1961

Would you believe "Dartmouth 1961" wine? It gets better with age.

Seriously, though, we'll be able to partake of Dartmouth 1961 wine at our 20th reunion, June 18-20, if all the appropriate permissions can be obtained from federal and state officials, says Reunion Chair Hop Holmberg. Our Saturday night dinner will feature the special label wine from the vineyards of Bob "Otter" Anderson and Tom Conger. The permissions involve a long string of requirements, enough to make it still a bit iffy. But if it goes through, Hop says there will be enough wine, one bottle for two people, so just about every classmate who attends will get a bottle as a souvenir.

Anyway, excitement is building toward reunion. Hop says we're "just on the edge of breaking the all-time record for 20th reunions established by the class of 1960."

As of February 5, we had 148 firm yeses and 129 maybes, which would be 277 if everyone came. (We've had 175 firm nos.) But years of experience say you have to figure some of the yeses and most of the maybes won't come, says the College. Using the College's formula, Hop said, means we should have at least 164 classmates .present, one more than the 163 of the class of 1960, "though we are 100 people smaller than they are." And Hop hopes to beat both those College percentages, since a number of you have not responded. The average family coming will have 3.6 persons, he said, indicating a total '61 crowd in excess of 600.

He says that of the 712 of us that matriculated, he's accounted for 486, and is waiting to hear from the rest of you.

And the distances that people plan to travel are beginning to sound like a newscast by the late Lowell Thomas. Gim Burton is going to be providing the Saturday night band, a jazz band with banjos, coming up from New York City. And people are coming from the South, from the Midwest, from the West Coast, and farther. Paul Kaplan, for instance, is coming from Kathmandu, Nepal.

And some of the nos also indicate just how farflung we've become. Parker Borg says he'll be at the American Embassy in Bamako, and Hilton Graham is at the American Embassy in Malta.

Jack Prescott earns the award so far for the excuse most devastating to the rest of us. He's got to attend his last summer camp before retiring from the Reserves.

Award: Mike Mooney has won a $12,500 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to enable him to set aside additional time for his fiction writing. Mooney was one of 204 persons selected nationally for the fellowships, out of 2,600 poets, script writers, fiction writers, essayists, and others who applied.

According to the Milwaukee Journal, "Mooney received a Council for Wisconsin Writers award this spring for the best booklength fiction published in 1980 by a Wisconsin writer. That was for Squid Soup, a collection of his short stories. His first published book, Names, came out in late 1979. It was a saga about a Scottish family and the forces that caused it to immigrate to the United States."

The paper reports that Mooney works full time as a manager of commercial and residential properties for De Toro Management, a firm he joined after leaving the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where he was a lecturer. He plans to use the fellowship to work on two more novels.

New job: Roger Baumberger has joined the National Bank of North Ameria as a senior vice president, greater New York group. Roger will be responsible for the Long Island, Westchester, and New Jersey-Connecticut divisions from his office on Wall Street.

He previously was vice president and head of Equitable Life's regional corporate finance department, and before that was a senior vice president with Marine Midland Bank. He's picked up a string of awards, including one for meritorious service from New York University (where he got his M.B.A.), the Distinguished Leadership Award of the Long Island Business Review, and the Humanitarian Award of the Long Island Cancer Society.

Doubles: Ron Wybranowski's daughter Lisa got into Dartmouth under early decision for the class of 1986. She gives Ron the distinction of being first in our class to have two children at Dartmouth. Ron Jr. is an '85.

Talk about the reunion whenever you see or talk to classmates. I'm sure doing it, and I'm repeatedly finding enthusiasm. I bet we can beat the record, and really renew the spirit of 1961.

"The Eighth Annual DSISSSBW (Dartmouth-Sugarbush Invitational Slalom, Snowshoe, andScotch Bachelor Weekend)" was the title assigned this gathering by Alex Summer '60, who hostedthe event in Warren, Vt., in January 1981. "Believe it or not," he said, "despite ample evidence ofadvancing age, some of the group actually skied a run or two." Participants were (left to right) SamBowlby '60; Dave Hiley '60; Pete Van Vlaanderen, Middlebury '58; Tom Brock '60; Al Stowe'60; Spence Morgan '60; Arnold Sigler '60; Donn Chickering '59; Summer; Eric Anderson '60;and Pete St. Phillip, Princeton '60.

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