1929

Bill Davenport's September letter from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif., says he looks forward to being in print in October. Merry Christmas, Bill, and all. These notes had to be in Hanover by October 15.

We share Bill's thoughts on The Review: "The College suffers from bad manners, official or not. A college means a group pursuing Truth, but today a university is more a place to train people to make money. By those lights Dartmouth is still a college."

We brought Ed Rollins, President Reagan's campaign manager, to Rockefeller Center to a full house of students and faculty. Their piercing questions and comments would make you proud. Dan Luten came up last summer with a list showing how fast Fritz and furious Ferraro could get the 270 electoral votes they needed. It was a fun letter, but it left me missing his lovely Lois whom he lost in 1982. So many people avoid talking politics with folks with differing views. How can we learn if we don't? And what a loss to all of us.

Dr.Arch Diack reports himself happy and healthily jowled. In his continuing fight to free Oregon from those who'd dam up more salmon runs, he quotes Dan Luten's essay from The Living Wilderness: "So long as Americans continue to value both the useful and the beautiful qualities of the landscape, so long as they are beset by both nostalgia and wanderjust, for so long will the problems of conflicting demands arise. . . . Beauty does all the compromising . . . the cause of the American landscape is a losing battle, to be fought from barricade to barricade, but always backward."

For nine years the Dwight Aliens have lived overlooking Lake Lucerne, in Brunner, Switzerland. They're looking toward their 50th anniversary and are in good health. Dave Westwater,who took his A.B.from Ohio State, writes from Columbus of his 52 years with Connecticut Mutual and a life with "many delightful compensations." He sounds like someone we'd be happy to see. John Compton reports a small change in living quarters, still in Derry, N.H.

Dick Brown sends pictures from the 55th and reports talking with Archie Crowley and dining with the Dick Eberlines. Former mayor and district attorney Art Bergeron of Berlin, N.H., and his wife, Florence, had their 50th anniversary in October. They winter in Lake Worth, Fla., and hope to see us in Hanover for the 60th. Dr. Jack Knight summers in Maine and comes south to Cape Cod for the winter but does stray to Florida for a while.

Mo Heath, bless him, urged me at our 55th meeting to keep up the poems. Another classmate said, "Cheer up. They aren't all that bad, but what causes them?" So here:

When I see a line with lots of wit in it I don't just pine and wish I'd written it.

But, with a vanity inveterate I try (in vain, it seems) to better it. But when my pen is at its wordiest My wits are then at their absurdiest. Happy New Year!

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