1956

It was a dark and stormynight. I sat alone, perusing the latest issue of the Dartmouth Preview, when the phone rang. On the other end, a voice from the distant past Wally Pugh wanting to know if I'd serve as class secretary. A few questions about the demands of this illustrious position reassured me that I should decline. Pugh insisted a piece of cake, said he. You and Flint Ranney will be the high profile guys. Flint's going to'continue WWW, and all you have to do is a monthly DAM column. All, I exclaimed! But his flattery prevailed on my all-too-easily-inflated ego. In a word, I agreed. English professors are notoriously easy marks (read stupid!).

Only then did I talk with Clem "the Ayatollah" Malin, whom I was to succeed as scribe when he moved up to his current exalted eminence. Only then did I learn that this is basically an exercise in creative writing—the genre primarily fiction. There will be times, said he, when there really will be nothing to go on, no one has sent in any tidbits, fascinating or otherwise, and you'll just have to wing it. Only then did I realize what serious trouble I was in.

So here it is, late June. The September column is due by July 15, the"New Materials" file a total blank. And I am off in two days to Nantucket; I don't plan to take the Macintosh with me, so the column has to come out of whole cloth, with maybe a few facts mixed in among the distortions.

Early this month, we had the good fortune to be invited to the anniversary of a wedding in which I took part 29 years ago. The wedding was in Greenwich, the reunion in Seattle. The reason I mention this is that the still happy couple, devoted followers of the fortunes of Holy Cross, somehow managed to produce a loyal son of Dartmouth, BillMahoney '82. From Seattle we drove to Corvallis, to visit with some old friends who are very close friends of Cy and Becky Field. Cy and I had not seen each other since the old days at Phi Delt, so we did a lot of catching up in a very short time. By the time you read this, Cy will have assumed the chairmanship of the Geology Department at Oregon State and all the trials and accolades (if any) that go with the job. Good luck, Cy. The department couldn't be in better hands.

Back from the West, it was off to Somerset, N.J., to grade Advanced Placement tests for the fourth time. Also there for this annual exercise in masochism was Prof. Richard Coram, recently of Dartmouth Review fame, having been spun around for a time in the same machine with Bill Cole. I was a lowly reader, he an exalted table leader. Don't think I saw him while I was there, but, still short of my word limit, I'll use anything even irrelevancies. If this doesn't suit anyone, remember, you have only yourselves to blame!

Now I am off to Nantucket, the Little Gray Lady of the Sea, and will look forward to a lot of news from a lot of you when I return. If that does not come to pass, I can only promise more autobiographical sketches with a healthy dose of fiction thrown in for good measure. Hope to see many of you at the Davidson game, one that we might even win!

Jr., 51 Tradd Street, Charleston, SC 29401