1939

777 West Street Pittsfield, MA 01201

We are just back from about 35 days "down under" in Australia and New Zealand, plus the isles of Fiji and Tahiti where the humidity sits on your shoulders and presses down. All of which is preferable to winter's blasts and accumulations of snow that we had heard were experienced at the homestead in western Massachusetts. But upon return, despite the cache of white stuff laying uneasily in our front yard, the best part of getting home was skimming through the mails and finding no evidences of further attrition to the number of classmates. So we face the word processor with energy and courage.

A note from Hank Conkle reports that he and Dottie are starting their 43rd year at running the Carolina Mountain Shop in Cashiers, N.C. Hank says that Dun & Bradstreet advises that very few Mom 'n' Pop operations survive that many years, and if the business does, the marriage doesn't. Hank also reports that the DE on which he served as communications officer throughout WW II held its first reunion last summer in the town of Intercourse, Pa. The location was chosen by the enlisted men and it made for some great bumper stickers along with the turnout of 125 men. "Now the crew has voted to return to the same place in September and have asked me to be their banquet speaker. Jokes for an audience like that require careful attention!"

Buzz and Jane Waters are off for a few weeks of skiing at Steamboat Springs just about as you read this material, if, that is, Buzz could talk someone into subbing at his weekly tennis match. Just goes to show how priorities have changed! Buzz reports that the Hartford Hospital's first chair in surgery, which honors Joe Pyrtek (as reported earlier), has surpassed its $1 million goal through the generosity of about 1,500 of Joe's patients, colleagues, and friends. The chair will be used to enhance the educational acitivities of the department of surgery.

In response to a 70th birthday card, Bobby Jacobson says that he is still an active specialist on the New York Stock Exchange, but also takes plenty of time off to try to continue to sharpen his skills on the golf course.

In the nostalgia department with perhaps the final word on the famed (or infamous) letter from A. Nonymous, Phyllis Wallis responded some weeks ago from Los Alamos, N.M. She said that she and Mai, living in the West for the past 48 years, had found it difficult to maintain contact with class members which, she says put them in the "outer circle. We have never felt that the active members, who have been the glue of the class, excluded us. In the past six years since Mai's death, I have appreciated the contacts from Betsy Wyman-Emmons and other members of the class. Vive La Inner Circle."

And in the Life-Goes-On-Department, Michael E. Hoover, the son of Joe and CarolHoover, was married to Janet Sue Coffman on December 5 in St. Thomas Church in New York, according to The New York Times.