1963

It's official! Dave Schaefer turned 50 in Concord, Mass., the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and that band of brave patriots who made life hot for the redcoats many years ago. Caroline rented the Elks club and little Andrew took time off from his first grade studies to surprise the Schaef along with SteveScott, Ken Reiber '66, brother Roger Schaefer 60, Barry Lawson '64, Bill Purcell, JohnSteele, and Barry Blackwell. The music was strictly fifties rock and roll and the guest of honor got bombed before delivering a one-and-a-half-hour monologue that would put an O'Neil hero to shame. All that while wearing a hat pierced with a trout. "To top it off, die Old Farmers Almanac paid homage by publishing several gardening tips offered by the Schaef for their 200th anniversary edition.

All in all there were some 60 guests at the fete including Scott Babcock of Norwell Mass. He represents John Hancock Mutual Life in a consortium of insurance companies that sets national standards for hospitals and health maintenance organizations (HMO's) for the submission of healthcare claims. When he's not keeping hospitals and patients honest, Scott is battling for funds as a member of the local school committee in Norwell. With state aid cut, Scott's committee fought successfully to get a city tax increase to keep school quality high. Scott and Marcia have three sons, two of whom are at Wake Forest University.

Up in Peterborough, N.H., JohnPatterson was over at Monadnock Hospital performing another emergency appendectomy, but wife Brenda, a transplanted Vermonter, filled me in on their pastoral life on "Golden Pond": fishing and canoeing, and summers sailing on northern Vermont lakes. The kids are just a hop, skip, and a jump away. Jennifer is a senior at the Big Green, and Holly just arrived as a freshman. Dartmouth is in the Pattersons' bones—John and Brenda met on campus while John was studying engineering and she nursing. The healthcare influence won out and John ended up at University of Rochester medical school and then residency way down yonder in New Orleans. Not bad for an Ohio lad. John missed the 25th but reuned later in Massachusetts (he still gets south once in a while) at Bill Lamb's house with Al Palmer and Tom Jester.

Bill Burtis of Guilford, Conn., started out in engineering. He even got a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford and went to Antarctica to study low frequency radio waves. But as John Patterson met Brenda, Bill met and married Mary, who, like Brenda, is a nurse. Bill met some doctors, and 10, he earned a medical degree from Cornell in 1979. An endocrinologist (they treat diseases caused by glandular problems), Bill teaches, researches, and practices at Yale New Haven Hospital. He developed a blood test to detect cancer which he published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. The test measures tire level of a newly isolated parathyroid-related protein that is the cause of high calcium levels in patients with cancer, Bill said.

Barry Sharpless, a chemistry professor at MIT since 1970, has pledged $30,000 to endow an undergraduate research fellowship fund in organic chemistry at MIT. It's his way of saying goodbye to the university after 20 years and of acknowledging his Dartmouth mentor, Thomas A. Spencer, after whom the fellowship will be named. Barry is now the William M. Keck professor in the Research Institute of the famed Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, Calif.

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