1948

A wonderful rural life in the summer-green and winter-white hills of Vermont and New Hampshire is enjoyed by comparatively few '48s. This way of life is portrayed in the following excerpt from a letter by Phil Viereck, who since graduation has maintained his home in the northern hills. "The weekend of February 13-14 was approximately the 20th year (no one can remember with certainty when we began) that a group of former D.O.C. Cabin and Trail members, friends then and even better friends now, met for cross-country skiing in Vermont. Ellen and I own a small farm in Shaftsbury, with just enough trails and open fields to get us started, and there are miles of trails and unfenced fields with good slopes in all directions. Present as usual were Dave Kendall '45 and Ann, Burt Hicock '45 and Bea, Nick Nickelsen '47 and Cindy, and Bob Kendall '49. Jim Schwedland and Jane skied with us until his death a few years ago. At our prime we were up to a crowd of 23, sleeping in attic space, hallways, and the truck camper and eating in shifts. As children became teenagers and then working adults, their attendance fell away. This year was especially pleasant because we were rejoined by some of that generation. Snow conditions were ideal, and those young people kept us from cutting our trips down to oldfolks distances." Does the foregoing take some of you city dwellers back to the New England countryside you may have known in another day, make you a little nostalgic?

Phil and Schwed will be remembered as very good friends on campus, a friendship that remained until Jim departed this life. It was Schwed, I believe, who hung the nickname Moosejaw on Phil, a name Phil says no one has used on him since Jim died. Phil is princiPal of the public elementary school in North Bennington, where he currently teaches firstarid fourth-graders during part of every day. He modestly mentions, "Over the years I have written a few children's books."

It's a long time since we've had the fun of earing of flyer and movie-maker Sam Hoopes. Sam grew up in Glens Falls, N.Y., the center of an area fabled in American Colonial history and fiction. It provided the setting during the French and Indian War for Cooper's Mohicans and is not far from Revolutionary War andmarks such as Fort Ticonderoga and Saratoga Sam has just been elected to the board of directors of the First National Bank of his home town, a recognition of his business service with Inch, Pruyn and Company and of his public service to his community as, among other things, a trustee of the Hyde Museum and a director of the United Fund. He and Patricia have two grown children, and one can bet that Sam is still seen on the white slopes in the winter and on the blue waters of Lake George in the summer.

Dick Bredenberg and wife Huldah get around. A delayed note from them was written on Christmas Day on the S. S. Veracruz somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. They have been escorting cruises to the Bahamas, Mexico, Panama, and other places in the Caribbean. Not bad. They had just had a "personal vacation" skiing at Squaw Valley, utilizing an exchange house on Lake Tahoe as headquarters. Anyone interested in arranging a house exchange with Dick can contact him at home at 4101 49th Avenue South, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33711.

Professor Bob Huke of Dartmouth's Geography Department and his wife Eleanor will be going to the Far East again on another extended trip. This time they have received an unusual joint appointment from the International Rice Research Institute and will spend the winter term doing research at Los Banos in the Philip- pines. They will be continuing work in preparing maps which indicate, by minor civil divisions, the type of soil and moisture availability for rice planting. This work has helped in the "green revolution" which has so greatly increased rice production in Asia wherever the I.R.R.I, has performed.

Further on our series on life in Hanover, I'm told that in the early 19305, students with the vote rammed through a measure at Hanover town meeting that called for the erection of a bridge a mile high and a foot wide between Hanover and Northampton so that it would be "easier to get to Smith." Perhaps a town histo- rian can advise us if the story is true.

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