1930

Fast-breaking news isn't really my style. When it takes my beautiful prose three months to make the round-trip from my typewriter to Hanover and back to Box 96, I'm not embarrassed about using a few items that date back to last summer but that still may be news to someone.

Ed Meyers comments philosophically about last year's mortalities, which have shaken his feelings of indestructibility. But, he says, "Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down." He hoped to be in New York on New Year's eve for his last remaining aunt's 90th birthday party.

Don Hight has been busy with the Lakes Region Conservation Trust, an organization working to preserve undeveloped lands around Winnipesaukee and nearby lakes. He still had time for salmon in New Brunswick and trout in the Catskills.

Belatedly, Nels Blake reports the birth of his first grandson, Samuel Nelson Blake, August 13, 1984. AH are doing well, including the grandparents.

A1 Smith says his New Hampshire mountaintop doesn't generate much news just work and taxes. He and Anne are in fair health except for his bum right arm and hand, "as you can see from the quality of my handwriting." But his handwriting is better than mine ever was.

The 1984 Conference on Iroquois Research, meeting at the Rensselaerville Institute, presented Bill Fenton, its founder in 1945, an inscribed copy of Extending the Rafters (SUNY Press, 1984). To the Iroquois, "extending the rafters" was a metaphor for adding to the longhouse to shelter new families and, in the symbolic sense, for bringing outlying tribes into the League of the Five Nations. Here the metaphor applies to expanding knowledge. The 22 contributors to the book represent the second generation of Iroquois scholars in the fields of ethnology, ethnohistory, linguistics, and archaeology. The book is dedicated to Bill and includes a sketch of his career.

A book by Bill is being published by the University of Oklahoma Press, on the masks of the Iroquois, their mythology, and their rituals. This all started 50 years ago in Bill's first field work at the Allegany Reservation of the Seneca Nation. He says that he and Olive, whom he met that summer, are "surviving."

In November Don Shaskan completed his 30th Annual Group Therapy Symposium, sponsored by the University of California Medical School in San Francisco. Don ap- pears in the brochure as one of two program directors, as a member of the faculty, and as one of the group leaders. He's retired, is he?

Don's artist daughter, Isabel, who has heretofore worked mostly in acrylics, has re- recently had in Sacramento a show of watercolors, a new medium which she obviously has found congenial. The show earned a fine review in the Sacramento Express. Of Don's nine grandchildren, two grandsons are now in college, one at Pomona and one at the University of Oklahoma.

A recent headline in the Paris (France) Herald-Tribune tells us that "Electronic Bloodhounds Dog U. S. College Alumni." Computers, says the article, keep track even of the names of alumni family pets because "you just can't know too much about a potential donor." Dartmouth is mentioned several times. Henry Eberhardt '61 is quoted as saying, "I can look at the screen and see who gave what last year, if their company matched their donations, and exactly how much they've given since they left school."

"But,"the article says, "whether private or public, when it comes to alumni fund-raising, one school stands out. Dartmouth College consistently tops the list of schools with the largest percentage of contributing alumni. Last year, it received money from 66 percent of its graduates . . . well ahead of the number two school, Princeton, which reached 50 percent of its former student body."

A major factor in the Dartmouth record was Ave Raube's 95 percent. With the help of just a few more we could make it 100 this year.

Box 96 Green Valley, AZ 85622

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