1939
As of this writing 141 '39ers have returned Bert MacMannis's questionnaire on reunion. 105 "plan to attend"; 36 "hope to attend." To the better than 500 of you who can't make up your minds, we offer this month's guest Class Notes Columnist, JohnHess, who reminisces on what we were 25 years ago and what we seem to be today.
John has been writing short stories, plays, movie and TV scripts since his post graduate work at Yale Drama School, except for his five "short" years as a tank officer in the E.T.O. He wrote and produced in Sweden a full length film "A Matter of Morals"; has written TV scripts for U. S. Steel Hour, The Nurses, Du Pont, Checkmate, G. E. Theatre, and Ford Startime. His play "The Grey-Eyed People" was produced on Broadway, and "The Better Mousetrap" on stage and TV. He lives on a Bucks County Farm with wife, 2 sons, dogs, and seven cats.
"I'll tell you what I suppose is an unflattering fact, but they say the truth is always the best. When I got your letter asking if I'd turn out some copy for the class notes column, about the first thing I did was dig around in my library a while, and finally come up with an interesting archaeological find ... my 1939 Aegis. Then I thumbed to the D's in the senior class members section, and when my finger lit on 'Bob Davidson' I said 'Ohhh ... yeah ... sure ... of course.'
"Then I started to look at the other fresh-faced photographs of all the brave young men and I decided that if I ever see DickJackson again (it says he was the Aegis' editor-in-chief), I'm going to ask him why he filled those pages with pictures of so many guys who obviously were not in my class because I'll swear I'd never seen their faces or heard their names before in my life.
"I'm grateful for and probably sentimental about my years at Dartmouth, perhaps a little snobbishly proud to be a graduate, and I know just what it did to shape my life. . . which was a great deal. But I've never been much of a classmate-follower and maybe I'll be drummed out of the corps for saying this, but the whole idea of mass reunions embarrasses me.
"0I do almost always go to the Princeton-Dartmouth football game, because I live near a little town called New Hope, Pa which is only half an hour from and because one of my sons, a 14-year-old is a Dartmouth nut the way some kids are car nuts or girl nuts. I yell like crazy for Dartmouth, on those occasions, and I'm elated if we win and disappointed if we lose but always the strongest impression I take away with me is that if there's one thing I really don't need very much these days it's such a vivid reminder of the passage of time. Apparently that passage of time has now gotten to the point where we're beginning to be impressed not with whether one of our classmates looks good or looks bad but whether he's 'well preserved.'
"Dutifully, however, as befits a class notes column, I can pass on some news about the state of 'preservation' of some few classmates, though it really has been gathered over the past five years, not the past five weeks.
For instance, my last two years at school I had three roommates. All three are living walking lies. I'll prove it.
"Take Alan Tishman. He looks a handsome 30 years old, is no balder than he was 25 years ago, and is a trim five pounds less than he was in 1939. This is not only impossible, it is also immoral. He is therefore living a lie. I wish I knew how he did it. But his particular fraud is worse than that. I visited him not too long ago, at work. He poses as the executive vice president of a vast real estate empire and he sits in a Darryl Zanuck-ish office atop one of his giant skyscrapers, king, more or less, of all he surveys. Well, I happen to know the truth about Tishman. He wears his socks for a week without changing, he can't spell without either a dictionary or me right there to correct him, and he's too lazy to put the cap back on the toothpaste tube. I know. This executive vice president stuff is sheer hokum.
"The second roommate, John L. Steele, I visited last spring in Washington, D. C. You know what his pose is? He pretends he is bureau chief of the Time-Life organization in Washington! He weighs ten pounds less than he did in 1939. He has somehow managed to line and shape his face so that he looks like Spencer Tracy playing Gen. Eisenhower deciding whether or not to launch the invasion of Normandy. It's a life-is-no-joke face and he wore it all the way over to his life-is-no-joke club, where he bowght me a very serious lunch and gave me some inside information about the President, the Vice-President, and several cabinet members, all of whom he knows personally.
"Well, for God's sake! Am I supposed to swallow that? John Steele ... and I know . . . is so shy he can't bring himself to invite a girl to the Green Key dance; his organizational abilities are taxed by folding a blanket; and I was absolutely right when I told him he'd never make the board of editors of The Daily Dartmouth because you can just look it up and see that he didn't. Chief of the Time-Life Washington bureau indeed!
"The third roommate was a thoroughly non-scholarly swimmer, both pool- and social-, named Bud Stein. He had no discernible interests or talents beyond that. I haven't seen him since graduation day in June of 1939, but I can tell you right now that he cannot possibly be what he is said to be. . . which is one of the most skillful and most successful general surgeons in the Mid-West. Couldn't be. Obviously just couldn't be. The kid clearly doesn't know the difference between a person's liver and his left foot, and never will know, either.
"Fakes all. Very depressing."
Another member of the class joined the ranks of company presidents on November 7 with the announcement of Hugh McLaren's election to the presidency of the Vermilya-Brown Company, New York City. Hugh had been senior vice president of the company, currently building Japanese Pavilion No. 3 and the Venezuela Pavilion at the World's Fair plus many other projects in the Greater New York area. He joined Vermilya-Brown in 1940 after gaining his Thayer School engineering degree, took time away for service in the Coast Guard, returned to Vermilya-Brown in 1945 as a superintendent, became a project manager in 1952, was elected to the board of directors two years later, and in 1960 was named assistant to the president.
And a Merry Xmas to you, too!
Secretary, 1908 Coolidge Drive Dayton, Ohio 45419
Treasurer 25 Sound View Drive Bay Hills, Long Island, N.Y.
