1940

"You don't know how much it means to us students to have Baker Tower lighted up again!"

The speaker was Diane Boyer, a senior from Vail, Colo, (and, incidentally, one of the nation's top women free style skiers - 13th in the national championship last winter), addressing the Alumni Council in December about her view of the College now that her Dartmouth experience as an undergraduate is drawing to an end.

She didn't include a credit line for the Class of '40, but the students knew. The story of 40's "Gift of Lights" was reported in The Dartmouth and also was the lead in the season's first issue of an energy conservation newsletter distributed to all Dartmouth personnel - students, faculty, and administrators - and it's been gratifying to hear Ms. Boyer's sentiments echoed many times by other students since the nightly tower illumination was resumed just before Thanksgiving.

Ms. Boyer, whose talk was a litany of superlatives about Dartmouth, recalled that the tower was spotlighted for a few weeks after her class first came here as freshmen in 1974, but then the lights were extinguished in response to the energy crunch. But such is the power of remembered beauty that the restoration of that tradition - for which the Class can feel good - has been enthusiastically welcomed by seniors and greeted with evident pleasure by the other classes.

A foot of snow having fallen, it's appropriate to note that Bob Skinner has recently doubled the size of his Ski Shop at the Mt. Sunapee State Park traffic circle. Bob, once one of the top five collegiate skiers in the country, who competed in veteran class races until two years ago, has been operating his ski shop there for the past 27 years. He has also had shops in Manchester and New London, but with his enlarged Sunapee operation, a second shop in Claremont is the only other one bearing his name.

Still in the skiing world, Gary Allen continues to be the Pied Piper of the boards in Laconia, where he was recently featured in a cross country clinic for beginners. In tribute to his recognized authority in Nordic events, Gary has also been named assistant chief of hill for all jumping events at the upcoming 1980 Olympics at Lake Placid.

Shifting to the world of words, Mel Wax, longtime news director of the San Francisco Public Television station, WQED, and editor-producer of that station's prize-winning news show "News Room," is changing his career perspective. From reporting the news, he is now having a hand in shaping it, as the new press secretary of the mayor of the city of the Golden Gate. As he explained in a letter to a Hanover friend, "I saw the change as a chance to be on the inside instead of on the fringes."

It is unlikely that most will take their eyes off the drawings and read the fine print credits on ads for the film, Semi-Tough; therefore, note should be taken here that Walter Bernstein, the Class's screenwriter extraordinary, wrote the screenplay for that new action-comedy which stars Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson as a pair of hard-living pro football players, from the book by Sports Illustrated writer Dan Jenkins.

Walter, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay for The Front, introduced Semi-Tough at a Dartmouth preview as part of a Dartmouth Film Society series entitled "A Tribute to the Writer as Filmmaker." Following his afternoon appearance on campus, he flew back to New York to be present at the grand opening of Semi-Tough there. Walter's other film credits include The MollyMaguires, Fail Safe, Paris Blues, and Heller inPink Tights, and he is currently working on an original screenplay entitled, The ElectricHorseman.

Meanwhile, Jonathan (Jack) Ingersoll has seen his second play, a musical whodunit, produced by the Chagrin Valley Little Theater in Cleveland. The play is entitled Zook's Gone, and it is a 1915 period piece for which Jack did both book and lyrics. A year ago, his first musical, (e) none of the above, was produced to benefit both the University School, where Jack taught history, mathematics, and English for 23 years until his "retirement" in 1973, and the Chagrin Valley Little Theater. Each received $4,500 from that production.

John D. O'Shea of Laconia, where he is president of the O'Shea Department Store, is one of two laymen among seven persons appointed by the N.H. Supreme Court to its newly-formed Committee on Judicial Conduct. The committee has the responsibility to hear allegations of judicial misconduct.

Word from Europe via Stet Whitcher reports that Nick Turkevitch has moved from staid Amsterdam to the glamorous Champs Elysees in Paris.

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