1978

It's nice to be back "home" in Spokane"? if only for a short while to pack up my household to send on to Turkey. It's nice to be able to breathe clean air and not see a constant brown smog, as one does in the larger cities in Turkey. We may gripe about the cost and maintenance of anti-pollution devices on our woodstoves, cars, and factories, but we really do take our clean air for granted. Imagine a city of 2½ million people where the main source of heat is from individual coal heating units, and at least half the vehicles are diesels, while the other half partially burn leaded gasoline. That's Ankara!

Thank goodness for Ellen Meyer. I just received a letter from her, posted in San Francisco, sent to Ankara, where I wasn't, and finally catching up to me in Vancouver, Canada, where I was, briefly. Ellen's letter was so full of news that I am considering letting her do the column for the next couple of years! Of course, it does not matter that she is incredibly busy finishing an M.B.A. at Stanford, or that she might want to spend some time with her brand-new husband, Paul Shorb. Maybe she will just have to repeat her idyllic wedding week along the Maine coast every year in order to provide me with good gossip from all the guests. One uninvited guest on Ellen and Paul's honeymoon in Cancun was Hurricane Gilbert! (At least they will remember something about the trip.)

Among the guests at the wedding were a host of new parents including Anat Feingold and Nate Link with baby Elanna, Brad and Anne McLane Kuster with Zachary, Rob Gifford and Claire Sokoloff with Benjamin, Peter and Mary Lewitt with Martha, and Brooks and Karen Clark with Isabel. There must have been a shortage of babysitters along the Maine coast for a week this past September!

It sounds like Celia Chen and John Lee have finally decided to live under the same roof, after being married for at least a year (no wonder there are no youngsters running around, yet). Celia had been living around Washington, D.C., and John in the Hanover area, but they now own a house in Lyme, N.H. John continues to sculpt and Celia plans to pursue a Ph.D. in freshwater biology, presumably at Dartmouth.

Dan Reicher is lawyering for the Natural Resources Defense Fund in D.C. Some of you may have heard him recently speaking on National Public Radio about environmental damage caused by nuclear weapon production. Also in the legal business are Rob Portman in Cincinnati, and Mark Brandt, clerking for a judge in Virginia.

I would like to point out that at least one other '78 is currently working abroad. Mickey Levitan showed up at Ellen's wedding straight from Bangladesh after taking the last plane out from the terrible floods during the 1988 monsoon season. He has now gone on to be the director of Save the Children, Thailand. Mickey, maybe we can start up the '78 Abroad Alumni Club and have our own mini-reunions at some convenient, stable place like, say Afghanistan. Anybody else out there?

Ellen also mentioned that Peter Endicott and his wife Carola are living in the Boston area, while Peter is starting up a oneyear master's program in building/ development at MIT.

While waiting on line half in and half out the door of Peter Christian's, I heard the familiar voice of Amy Simon Berg, along with husband Eric. (Ah, more fodder for the Notes!). Amy presently oversees safety procedures worldwide for DuPont. As safety czar (gestapo?!), she has recently visited plants in Venezuela, Argentina, and Northern Ireland, coinciding with uprisings and bombings in the latter two countries (hmmm... any connections?). Later.

Farabi Sokak 3/3, Cancaya, Ankara, Turkey