1929

The shortest days of the year are stretching the hours of daylight as we head home after work and enter into February. We see a record snowfall all around us and feel the deep freeze of subzero weather stimulating flu germs into their winter offensive.

Bob Monahan writes to inform us that Mary and Larry Hale did see the Columbia game last fall and were Monahan house guests for the event. He enclosed a letter from the University of New Hamp-shire Institute of Natural and Environmental Resources signed by eight foresters noting his retirement. I am sending it on to Harry Baehr for '29 UP. He reports that Jo-Ann and he have had a busy year. She covered the aftermath of the Mississippi hurricane in the first part of 1970, and took assignments in San Francisco and Canada thereafter. She was on a CBS panel reviewing religious events of the year. Harry has been president of the Brooklyn Eye and Ear Hospital for a year and feels he's earned the Purple Heart. He's had to be content with the Cross of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, which is something like carrying coals to Caracas.

Charlie Dudley has sent us a clipping from the January 3 Manchester Union headlined "Official Raps Flush Toilets." The flush is "the very symbol" of modern civilization, says a government official— Harold H. Leich, chief of policy development division of Civil Service Commission's Bureau of Policies and Standards. Hal poses the question in the American Chemical Society journal: "Can modern technology devise a better method of sewage disposal than using scarce and expensive drinking water to transport human waste from the bathroom to the river or the treatment plant?" He quotes the President's Council on Environmental Quality's prediction of the quadrupling of municipal system waste loads over the next fifty years. He offers as the alternative to the flush toilet "a dry method of sewage disposal."

Our New Hampshire reporter also informs us that Esther Nigrhswander was reelected to the New Hampshire legislature in November, which is a tribute not only to her but to the judgment and common sense of her electorate. We also learned that Ollie Holmes has retired from the Boston Downtown Club and he and Marion have moved to their New Hampshire home on Winnepesaukee.

The Sunday New York Times today (January 31) reports the engagement of Ellen Christine Lougee to Matthew Roy Simmons of Boston. Ellen is the daughter of Larry and Mary Lougee. She is a graduate of Northfield, and Connecticut College, where she was president of her class and assistant director of Community Development Program in Wallingford. Her finance comes from Salt Lake City, Utah, a cum laude graduate of Utah University and has a Master's degree from Harvard Business School. He is president of Simmons Associates Inc., a Boston investment counseling firm, and vice president of Keystone Insurance and Investment Corp. of Salt Lake City. Ellen's picture, accompanying the article, shows how lucky her young man is to win such a strikingly beautiful girl. She appears to be almost as pretty as her mother.

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