1933
Joel Portugal '58, head of this year's Alumni Fund campaign, has asked all class secretaries to mention the Alumni Fund in all class notes through June, when the drive ends. This is my one-shot effort to comply since the class of '33 has been unusually cooperative especially those members who pay class dues and receive this magazine. We've broken many records in our giving - we topped every previous class for the 25th and 50th. Mannie Sprague and Bob Niebling expect to repeat the topping in our 51st year. A list in TheNew York Times in March, regarding tuition, room, and board increases for the 1984-85 academic year showed Columbia, Dartmouth, Princeton, and Yale as the four Ivies on the list. Dartmouth's costs, now at $13,647, were lowest of the four. The Alumni Fund pays half of Dartmouth tuition costs.
Page Worthington has been sending out letters to classmates who have never paid dues or who pay them irregularly. We were billed for these last September. From the billing and his special appeals, he is pleased to report the highest participation in memory 310! This in a year when we are naturally at our smallest in membership. I've had my say about money.
Page has also been cracking the whip over his fellow class officers to send their reports to him so that he can write and mail to the College his annual class activity report for the year April 1, 1983, to March 31, 1984. It is this work and these reports that have secured for '33 honorable mention as a "Class of the Year" four years in a row, and won Page the "President-of-the-Year Award" and Bob Fox the "Newsletter-Editor-of-the-Year Award" in 1983.
Foxy hopes for a big '33 table at the "Wearers of the Green" dinner in Boston on April 27. He says that back in the fifties our class won the attendance cup at those Boston dinners several years in a row. He is also working on his high school class reunion in his capacity as past class president.
In a phone call to Al Beekman, I spoke to his wife Edna. She said Al was not too well, having ups and downs, now a downer.
Al and Betty Juergens are forgiven for letting a five-week auto trip through Europe interfere with their coming to our 50th reunion. It was a first trip to Europe for both of them. They are enjoying Al's retirement from business.
Bill and Sue Dewey have returned from a trip to the Far East that proved very exhausting to Bill. He is trying to give up smoking and is finding that very difficult, too.
Bob Niebling, besides working on the Alumni Fund, has found time to sing in his church choir, serve as church treasurer, raise funds to build a community center in Mystic, Conn., serve as treasurer of the local yacht club, and continue his travels to distant lands. The traveling started with 'Silla, on their honeymoon to Hawaii, in 1975. They are presently snowbirding in Florida.
Horace and Laurel Shaw also visited Florida, but only as part of a great circle, from Burlington, Vt., to Syracuse, N.Y., to see a young grandson, and then home. Horace is about to resign from two of his bank directorates but will still "look after" a home for retired ladies. (A recent cartoon in The NewYorker showed a rocking chair-bound row of retired Rockettes, still doing their kicks on the front porch of their home.)
Bob Sewell Turner and Genevieve are traveling to Amarillo, Tex., for an Easter reunion with the families of their daughter and two sons including eight grandchildren. Bob is still working in the family insurance agency, in St. Louis, Mo., and is very active in the Big Brother-Big Sister movement and on the executive committee of the Dartmouth Club of St. Louis.
We have had way too many deaths among our classmates this past year. One is too many! I know you will all be saddened to learn that Father Ted Purcell died of heart failure in Georgetown University Hospital on March 21. A number of our '33 classmates attended the services in the Georgetown Chapel in Washington, D.C., on March 27. An obituary will appear in an upcoming issue of this magazine.
Determined to end this column on a lighter note I like Bob Fox's listing of the month's birthdays in his newsletter. Spot a good friend send him a card or a note.
Mansfield Sprague, left, 50th reunion giving chairman for the class of 1933, recently receivedthe Fred A. Howland Award from Joel Portugal '58, right, Alumni Fund Chairman. TheHowland Award is presented annually to the outstanding campaign leader of classes 40 to 60years out of college and recognized 1933's outstanding achievement in raising a record$661,000 as its 50th reunion gift. Working with Sprague but not pictured was Bob Niebling '33,head agent. The class of 1933 also received the Roger Wilde Award, for setting a new reunionrecord total.
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