1932

This column, threadbare news-wise, is grateful to those of you who squibbled notes on your dues slips to Jack Pyles, some of them having reached here, kindness of MarkShort.

Thus we find Don Allen of Seneca Falls, N. Y., noting that Eisenhower College is about to start its third year, with four new staff members in the Division of Science and Math, which he heads. He and Kay rode the "Canadienne" out to Banff last summer and found that part of the northern Rockies country a great vacation spot. CharlieDoerr writes from La Jolla, Calif.: "We're delighted with life out here. My consulting activities keep me hopping." And WallieRushmore from Mineola, N. Y.: "In my 28th year at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and planning a trip to Spain, Portugal, and Morocco for a month this fall."

Charlie Mayo, from summer headquarters in Provincetown: "Marine biologist son Stormy '65 is now in Japan as a representative of the National Academy of Sciences. He is attending an International Academy of Assembly of thirty nations called "Ocean World," which is convening in Tokyo. Too bad he couldn't have gone by boat instead of a 747! Ing and I are planning on Bahamian cruising again this winter with headquarters in Coconut Grove."

And Jim Whiton also gives a nautical report: "Have started my retirement living plan, by spending the summer living on my 33-ft. sailboat. Saw a great deal of Maine fog, and some lovely scenery, while Down East. The next stage should be a trip down the Intra-Coastal Waterway to Ft. Lauderdale, then through the Bahamas to the Virgin Islands. Can Jim Moore beat that?"

Following the class officers' meeting last May Art Allen modestly withheld from us the information that he had been elected vice-president of Dartmouth's Association of Bequest and Estate Planning Chairmen, but we have caught up with that news via a clip from his old hometown paper, the "Mamaroneck Times." There we also read that since moving to Hanover Art is active in the Upper Valley Chapter of Retired Executives, which operates under the U. S. Small Business Administration Office. We'd like to hear more about this activity from Art and similarly active R. E.'s.

This being a short column, it may be a good time to keep a promise we made last year. You may recall our recalling a past interchange with sociologist Reuel Denny relative to a statement Ernest Martin Hopkins once made, that each college class tends to produce individuals of distinction in some particular area of endeavor, rather than in a cross-section of fields. Reuel played it back to us in professional language and query format: "Do the aspirations or the excellences of a given class tend to concentrate in a particular field or toward a particular challenge?" This naturally raised the question of where the particular excellences of the Class of '32 have tended to be manifest, and we promised some time to venture our own answer. Here it is: we think the evidence overwhelming that ours is a class that predominantly has produced business leaders.

Among us are a considerable number of chairmen of the board and chief execs, presidents, and other high echelon officers of some of the country's leading corporations, banks, other ancillary commercial undertakings, and diverse smaller enterprises. Assuming the thesis correct, there remains for interesting speculation the question of what forces shaped things so. Why did the College's depression-bottommost class, graduated in the period when American business was at a perhaps all-time low in performance, energy-flow, confidence, and prestige, produce so many entrepreneurial leaders in the burgeoning post-World War II economy? Any speculators—or dissenters from the basic thesis?

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