimony and made himself generally a nuisance. She put him in the cooler where he did some cold thinking about his and his ex-wife's dignity and honor. Because she has made a study of Parliamentary Law, women's organizations call on her to serve in one capacity or another.

Hal Braman and Doris spent the Christmas holidays with Marcia in Florida.

Here are what the three sons of Dick Hill are doing: Dick Jr. '47 is now manager and stockholder of WNOW, York, Pa.; John, UNH '56, is covering Maine for Aetna Life; and Arthur, a junior at Dartmouth, is doing well in his studies this year.

The reason why Kent McKinley was recently awarded the Citizen of the Year Scroll and Medal from the American Legion in Florida is that the Legion looks on him as an outstanding fighter against the menace of World Communism.

To honor her husband, John Gordon Ives, an engineer by profession and a sculptor by avocation, who died Jan. 3, 1944, Roma E. Ives of 65 North Fullerton Ave., Montclair, N. J., has sent a check to Baker Library to be used for the purchase of a volume to be added to the 1921 Memorial Library.

Secretary, 33 East Wheelock St. Hanover, N. H.

Treasurer, Rm. 1200, 195 Broadway, New York 7, N. Y.