1929

Here's word of the loss of four more classmates Ray Hedger, Porter Kier, Bob Ramage, and Ned Richardson. Obits have to be brief. Do pass along some reminiscences for '"29 Up" and these notes. These.guys are part of us all.

Ray's Dot died last June. I dated her long before Ray met her. Porter Kier III '56 wrote us about Saw. Bob Ramage's editing of our 25th yearbook was a priceless gift to the class. Our Cape Cod group agonized with Ned on his long slow fight. The Reverend ArchieCrowley handled the funeral service and says Connie is doing well. Gil Griffin's niece writes of Gil: "An amazing, great guy." KittyHow's loving note about Ed was all the tribute any of us could earn.

We accept the inevitable, but all the more reason to grasp the joy of our class gatherings. Do make the fifty-and-fifth, June 11-13.

John Laffey says Frank Middleton is home from a hospital bout. This is reassuring because we were puzzling over a note from the class of '30 listing Mrs. Frank Middleton of Frank's address as one of 1930's widows. Frank married her later. Wen and Suzy Barney sounded fine on the phone a while back. They see no '29ers in Winchester, Va. Wen still feels a stroke he had ten years ago but says he's "alive and kicking."

Dave Cogan and Gus Wiedenmayer followed up Dave's fun letter to the editor in our October issue with an exchange on their futile efforts to trap racoons. Harry Baehr can share some of it with us. Modesty stops me from telling how many coons I trap in the course of my skunk removal side-line. (Prices quoted in round dollars.) Dave mentioned moments with the Mau Mau in East Africa. Let's hear more. He's still practicing and ignoring hints from several retirement parties. His eminence in ophthalmology shouldn't be wasted.

More eminence: Ed Felch was awarded the Radio Club of America's "Armstrong Medal" for his invention of the, airborne magnetometer and other detection devices. Ed was field director at Kwajalein, where his work was called "The Department of Defense's most successful test program." His physics major at Dartmouth really paid off for all of us. Ed retired from a career at Bell Telephone Laboratories then worked for IBM. His son, E. Pierson Felch '60, is carrying on at Bell Labs.

From Rusty Ayers: "I spent half of December and all January in Oklahoma with my relatives and Cherokee tribesmen. It's almost the same thing, because if anyone traces back we're all related." Rusty always spells "indian" with a small "i." He was born before Oklahoma statehood, so is an original enrollee and "one of a much-made-of bunch from whom the rest take their genealogy."

Our Cape club had the chairman and president of the Review speak to us in Janaury with the idea of trading thoughts on responsibility and loyalty to Dartmouth. They both spoke so engagingly there was neither time nor disposition to do much of a job. They're trying to raise the tone of the Review. You have to like them and believe it.

Here's another thing students do better than I do:

For far too long I've agonized At Latin endings anglicized; Alumni, ae, or is it orum? We want to say it with decorum. How simple now it all becomes When students simply say "alums."

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