1934

Florida has become the number one locale for '34 mini-reunions. Mac Collins reports on one at his house on Siesta Key, featuring Artand Geri Grimes and Perry Gilbert, whose wife Claire was in Ithaca visiting the kids and grandkids. While Mac was looking up something in his Aegis to settle an argument, what should fall out but the 1934 graduation budget. Mac was our first class treasurer.

Our Commencement Ball was budgeted at $1,000 and came in at $845.78, an accomplishment due largely, we can be sure, to the redoubtable Collins, but partly also to Hank Rigby for charging only $225 for the Barbary Coast, and to Spud Bray for requiring only $22 for himself and two other private eyes to help keep the peace.

The senior banquet, however, went out of control. Budgeted at $400, it cost $403.05. The principal items contributing to this bursting at the seams were 456 bottles of beer at 13 cents each and 432 dinners at 75 cents apiece. (It must indeed have been a banquet you could get a perfectly good regular dinner at George Gitsis' Campus Cafe for 50 cents!)

I was inspired by these revelations to research the line of 1934 class treasurers in the Collins succession. Mac, whom we elected senior year, stayed with it until the fifth reunion, when Dick Gruen took over. Dick had to give it up in favor of the Air Force in 1942, and the office was then combined with that of class secretary through the administrations of BillKnibbs, Bill Embry, and Jeff Jackson. Then, in 1950, cooler heads prevailed and the jobs were again made separate ones. Jack Gilbert was treasurer for one term, Bill Wilson for another, Hank Werner for still another. Finally, the class head hunters located the present incumbent. Without benefit of either convention or primaries, Ed Brown emerged from the field, and long may he wave.

Said treasurer Brown has forwarded a letter from George Collins in Delray Beach, Fla, George and Gisele had just returned from a Christmas visit to their daughter in San Francisco and their son in Boise, Idaho, where they also had a reunion with Thor Eraser. George's curiosity about his host's street address (Warm Springs Avenue) elicited from Thor the fascinating intelligence that the Frasers and their neighbors "live on top of a geothermal spring that heats their homes and hot water all winter-for peanuts. Thor showed me the piping, which comes from a main in the street like in Hanover, only they don't need a power house. It's more like in Iceland."

In the preceding issue of these notes we left Liz and Hank Werner in Canton, China. Let's bring them home. "We took the train to Hong Kong," Hank wrote, "having previously flown to every other place. Liz and I left the group to fly to Manila, where our son Peter was directing his first full-length feature film. Don't Cry,It's Only Thunder. From Manila we flew to Los Angeles and spent a few days with son Tom and Jill and their two children. Tom has just signed a new contract with A.B.C. Television as a senior vice president. Fortunately, our daughter Patsy lives in Greenwich, so we can see her more frequently than our sons."

Some columns back, we reported a MorrisLevine "move" from Coronado, Calif., "back" to New Jersey and wondered in print why anyone would do that. Morris wrote and explained. Home is, and has never stopped being, Cranbury, N.J. (a condominium community called Clearbrook, where Len and JeanHarrison also live). Retirement from his insurance agency in Linden, however, has made life more flexible for Morris, and he and Hazel have spent two winters in Coronado. "Haven't moved there, though. Sometimes I wish we could."

The common denominator shared by the primary readers of this column is four years of education at Dartmouth College between 1930 and 1934. There is some sentiment that the class notes should at least occasionally reflect that fact, and I wish space permitted it more often. Here's Brice Banks: "Still stuck in the craw of one's mind are perhaps two or three teachers who could be described as mavericks. In our day, Mecklin, Stilwell, and Lambutt would probably qualify. Lesser-known . . . was a teacher in the philosophy department: Professor James Mackaye. A disciple of Jeremy Bentham, the 19th-century English philosopher, Mackaye taught his own version of Bentham's utilitarianism, which was designed to lead to a better, more moral society. I am curious as to whether there are others who took Professor Mackaye's course and remember his teachings."

In more frivolous section of the Nostalgia Department, I give you the following item, gleaned from Art Grimes's bound volumes of The Dartmouth: In the fall of 1933, although the Co-op was selling Bostonians for as much as $9.00, you could get a pair of Endicott-Johnson pebble-grain oxfords for $3.50 by going to no more trouble than driving to Lebanon.

Smith, Dartmouth '33, and Smith, Cornell '33, brought blessings from the Ivy Leagueto the inauguration of President Berendson of American University in Washington, D.C.

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