1921

The 1921 Packard is dead. A couple of years ago Abe Weld drove it proudly into Bonnie Oaks where our class marvelled at the license plates: 1921. Venerable and reliable, the Packard had a heart attack as it was genevieving along from Jackson Heights to Henniker. Packard parts and Packard hearts are so hard to come by that Abe buried his old friend with a prayer that it should go to a Packard Heaven, but he has a guilty conscience. He fears that Venerable Packard heard him say that he had ordered a new Volkswagen for February delivery. Paralyzed in its carburetor-artery flow by such an abandonment of Lincoln-Weld standards, the Rt. Rev. Reliable Packard suffered a gasoline clot in its differential. Abe felt its battery with a sympathetic forefinger. Dead, everything extinct. The King is dead; long live the 1962 infant princeling.

Professor David Lambuth of our day used to drive a white Packard, which went well with his white beard, white tweed suit, white shoes, black cape, and arching black ribbon on frameless pince-nez glasses. All 27 men in the Department of English today are smooth-shaven except one, who wears a sort of early D. H. Lawrence moustache, Ned Perrin, whose articles you read in The New Yorker. In lamenting the recent death of Kenneth Allan Robinson, Professor of English and son-in-law of David Lambuth, Sudi Blesh recalls that "figure in a white tweed jacket that as an undergraduate I thought the height of slender elegance (as no doubt it was) gently biting a trim beard as his modulated phrases spoke of the Second Mrs. Tanqueray! And pronouncing Paula in the real Italian way of Paola, so that it came out Powla, with 'ow' as in 'how.'" It may well be that to Mr. Lambuth, Rudi owes sonfe of his literary energy. In 1960 he published no fewer than three books. In 1962 appeared a large and heavy tome, a five-year project, "College: Personalities, Concepts, Techniques," published by Chilton of Philadelphia. "Motherwell," still another book, is rapidly nearing completion, and Doubleday is prodding Rudi to finish one more, on American spirituals.

Who is Grandfather Supreme in 1921? Don Sawyer or Phil Noyes or Hugh Penney? Well, Don and Alice consider themselves mighty philoprogenitive. Their count is eight granddaughters and two grandsons, ten in all, between the ages of ten-and-ahalf and one-and-a-half. Even more philoprogenitive, if numbers be the criterion, are Phil and Florence Noyes. Their total: eleven. Curtseying into the world Jan. 26 and tipping the scale at six pounds, four ounces came Mary Louise Church (Elizabeth's daughter). Like the Sawyers, the Noyeses favor girls: seven, with four grandsons. But Hugh Penney is the King of Kings: Fifteen grandchildren.

Who is Globetrotter Supreme in 1921? Merrill Shoup, Ellis Briggs, Bill Beers, or Ike Chester? It has not yet been decided. Merrill is still peripatetically impressive. Here is a typical week. Tuesday, leave Colorado Springs. Wednesday, Washington. Friday, San Francisco. Sunday, Honolulu. Tuesday, Colorado Springs. With perfect nonchalance, more than once, Merrill has dropped in on Hanover from places 3,500 miles away. How then did he miss the 1961 football weekend? The reasons: pneumonia, blood clots, and other minor ailments, with three months in and out of the hospital, all very dismal. Despite so pressured a life Merrill has found time to write articles and give speeches: "Our Disappearing Dollar," "1962: The Year of Decision," and a formal published letter to the stockholders of the Golden Cycle Corporation.

An imaginative man about vacations, TedSonnenfeld recollected this winter that his daughter Marcia and her husband, Dr. Bill Scharfman, had been married fifteen years. Accordingly, he invited them and Celia for an expedition combining judiciously pleasure, Las Vegas and Palm Springs, and instruction, Boulder Dam. Boulder Dam rises 700 feet above bed rock, lifts the water level 584 feet, irrigates two million acres, and generates more than two million horse power. Las Vegas and Palm Springs also furnished Bill and Ted with some interesting, not to say, spectacular figures.

The dream of Homer Cleary to spend the rest of his life in Puerto Rico where he had good friends and a position in the Colegio San Antonio Abai, Hamacao, has faded out because of a heart attack in the island classroom which forced him into a hospital and retirement. Now recovered, he lives quietly at the Forest Hills Inn, Forest Hills, N.Y., and looks back over a long and emotionally rewarding teaching career, forty years.

Nose Dive Dan Ryder of Waterbury, Vt., so close to Stowe, has allowed his skis to accumulate dust in his cellar. He recently spent ten days in the hospital where he asked doctors this question, "Why does my head ache so much of the time?" Diagnosis: Arthritic neck. Cure: Home therapy, the perusal of seed catalogues, and a forward look to spring gardens. Bob Luce and Dan exchange books about the Civil War, their mutual hobby. As the years pass, like BobLoeb, Dan reads more and more. At this moment he and Frances may be sunning themselves in Arizona.

Speaking of ski country, one learns that Dutch Bausher passed through Hanover recently to visit his daughter Phyllis, Mrs. Ivor Petrak, wife of the Manager of The Lodge, Stowe. A long time childless, Phyllis has adopted Maria, born Nov. 17, 1961, somewhere in Vermont.

The bigger the family, the smaller the house. Red and Fay Stanley are happy in this paradox. Good-bye to their 15 Upland Road, Waban, home and hello to a fourroom cozy apartment, 40 A Beaconwood Rd., Newton Highlands. Residing with them are a poodle, aged two-and-a-half, and a Big Black Monster of a Cat, Baskerville type, aged twelve, sex uncertain. The Black Monster is, however, no match for the St. Bernard dog, which in the full flush of youth, three years, weight 165 pounds, the pet of David '53, but it can claw any opposition which David's wee pussy, aged two, weight three pounds, can offer. David, Mark, and Jon, sons of Pete '52, have inherited so much of Red's vitality that anything smaller than a St. Bernard approaching the 170- pound size simply would not do. Red's sonin-law, Richard F. Kneiss, has an airplane to play with, but it is in a troubled country. An A.A.F. lieutenant, married to Red's Polly, he is stationed with her and Red's grandson, Craig David, at Schweinfurt, in World War II the center of the German ball-bearing production, heavily bombed by the Allies for three long years, some 66 miles east of Frankfurt, that city more American than America in its traffic problems.

No longer little, some 1921 children are getting engaged and married. Harriet, a sculpture student at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, daughter of BobBurroughs, is engaged to William G. McGraw Jr. of Gaithersburg, Md., a Harvard graduate, now in his third year of Harvard Law School. Jean, Connecticut College '61, daughter of Jack Hubbell, has married a New York commercial artist, Everett G. Asher, educated at the University of Kentucky and the Ringling Art School, Sarasota. Charles '53, Tuck '54, the son of SpeedyFleet, has married a '56 Smith girl, Jaquelin Randolph Perry of New Canaan, Conn., a descendant of John Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States, and a debutante at the 1952 Darien-New Canaan Cotillion.

Bob Wilson continues in his spectacular Far-East career. His most recent exploit is the attempt to salvage, unharmed and unstolen by light-handed and heavy-handed natives, the $12,000,000 cargo of the $14,000,000 Pioneer Muse, which with radar scope working well and with visibility of 23 miles ran aground on an island "225 miles from nowhere." On board were 44 war heads with full atomic power, which the Navy removed before they blew the island into Kingdom Come. The full story will run to about 40 typewritten pages in Volume 10 of the Collected Works of Robert Francis Wilson, Jr. '21.

Bill Bullen '22 is shown presenting a cupfor the best class attendance at the BostonAlumni Dinner on February 1 to classmate Haskell Cohn. Bullen is both president of the Boston Association and chairman of the Class of '22. Small wonderthat '22 was out in force.

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

Treasurer, 2728 Henry Hudson Parkway New York 63, N. Y.

Bequest Chairman,