1963

Dave Dawley took me at my word when I asked in a column last spring whether or not the members of the class were happy. "That is really a question to keep us awake," he notes, adding that for himself he thinks he is, "and where I'm not I'm trying. For me the 1970s were an unsatisfying transition from intense community organizing to something less dramatic. But I've started the new decade determined to take risk, follow adventure and conscience, to live Tom Robbins' 'Fourth Vision' 'to overcome that in yourself that is dull.' Robbins was referring to women in EvenCowgirls Get the Blues but he admitted that even men can get the Fourth Vision too and that women will be their 'steady sidekicks in equal and ecstatic escapades of poetic behavior and romance.' "

Dave also writes that he has recently "parted painfully" with the woman he'd been living with for the past several years, and now is living in Cambridge, Mass., managing his own business and being father to a nine-year-old Honduran girl he is adopting. (She is the daughter of a family that adopted him while he was in the Peace Corps, so there's an element of things coming full circle involved.)

"The way I live has a higher priority than business as usual," Dave continues. His priorities are to "avoid commuting; work at home as much as possible; 'give no credence to any thought that was not born outdoors'; pack your child with the toothbrush whenever you need to explore. I've written revolving five-year goals that include watching the sunrise more often, speaking a third language, no cooking unless I want to, having a foreign adventure in southern California, learning to relax without guilt, learning to receive love more comfortably, becoming more giving and open; feeling free.

"Your question to all of us reminds me of a similar question from 'Dallas' — though admittedly we're in trouble when we look to prime-time soap operas for insight, but . . . it goes like this:

'What are you looking for?''Just a happy ending!'

I keep filling my 'Death Wish' file with blurbs about my own happy ending, and I guess Garp comes close: ,'No matter what my . . . last words were, please say they were these: I have always known that the pursuit of excellence was a lethal habit.' "

I thought that was as nice a piece of writing as I'd seen anywhere lately, and was worth sharing at length. On a lighter note Dave also passed on his belated congratulations to ChrisMiller for Animal House. Dave's only regret was that Chris hadn't preserved at least a cameo role for the Judiciary Committee, service on which has provided Dave with many fond memories concerning intensive investigations launched as to whether or not dropped pants at Green Mountain; constituted "gentlemanly behavior."

David Browne also sent along an interesting communication. Your secretary has previously made reference to his writing career and its mind-stunning range of subjects from "Asparagus Ferns" for Plants Alive to his most recent "Distributed Control for a Cement Making Plant," which was designated as the third-best paper presented to the The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Toronto last spring. Dave, who is now living in Concord, Calif., and continues to work for Kaiser Engineering, also sent along a copy of his curriculum vitae, which seems certain to make any prospective employer sit up straight on the end of his spine. Its last entry (after "education" and all the usual stuff) is entitled "Major Transformation," and reads as follows:

"From conservative Republican to disinterested observer of the political show; from real estate investor and hassled landlord to renter, back to owner of own home; from naive optimist (believing like Dr. Pangloss that this is the best of all possible worlds) to pessimist and back to a realistic optimist (having faith that things work for the best in the long run)." Among the interests Dave lists are music (of nearly all sorts), "training guard dogs, teaching my doves magic tricks, winning amateur billiard games, oil painting, reading . . . (and) cooking. My kitchen experiments have ranged from raising French souffles and dabbling with nouvelle cuisine to stir-frying with an Oriental wok." Thank you for the letter, Dave.

While we're on the subject of Daves, we'd better include the fact that Dave Schaefer, our newsletter editor (and, it might be added, the newly elected president of the College's alumni Newsletter Editors Association) was married right on schedule last May. (Remember, fans, you read all about it here first.) Classmates on hand for the long- planned nuptials included Bill Russell, BillScott Babcock, John Steele, Mike Cardozo, and, of course, Dave. A European honeymoon was planned (and taken). Dave says he ran into Mr. and Mrs. Bill Courtney in Paris, where Bill is a partner in a big accounting firm. In addition, Dave has changed jobs, joining the advertising firm of Quinn and Johnson in Boston as creative director for the Fidelity Management & Research Cos. account. (Fidelity is a major investment firm with several different divisions.) Dave had been creative director and vice president of McKinney/New England, the Boston subsidiary of the Philadelphia-based McKinney advertising agency.

In other developments on the corporate front, Bank of America is pleased as punch to announce the appointment of Maurice Fried-man as vice president and director of the bank's western region corporate finance office. Maurice had been assistant treasurer of Itel Corp. ... Tom Chandler was named director of marketing for Vienna Sausage Manufacturing Co. in Chicago. Tom had been product acquisition manager for G.R.I. Marketing Services in New York.

In closing, I might note that your secretary won a Pulitzer Prize last year. No, it was not for this column. In fact, I don't think I'll tell you much more about it because, frankly, the more you know the less impressive it becomes. Actually, I shared the award with about 80 other Philadelphia Inquirer staffers for the paper's coverage of Three Mile Island, though, truth to tell, I deserved it more than some of them.

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