1944
Nice thing about football weekends in Hanover: they draw a crowd. We had a dandy '44 group for the Princeton game October 14. Lodgings at the Mascoma Lake Lodge were admittedly on the rustic side—the bed that fell in, the few that sagged; the hissing heaters, those that didn't hiss at all—but the food was good and the Saturday night post-game get-together was really cheering. So, we look for other accommodations next year . . .
Names and numbers will be covered by Merle Hagen in his '44 Newsletter; let me just report on the meeting of the executive committee. Those assembling in a tense pre-game caucus included: Hap Bush,Merle Hagen, Ezz Hale, Fritz Hier, BillMcElnea, Bob McLaughry, and RayZrike. Welcome walk-ons who we were happy to have audit the festivities included Ross Higier and Bob (Arizona) Miller.
The action-packed agenda included a secretary's report which the secretary couldn't find but which he niftily adlibbed; a treasurer's report which hadn't quite arrived from Ohio but which we supposed would have chalked a surplus; a class project discussion which led to no class project; and an Alumni Fund report which noted exemplary behavior and performance on the parts of so many in the Class. We all exchanged wet embraces as we broke up for Bloodys and the game . . .
A backward glance at that assembled committee reveals that:
Hap Bush has re-located as executive vice president of an insurance company in Springfield, Mass., BS & C Financial Services, Inc., by name. He and Mary live on a Massachusetts Alp in nearby Blandford, inhaling good mountain air and with views 100 kilometers in every direction.
Bill McElnea has resigned his NYC investment banking firm to take over as president of Caesars World, Inc., a group engaged primarily in operating resort properties. It owns Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas and the Cove Haven and Paradise Stream honeymoon resorts in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. It is also developing a resort and condominium project in North Miami Beach and it has announced plans to purchase the Hotel Thunderbird in Las. Vegas and to build a new 2,000 room hotel on the Thunderbird tract. Our East's loss to the West's gain, as Barbara and Bill move from Manhattan to Los Angeles . . .
The Brown game weekend in Hanover brought Bill Seekins back to the Plain for his second time in some 30 years, along with wife Dorothy and Gail, a senior at Bucknell, and Barbs and Jay, in high school and junior high respectively. Bill is a vice president with Courier Corporation, a commercial printing firm in Lowell, Mass., which has just gone public on the stock market.
On the move: (1) Cy Thompson has traded in his Cuckoo Clock for a Bowler since Rank Zerox transferred him from Zurich, Switzerland, back to his old stamping ground, London (England, not Ontario). (2) Frank Davis, from Brockport, L.I., to Florence, S. C.: "I am now the Manager-Compensation at G. E.'s newest plant—a $25 million edifice dedicated to building mobile two-way radios. Life-styles do change with such a move, but since the Davis menage likes camping, the milder climate is most welcome. One daughter married (two grand-daughters) and one daughter in college (Guilford in Greensboro, N. C.); Betty and I are now down to only three girls at home. The passing years are breaking up my sorority house!"
It's hard to keep up with hunter-trader-trapper, gourmet cook Bill McGrail: he and wife Joie are on the road again, this time with a new venture called "Kitchen Rags," a collection of clothes to cook in which has caught on with both retailers and the press. The McGrails are making the rounds with appearances on TV shows and in department stores.
Among our busy opthalmologists is NickDaukas (Middletown, Conn.), who thought for 27 seconds that he might be able to get away for the Brown game—until he realized he would have to re-schedule "about 50 appointments . . ."
Al Howland (Akron, Ohio), schedules cleverly: his fall Trustee meeting at Kimball Union Academy (just 14 miles south of Hanover) fell on Princeton weekend and so he combined a Board meeting with a seat on the 'fifty yard-line.
But Al is no planner at all compared to Fred Harrsen, who retired a year and a bit ago after 20 years as a management consultant, from New Hope, Pa. to Marlboro, N. H. "I was lucky in the things I'd done," he said in a phone conversation, "and thus was able to retire early to do what I wanted. We bought a summer house on Stone Pond and have been busy winterizing it. And then we have a second place, half way up Mt. Monadnock, the last five private acres in the middle of state land, and with a view to the moon." Fred's four children by his first marriage are all "up and away and married," and he has a second family in the form of wife Grace; son Jim, 9; and daughter Faith, 6.
Coaxed out of semi-anonymity in Atlanta is George Dyke, an engineering vice president with Simons-Eastern Co. He and five others founded Eastern in 1958 and it merged with Simons two years ago. Ninety per cent of the company's business today is in pulp and paper, in the U. S. and around the world. George and Betty prefer weekends on their houseboat on Lake Sidney Lanier, 35 miles from Atlanta, to trips to India and Sweden, and George says he has stayed south, as a former northerner, ". . . in order to keep warm." Son George, a graduate of the U. of Georgia, is working in Knoxville, Tenn., for the Hartford Insurance Co.
H. Taylor Pratt, USM Corporation, Boston (manufacture and sale of industrial products) says his big kick of the fall season was watching son Chris '73 "survive" a weekend rugby match against Harvard. "That's a tough sport." Chris is a math major, a Tri Delt and in the last of the NROTC contingents which will graduate next June.
Finally, from one whose pen is mighty, word that Joe Goldstein, Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law, Science and Social Policy at Yale, is co-author of a book, his fifth, "Crime, Law and Society," published by the Free Press in 1971.
That's it. Blessings.
Secretary, 309 Crosby Hall Hanover, N. H. 03755
Treasurer, 815 E. Schantz Ave., Dayton, Ohio 45419
