1949

Rudolph will be lighting up in a few days, and Santa is busy piling his sled high with gifts he wouldn't dare to entrust to the pokey old U.S. mails. The flu bug has me flattened, and my only current inspiration for you good people derives from the cheerful Christmas cards I read through somewhat watering eyes and the bell-jingling commercials for the local savings bank that I hear on the radio. I was in a pretty fair holiday spirit until this bug bit me, but the crowning blow was struck only an hour ago. I had remembered the milkman, the laundryman, the garbage men, the newspaper boy, and the postman. Their Christmas envelopes were all carefully lined up. Then a young man came to the door and wished my wife and me a happy holiday, introducing himself as the relief driver for the Sunday paper delivery. I think I'll buy my own tin cup.

News from the College is a bit scarce this month, and aside from progress reports on the big Third Century Fund drive which is making healthy progress around the country, the top story right now is that Ab Oakes' varsity hockey team has just played its first tourney in the new Madison Square Garden. The Big Green sextet jumped off to a quick two-goal lead in the opening game against powerful Clarkson before succumbing 9-4 but surprised favored Brown with a last-minute tie in the consolation match.

More news is in on Dr. Carl Granger, and an extremely erudite "Analysis of the Concept of Teamwork" written by Dr. PeterNew has been clipped from the Rhode Island Community Mental Health Journal. These men are both at Tufts University as we wrote you several months ago. Carl was recently appointed professor and chairman of the physical and rehabilitation medicine department at the Tufts School of Medicine. He brings to the Tufts-New England Medical Center a wealth of experience garnered from years of clinical and experimental work in muscle diseases. His numerous professional affiliations include an appointment to the committee on medical practice of the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine and the current presidency of the American Association of Electromyography and Electrodiagnosis. Carl and his wife Helen live in nearby Cohasset with their two children Glenn, fifteen, and Marilyn, eleven. Pete New, a sociologist, is associate professor in the department of preventive medicine at the same school. A version of his paper on the concept of teamwork was presented at Brown University at a standards for community health program training session. The following abstract sets the basis for the paper. I sort of kind of understand it all, I think, but those big words make my head throb. Abstract: In community health work the team approach is often proposed as one way of getting things done. Yet, when teamwork fails, we are at a loss in assessing the reasons for its failure. In this paper, we suggest an analytic model in viewing the possible reasons of this failure. We examine the structure of the team within the context of six assumptions under which teamwork operates: equality, knowledge, professions, marginality, task, and domain. When these assumptions are viewed in relation to possible cognitive dissonance, consisting of functional and substantive rationalities, it is our contention that success or failure in teamwork can best be explained by the degree of dissonance that is inherent in the assumptions.

Your roving reporter gathered little bits of information from classmates and their wives at our last Hanover weekend. Some of it is quite interesting and some of it regrettably rather sketchy because of a lack of time to hold much more than very brief conversations.

We were all extremely pleased to have Bob and Ginnie Hill join our returning group for the first time. Bob is in the real estate business in the Bronx and lives in Irvington on Hudson. He stays in shape by keeping active in the ancient Scottish sport of curling. Curling was described to me as a game in which a 32-pound stone is slid on ice to a spot. This sounds like a granddaddy version of the shuffle game played in many a pub with little metal discs. It would take a big guy like Bob to play a game which has to be likened to playing tiddlywinks with manhole covers.

Charlie and Natalie Holtzman also put in their first fall weekend appearance. They live in Roslyn Heights, Long Island, with young sons, David and Paul. Charlie specializes in internal medicine in nearby Plain-view. Natalie hails from Caldwell, N. J., and she is a full-fledged tennis bug. And talking about tennis bugs, Bert and Sue Rodman both play as much tennis as they can find time for in the Boston suburb of Newton. They hire a bus to take a lot of their friends to the Harvard-Dartmouth football game with a flourish and a sour or two to sustain them.

News out of the Northwest has it that John Sweetland is the czar of Minnesota junior hockey. In fact, with his 58-inch waistline he is known as the second "Minnesota Fats." Apparently, John's top team of 1967 went to the finals of the national peewee hockey championships. Perhaps John or Joan will write and tell us about this year's crop.

Bob and Donna Muenzberg took a summer trip to Canada and the Midwest last summer and visited the Sweetlands as well as John and Phil Tull '50 in Barrington, ill. The Muenzbergs live within a mile or two of Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, the famous reproduction of a colonial New England village which draws so many visitors from all over the nation each year. Bob is currently president of the Lions Club of Sturbridge-Southbridge-Charlton.

Herb Gramstorff reports that as an account supervisor and vice president at Foote, Cone, Belding he is in charge of the Best Foods account as well as the Savarin coffee account. He further went on to say that Savarin is now the number two coffee in the New York market.

Bill Ballard and his wife Naomi also made the scene for the first time. Bill is also in the advertising game with American Home Products Company where he writes those clever commercials for Anacin. The Ballards live in Pelham, N. Y., from whence son Bill Jr., sixteen, has already applied for acceptance to Dartmouth. He apparently is a very bright youngster and takes after his old man, the master at bridge, hearts, and other challenging games.

News out of Cleveland has Dave Vanderhoof still living there but traveling the mid south and Bill Griffiths no longer in Cleveland and now with ITT-Levitt, builders of the famous Levittown developments, and living in Great Neck, Long Island.

John Dahle and his Pick Axe Award cornmittee of Bob Priester and Phil Johnson are now set up and in business. They will welcome any and all nominations for the next award addressed to John Dahle, 310 Jasmine, Denver, Colo. 80220.

Secretary, 15 Twin Oak Rd. Short Hills, N. J. 07078

Treasurer, 530 East 86th St., New York, N. Y. 10028