1951
The College recently learned of the death on June 3, 1967 of the Class' oldest member, Colin Raubeson, at the age of 49. An obituary will appear in the next issue of this MAGAZINE.
Guido Rahr recently became president of the Rahr Malting Company, which maintains general offices in Minneapolis and operates plants in Minneapolis and Shakopee, Minn. He is a fourth generation member of the family which founded the company as a brewery in Manitowoc, Wis., in 1847.
Guido prepped for Dartmouth at Exeter. Following graduation from Dartmouth, he served two years with the Army Engineers in Germany. He then joined the grain department of Rahr Malting. In 1956 Guido became associated with the Great Western Malting Co. of Vancouver, Wash., of which he was most recently vice president.
He and his wife have five children. Guido is an avid outdoorsman and has been affiliated with a number of conservation, civic, and educational organizations. He is currently a trustee of Outward Bound and of the Portland (Ore.) Opera Association and a former trustee of Reed College. He is a member of the Izaak Walton League and the American Alpine Club.
Will Rowe has been elected a vice president of Armour-Dial, Inc. Last year, he was appointed vice president and general manager of Rehesis Chemical Co., a division of Armour Pharmaceutical Co. which is wholly owned by Armour-Dial. Will joined Armour Pharmaceutical in 1967 as controller. Previously, he served as a management consultant and held various controllerships, data processing, accounting and marketing positions with several manufacturing companies. In addition to his Dartmouth A.B., Will holds an M.B.A. from Northeastern University. He and his family reside in Park Ridge, Ill.
Don O'Dowd, recently elected president of Oakland (Mich.) University, is a new trustee of the Cranbook Schools in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. These consist of the Cranbrook School and Kingswood School Cranbrook for boys and girls, respectively, in grades 7-12, and Brookside School Cranbrook for both sexes from kindergarten through grade 6. Don will serve on the Kingswood School operating committee.
Class Treasurer Merle Thorpe is an imaginative and innovative engineer who holds a Thayer School Master's in Electrical Engineering on top of his Dartmouth A.B. A recent newsclip (source unidentified) carries an article, with a picture of Merle, entitled "Putting the Profit in Plasma Technology." I am sufficiently ignorant in the field to eschew any attempt at paraphrasing and therefore quote the opening paragraphs:
Plasma—an intensely hot ionized gas—hasn't yet emerged as a common industrial processing tool despite earlier optimism. But thanks to the work of one New Hampshire businessman, the day is coming closer and closer.
The businessman is Merle Thorpe. A former Dartmouth College professor of engineering and plasma torch pioneer, Thorpe has eschewed work on the more common applications for the superheated gases—in metal cutting—and instead focused his efforts on developing ways to use plasma to speed up chemical and metallurgical processes for currently impractical applications or at less cost than traditional methods. The means: either a plasma furnace, where the intense heat can be used to melt or separate materials (as in the reduction of ores), or the plasma induction torch, whose best can be used to produce high-purity materials.
The umbrella for Thorpe's activities is lonarc Smelters, Ltd., a Canadian-financed company of which Thorpe is executive vice president and chief executive officer. lonarc in turn is the holding company for Humphreys Corp., a Concord, N. H. commercial refrigeration and distribution firm which Thorpe acquired in 1963. And Humphreys is also in turn the parent company of Thorpe Arc Flame Associates (TAFA) of Bow, N. H., just south of Concord, a division which Thorpe set up, soon after buying Humphreys, to carry out research and development work in plasma technology.
TAFA had auspicious beginnings, thanks in large measure to Thorpe's recruitment of other industrial plasma pioneers. Not long after the company was formed, TAFA developed the first plasma induction torch capable of handling reactive gaseous chemicals at 30,000°.
The device, which differs from a plasma furnace primarily in that it permits materials of extremely high purity to be made, received an award from Industrial Research magazine as one of the top 100 inventions in 1965. Three years later, in 1968, the fledgling firm won another IR invention award for a much larger version of its plasma torch.
Thorpe has also moved TAFA to practical plasma applications. The company's induction plasma torches are being used, for eample, to produce nuclear pellets for the generation of electricity and also to manufacture rare earth oxides.
At this point, my head is swimming, so I'll turn to:
NEWS IN BRIEF: Don Smith, ex- Hanover, now Durham, N. C., did marry Virginia Swain on January 2. . SamRoberts and Bill Ruggr have been promoted to Captains in the U. S. Naval Reserve Sam was also recently promoted to a senior vice president of the Philadelphia securities firm of Schmidt, Roberts & Parke.
Secretary, Apt. 32-A 45 East 89th St. New York, N. Y. 10028
Class Agent, Reader's Digest Pleasantville, N. Y. 10570
