1943

I'll take bets that few of my. contemporaries in the adjoining columns are preparing their copy 18,000 feet over snowy New England. But I am - despite the panorama below me and the pretty girl beside me. Her contact lenses are giving her fits, and if I knew her at all, I might suggest that vanity has its price and maybe she'd better just stick to her old glasses. All this - and in an Electra too.

While in Andover visiting my mother, I surprised Bunny McCormick Sunday afternoon baby sitting. Bunny is quite familiar with hotels, airlines, Electras - and maybe contact lenses - while traversing the U.S. for John Hancock Life Insurance Co. in its group sales department. Bunny reports the rumor that ex-roommate Roland Higgins is no longer at Punahou School in Honolulu but has instead entered the commercial swimming pool business. Roily and Esther Williams would make a good pair, come to think of it. Bunny says Andy Caffrey recites with slight encouragement an ode he wrote for his Lawrence High class.

Ex-secretary Stan Priddy, veteran of one of the longer terms in this class office, dedicates much of his business energy these days to his Boston Capital Corp., which his associates and he successfully put on the market recently. Its primary function is to supply capital to small businesses through its $20,000,000 stock offering engineered by Stan and friends. The whole project, it seems, has the blessing of the government's Small Business Administration. Stan allows that matrimony has cut down his free skating time, although he attempted this winter to build a backyard rink for his son - a shade over two years old.

Bruce Jones is back in New York City again, as manager of the Rumrill Company's New York office. The $12 million upstate New York advertising agency has recently opened offices at Rockefeller Plaza and sometime this month will move into new quarters in the General Dynamics Building. Bruce has been with the Rumrill Company since 1950. You may remember twenty years ago in the World War II Air Corps, Bruce flew in China with the 14th, receiving the DFC and Air Medal - facts which recall his early birdman career in Bugbee's Flying Circus at "White River Junction. Strange how I remember him in a brown leather jacket stepping into a Piper Cub. His first fulltime job was reporting on the old Geneva (N. Y.) Daily Times, followed by graduate work at the University of Missouri Graduate School of Journalism. Then followed copy writing experience with Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn and later with McCann-Erickson before joining Rumrill. The Joneses have one daughter, Mary, five. New York friends of Bruce will reach him after February 1 in the General Dynamics Building.

Jerry Blanchet has the noble task of working on disarmament in the State Department as special assistant to Edward Gillian. Jerry and I had a New Year's reunion via phone while we reminisced the sixteen years since last we talked. Jerry flew in the Navy despite the fact that at one point I was his flight instructor at Pensacola, and after the war he was honored as a Rhodes Scholar. Took his Ph.D. in history at Oxford. While we talked, the sound of five gleeful children filled his Connecticut Avenue apartment. Next time I'm in Washington for any length of time we'll get together.

The Van Pettens arrived on their Christmas card appropriately dressed for a Tokyo tea party - very striking picture. Van even enclosed a sample of Grace's attractive painting. Van sees Nobu Mitsui occasionally and ran into John Muchemore en route to the Philippines last summer. Naturally the Van Pettens are concerned with the recent presidential edict about dependents abroad but expect their plans won't change until their return to the States in 1962.... Thanks to Don Taylor for a nice card. As an up and coming Providence banker, Don has never lost interest in our class activities The Pelrens enclosed with their card a prewar photo of your secretary in his hungrier days.

Here are some tracings of our peripatetic classmates: James K. Boak, Engineering Dept., U. S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Md.; JohnW. Conn, 14 Evergreen Way, North Tarrytown, N. Y.; T/Sgt. Sidney C. Hazelton Jr., 38 High Street, Newport, Maine; Frank W.Hussey, Burnham Road, Wenham, Mass.; Richard C. Klein, 13911 Knollway Drive, Minneapolis 26, Minn.; Harold W. Lindley, 1921 S. W. 22nd Ave., Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; James L. McNamara, 1420-47th) Avenue, Rock Island, Ill.; Frederic A. Mcßae, 416 East 84th Street, New York 28, N. Y.; George T. Shimizu, 16225 South Dalton Avenue, Gardena, Cal.; Frank P. Slingluff, 3937 San Felipe, Houston 27, Texas; Howard C. Thomas, 35 Beaconwood Road, Newton Highlands 61, Mass.; William I. Zeitung, 430 South Burnside, Los Angeles 36, Calif.

Secretary, 1445 Cherry Lane Pottstown, Pa.

Treasurer, 29 Ryerson St., Brooklyn 1, N. Y.