1948
With our 30th coming up in June, it is appropriate for us '48s to note that reunion classes have traditionally set a tough example in terms of helping our College on the Hill with its continuing financial problems, this in reaching more deeply than usual in the annual Alumni Fund drive. The costs of our own undergrad years so many years ago were covered to a substantial extent by others before us who had provided endowment, or by Uncle Sam. Some of this need and responsibility has been passed on to us as alumni, a responsibility which our reunion status emphasizes.
Thus, we have the difficult objective this year of finding $100,000 for the College, more than the Class has ever given. Last year we gave only $23,643, which further illustrates the difficulty. Five years ago we exceeded $65,000, however, thanks to dedicated and time consuming personal phone calls, by John Van Raalte and Bud Elliott and a few others, to a great many members of the Class.
This year, Head Agent Ken Young and John and Bud are the nucleus of a wider organization consisting of various regional agents, including Marv Axelrod, Jim Schaefer, Sam Wilkinson, John Hatheway, Lloyd Krumm, Al Becker, Bob Reynolds, Bob Foster, Jere Poole, Don Casey, Bob Jeavons, Bob Munson, Marty Ullman, Earl Chambers, Mouse Taylor, and others still being contacted. The intent of this group is to contact personally every '48 before those June 12-14 30th reunion days, in the hope that the men of our Class will find the will and means, somehow, to meet the tremendous objective hoped from us on this 30th year afterward.
Dick Repko certainly gets around, and finds no little excitement in doing so. This Caltex official and his family have lived, that I know of, in Ceylon (where Dick sold to the tea plantations back in the hills before the oil companies were nationalized in what is today known as the island country of Sri Lanka), Thailand (where deadly poisonous snakes in the garden were not a rarity), and Japan (where the Drurys joined them for a few great years).
The latest note from our traveler arrived from Nairobi, Kenya, where wife Casey helps Dick cover the Red Sea countries, including the Horn of Africa, and the Indian Ocean. "It's quite interesting since I travel extensively to Somalia, Ethiopia, The Yemen, Sudan, plus Mauritius and Reunion." This assignment succeeds two years in the Malagasy Republic, up to June 1976, "when the oil industry was nationalized there and I was asked to leave." He finally got out "on a somewhat clandestine basis as the Government was giving oil company people remaining in Madagascar a bit of a hard time." Dick, you are in the great tradition of your Dartmouth predecessor, John Ledyard.
In answer to my plea for news from the wives, Jan Evans writes from Warwick, N.Y., a friendly sounding town west of the Hudson and south of Goshen, that husband Carl is still "the persistent tennis promoter and chairman of the town recreation commission." One of their sons, Walt, a '75 at Dartmouth, is a third-year med student at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons in N.Y.C., "and occasionally brings Phil Johnson's son, Larry '75, home for country fresh air." They occasionally see friends Bob Eckerson and Arlene in the latters' hometown of Nashua, N.H. (Thanks, Jan.)
Talk about disaster! Bill Pace, whose appointment as a Dartmouth Med School Trustee was described in this column a month or so ago, can't believe it happened, "because I really broke my leg last summer in an impossible, it-can't-happen-to-me type of fall in my own garbage getting into the car to go to the hospital. I I wound up with a comminuted supracondylar fracture of the femur and fracture of the fibula which required a huge plate and eight screws for repair, and knocked me off for almost six months." Ye gods, Bill! Sure glad you didn't get hurt. Hope we'll see you and the other 23 '48 physicians at reunion, and that you're solidly back on your feet by now.
Bill, by the way, knows beauteous Squam Lake in New Hampshire and has high praise for Dartmouth's Minary Conference Center there. It's in an area that the post-reunion '48 visitor to the Granite State ought to see if he has an eye for unspoiled, gorgeous natural scenery.
Congratulations to Walt Cairns and WidWashburn. Walt, who has been with wellknown Arthur D. Little in Cambridge, Mass., since 1955, was elected a vice president of the firm in March. His highly interesting field is the firm's invention management program, which involves the finding of promising technological developments and their commercialization through outside licensing where the necessary resources are available. Walt has patents of his own, and is a recognized authority in the licensing of new technologies. Mary Lane and the kids at home in Marblehead can be proud of him.
Wid, the '48 representative with the Smithsonian in Washington on native American af- fairs, has done it again in writing the front half of the American Heritage Publishing Company's new History of the Indian Wars, a marvelous volume for the history buff, reviewed elsewhere in this issue. Wid is described on the cover of the book as the "noted scholar and student of Indian affairs whose books on the subject include Red Man's Land/ White Man'sLaw and The Indian in America." Congratulations, Wid. Hope you'll be at reunion to see your Hanover once again.
And the same to all '48s who can possibly be there! The 30th should be fun. You know from the correspondence that Dick Leggat and his committee are certainly working to make it so. Be there if you can.
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