1942

Ben Page telephoned in from Houston expressing interest in the "goings-on" in Hanover. Your secretary had to express his ignorance. A day or two later we ran into Bob Searles at the Dartmouth Skiway who reported that since he's retired, he can ski anytime and does so when all right-thinking Hanoverians are either studying or working. He further commented that "99 percent of those Dartmouth kids are busy at the books, and only a few are building shanties on the Green or trying to knock them down. They are great youngsters, and we should be proud of them." The skiing was beautiful, perfect spring corn, and, of course, no vestige of a lift line.

Ernie Grinnell, who is retired and living in St. Louis, showed up at our Noich door in a rented black Cadillac. This frightened us considerably, for it looked for all the world like a hearse coming to pick us up. Ernie was carrying a bottle of Scotch, so we let him in. He was in Hanover for some sort of meeting of important people involved in the Dartmouth Institute.

Charlie Hunt called in one afternoon, all the way from his farm in lowa, to see if your secretary knew anything about a couple of good companies operating there in his neighborhood. In the process, he reported that his two sons were running the family cattle business now and that he, Charlie, was simply an advisor. And so are most of `the rest of us these days.

But not Jim Rendall. According to a Tucker Anthony release, Jim has been elected as first vice president of the firm. With the Dow jumping very nearly 100 points a week, Jim should be a busy fellow. Joe Wilder is still getting plaudits as an artist. "CBS News" profiled our boy Joe in January. Bob Kirk was the frontrunner in a race for selectman in Hanover last month. Not only did Bob win big, but he did it as a write-in candidate. Congratulations are in order.

Merrill McLane reports that the piece on his ice hockey exploits in The WallStreet Journal brought in a lot of correspondence. One which seemed to us particularly interesting was this: "I received a letter from my runner when I was a rifle platoon leader in the Marines on Okinawa. My platoon was in a tough spot, and since my radiq wasn't working, I sent him to try to find someone on our right flank to let them know about our situation. He never made it. That was the last I ever saw of him. Wounded and evacuated, he now lives in California. On reading the article in the Journal he wrote to me, reestablishing contact after 42 years."

Doug Duffy '44 reports that he called on Nate Ward at his luxury condo on Siesta Key. "When I telephoned, Nate was feverishly working on his personal computer. He suffered immediate anxiety that my interrupting him might cause his entire data file to vanish. Nonetheless, he bravely punched in the 'out to lunch' symbol and graciously received me. We had a nice chat, although we had to do a lot of head scratching trying to recall common ground from the Hanover years. When we were all learning about the world in that yesteryear town, would we ever have believed that our homes would someday have things called 'computers' in them to challenge and frustrate us and periodically send our worry indices soaring? Nate's wife is operating up to four separate businesses in the Sarasota area so she is busy enough, thank you, without a PC in her life."

That's it for the month; drop your secretary a line, and achieve fame through this column.

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