1944
This is being written on April 1, but there is nothing April Foolish about the fact that our 40th reunion is just up the road a piece. The date one more time is June 11-14. We still have room. Leave the parakeets with a neighbor and head this way. You'll be glad you did, and we'll be glad to see you.
George and Helen Bruce are coming up from Essex, Conn., leaving behind them a cataract operation, a hip replacement, and a few other bumps and grinds. "Wouldn't miss it for anything," says George, who is busy in the meantime whittling a paddle to present to the Ledyard Canoe Clubbers when they arrive in Connecticut in May on the annual trip to the sea.
Don Hinkley won't make it to Hanover and for a pretty good reason. Word is that he and his sailboat are berthed in New Zealand these days; that sounds like the kind of rough duty up with which one could put.
Ed Crawford Hills wasn't exactly grimacing either when we caught him on the front patio of his waterfront house in Delray Beach. He and Fran are permanent residents there now, having all but given Cleveland back to the Indians. Ed retired in June after having been slowed by a couple of by-pass operations, and so now it's golf, sailboating, a bit of bridge, and dallying with a new home computer. He and Fran will be on the Cape this summer for five to six weeks.
Quasi-retired, we hear, is Chuck Rendigs, after a long New York career in investment banking. Homer Bogart, who tries to lunch with him every month or so, says Chuck is still doing some consulting and is quite happy to advise the troops on how to turn their thousands into millions. Chuck and Jean had a narrow escape last summer: two houses next to theirs on Fire Island were destroyed by fire.
An item from last summer/fall: Dr. MarshTenney, who is the Nathan Smith Professor of Physiology at the Dartmouth Medical School, received two honors. He has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an honorary fellow of the Meakins-Christie Laboratories for research in respiratory functions and disease at McGill University in Montreal.
There's nothing hammock-y about engineer Paul Jones over there in Falmouth, Maine. He has sold the family shoe business over the years, but he's still helping the new owners with management and with the design of new heels and products. Keeps him going five days a week. The other two days are taken up with projects around his and Alice's place on the ocean. Right now Paul is building his own barn/workshop, which is an engineering feat in itself, seeing as how it's being built on a steep slope. Two of the Jones's daughters were married last year; a third daughter is a sophomore at Wellesley; David '77 is a lawyer on the West Coast; and son Cameron '75 is a partner in a computer firm in White River Junction, Vt.
Tidbits on some other '44 offspring: Billand Rusty Hirons' son Allen has opened a law office in Marietta, Ga., right outside Atlanta. Phil Puchner's son Chris '75 is a geologist with Anaconda, living in Anchorage, Ala. And Jack and Barbara Snobble's youngest daughter, Cristi, was married last May in Carbondale, Colo. Bill and Liz Craig's daughter Susie tied the knot last September in Hollins, Va. So there . . .
At another Falmouth, the one at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on the Cape in Massachusetts, we talked to Denise, DickBackus's second wife, and she told us that for the past couple of years Dick has been working on a major opus on George's Bank, the world-famous fishing area off the New England coast. Dick is the editor of and chief contributor to the volume's 1,200 pages, and Denise says it will cover everything from fishing, water chemistry, and resources to the U.S.-Canadian boundary discussions. I'm sure you'd want to know, too, that Dick is heavily involved in the study of the meanderings of warm-core rings in the Atlantic's Gulf Stream. He and Denise spend their spare time gardening, with an accent on exotic plants.
We'll wind up on that exotic note. Don't forget to give exotically to this year's Alumni Fund. And give your life a break and come to our exotic 40th reunion. On the one-in-a- thousand chance that you can't make reunion and would like to send a message to Hanover, address your immortal words to: Class of 1944, 216 Blunt Alumni Center, Hanover, NH 03755.
That's it. Blessings.
44'S EVERGREEN 40th
304 Parkhurst Hall Hanover, NH 03755
