1945

In April there were still patches of snow on the ground and another blizzard was not completely out of the question, so Pat and I were glad to head for New Orleans early in the month where I attended the annual Risk and Insurance Management Society Conference that is held in a different city each year. My main concern at The First National Bank of Boston is dealing with risk management and insurance exposures for the bank, its holding company, and their subsidiaries worldwide.

This conference is a golden opportunity for me to get together with risk managers of other companies to share mutual ideas, problems, and concerns through various meetings and seminars; especially the first two days when representatives of almost 100 banks throughout the country and the world met to concentrate on risk management problems relating to our particular industry. It has been good also to renew friendships with fellow bankers who have been attending these working sessions over the years. Pat was involved with a guest program that included a ride on a Mississippi River boat, lunch at the Louisiana Superdome, and visit to the old parts of the city plus trips to plantations out in the country. I was thus able to get a vicarious enjoyment of the place through her eyes.

We missed seeing our peripatetic orthopedic classmate Bob Samilson, clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco, who travels all over the world lecturing on his specialty, biceps and cuff lesions in the shoulder. He and his wife Marge were in Boston (while we were in New Orelans) where he was visiting professor pro tempore at Tufts University School of Medicine Department of Orthopedic Surgery. At the end of his "pro tempore," he was honored by the Tufts orthopedic staff at a formal dinner at the RitzCarlton Hotel where the other guests enjoyed a roast (of him). I wish I could have been there, because this writer is forever grateful to him for reducing my shoulder which I dislocated at our 25th reunion while playing tennis with the wives of three classmates.

A nice note came in from Howie Germain who wrote that Rosanne (new wife of four years) and he have been retired on Hilton Head Island for two and a half years, and he feels competent to say that of the various lifestyles he's experienced in the past 30 years or so, that life is, by a substantial margin, the best. Hilton Head is the ideal end product for a good liberal arts education, i.e. more golf, tennis, bridge, sailing, etc. than one can find time for. Even the immunity to cocktails and conversation, honed to such a razor edge in Hanover, is standing them in good stead. He extends an invitation to any classmate who happens to be visiting to get in touch and says they're in the phone book. Ad Winship '42 was through some time ago and Young Dawkins '38 had a cocktail party for all the 20-odd Dartmouths on the island (Somehow that doesn't sound quite right). Frank Bousquet and wife Maggie live in Savannah (about 40 miles away) and they've gotten together a number of times. The good doctor has a very successful opthamological practice and has changed practically not at all since 1941 (What a compliment!).

Now that June is just around the corner, let's think ahead two years to our 35th reunion in 1980 and make Steve Hull very happy by inviting at least one classmate to attend and thus swell our reuning ranks (which are pretty swell to begin with!).

483 Franklin St. Reading, Mass. 01867