1929

Some class note gatherers send surveys asking your opinions. But surveys mean categories, and categories are by definition false. Old Procrustes used a physical category. To make people fit he sliced off feet and bits of heads. So no surveys. Let's hear from your uncut self.

What do you like best or least about Dartmouth and the world around us? Send us a note telling how to utilize Dartmouth's plant 12 months a year instead of nine with something better than the Dartmouth Plan. Read George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty, then write Tip O'Neill a letter telling why you like him, and send me a copy. That'll get you mail.

Few people have the wealth of friends with common background that we have in our classmates. Some of the best of it turns out to be with classmates we didn't know in 1929. For heaven's sake and your own, speak to them. Don't drop out just because some of our physical ability is more funk than function. More important, our classmates need you and your thoughts to wake them up. Do let your postprandial response to the feast of this life be more than a belch. You're shy and retiring? Just don't be dry and expiring.

Do you picture Ed Chinlund as a stern auditor type reaching for our dough? Then see him and Polly woefully retracing their way from Pittsburgh to Hanover searching and advertising for a lost family cat that somehow escaped from their station wagon. Do you think of Professor Jeffrey Hart '51 as the angel (demon) of the contentious Dartmouth Review? I see him as the friend John Kemeny sent us to ten years ago to help our foundation promote the American way at Dartmouth, which he's been doing ever since. How many of us knew Harry Merson? The Falmouth School Committee writes of him as "... a loyal friend and wise advisor. No single term could better describe Harry Merson. ... he counseled his opponents with the grace most of us reserve for our friends. . . . a man of great courage, good humor, and abounding energy. . . . the whole community has lost a great man." And I lived 15 miles away and never got to know him. It's not too late for those of us who are left to keep in touch.

Now for the usual chatter: Bob Jones read my feeble October verse on sex (or was it on feeble sex?) the same day he was reading Andre Maurois and Gustave Flaubert on the same subject. We both have little to report. This issue may be in time to warn Coronado, Calif., that Phil Fitzpatrick plans to spend six weeks there this spring. Harris Huston comes up with, "I'm too old to go out and rob or rape and too young in the way I feel to die just to make a news item."

And now for the crisis of the month: The sexes face a bitter fight Of fairness quite bereft. The women button from the right. Men button from the left. The button is insidious and used in ways invidious. Its subtle poison constantly infects us. It's so again with hooks and snaps. We'd better change lest we perhaps Exacerbate the war between the sexes.

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