1934
A lot of water has gone downstream since I scribed the last column. Hope the time was as refreshing for you as it was for me. May was particularly exciting. I was best man again after all these years, at the wedding of my son Bill '73 in Washington to Margaret McDonald. My other son, Dietrich, was the minister. Then at the end of May I started off on a fascinating two-week bus tour of the capitals of central Europe Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Munich. In between there was a weekend in Hanover when the class of 1934 was lauded with honorable mention status for the wide range of our activities and accomplishments in the previous 12 months Bill Scherman gave you details.
Now to give you the word you've been waiting for the final four one-of-a-kind states for '34. First, there is the Sooner State and our representative out there all these years has been H. Lewis Meyer. If a state can have ony one '34, Lew is a great one for a solo performance. Not only did he come to Dartmouth from Sapulpa but he went back to Oklahoma after getting his Juris Doctor from Michigan. He practiced his legal profession in Tulsa for a while until his love of communicating got in the way. That's when he opened a book store in Tulsa and started writing books as well as promoting and selling books others had written. He has worked on television and has had a weekly radio "Book Review Hour" for 25 straight years!
Even if you don't pick up another book this fall I recommend Lew's Preposterous Papa. It's a delightfully written, humorous reminiscence of his unusual sire and what living was like out there in Oklahoma, with oil wells popping up between the corn stalks. He has written other best-selling books Off The Sauce and MostlyMama among them. Lew and his wife Natasha have daughters who pioneered at Yale and Williams for their undergraduate degrees; then Elizabeth went on to medical practice and Renee became a Russian specialist in government.
Going a bit southeast we come to the Bayou State, and in Shreveport find our '34 representative, John Banks. He and Helen and their two children landed there to help manage a plant for Western Electric. That was the company he'd worked for in Indianapolis after the Air Force, the Boy Scouts of America, and Swift and Company had their innings. I asked Joy Dwyer to check on John when she was in Shreveport for a niece's wedding, and she reported he was alive and well and still working. Lou Marrero had been Louisiana's original contribution to '34, and his widow Mary continues to live in Metairie and keeps in contact with our class.
Coming still further east we land in the Cotton State, and there, in Fairhope, Ala., is Jack Chollar. He hasn't revealed how he happened to shift down there after graduation from Antioch College and working with N.C.R. in my hometown of Dayton and then for Remington Rand in the New York area. Original home base for Jack was Stratford, Conn.
Then one more eastward step brings us to the 14th of our one-of-a-kind states, Georgia. Our resident Georgian is John S. Fish. Jack has been personally responsible for some of the post-war population surge in Atlanta, since that's where he moved to set up his obstetrics practice. I have had no direct confirmation as yet, but no doubt he feels more like a Georgian than a Buckeye now. (He came to Hanover from Cleveland.)
A very special one-of-a-kind guy from Minneapolis, John D. Tobin, has just retired after serving that area as a pediatrician for 35 years. Dick Wells sent a clipping from the Star andTribune that showed Jack enjoying a surprise retirement party surrounded by 200 friends and patients and a hundred balloons, testifying to how respected and beloved he was. You can feast your eyes on the very same picture below. According to George Hoke '35, who also wrote about Jack's retirement, almost nobody in the area had raised their children without the help of Dr. Tobin and his cohorts. Dick will be missing his tennis doubles partner, as Jack is retiring to Westerly, R. I., his boyhood home, where he intends to lead the life of a beachcomber.
Before this reaches you, many of us will have had our fall renewal at the opening Penn-Dartmouth game. Don't forget just 21 more months until we'll all be in Hanover for our 50th! Are we really old enough? Well I've heard that if dialing long distance wears you out or if after painting the town red, you have to rest a long time before applying a second coat then you are.
Lots of balloons and lots of friends made quite a celebration of the retirement of Jack Tobin '34 fromhis pediatrics practice in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. More on the party pictured above and onTobin's post-retirement plans are in the '34 column.
140 North Broadway, #12 Irvington, N.Y. 10533
