1933

It's a long way from a job as a $15.00 per week book salesman in Boston to the status of Rutgers professor of American studies emeritus, but that is the course Walter Bezanson had traversed prior to his retirement in 1982. Along the way, he taught at Dartmouth and Harvard as well as at Yale, where he received his Ph.D. During the war he served for three years on the Intrepid. He was married twice, but lost both wives to cancer. However, he faces forward and is forging a new career as an expert on Herman Melville. He has been president of the Melville Society and is the editor of an about-to-be-published volume embodying "Clarel," a long narrative poem. The volume is one in a series of Melville's collected works. He will participate in a panel discussion at the coming Modern Language Association meeting in Chicago and will preside at the Melville centennial at Pitts field, Mass., in 1991. He intimates, too, that engagement and a nuptial involvement may not be too far in the future. En avant, mon ami!

We called Gobin Stair at his work in Kingston, Mass., and he revealed that he is still painting industriously, a vocation that started with his involvement with Orozco and the Baker mural. He worked and studied with the New York abstract impressionists, but decided to follow the Dartmouth idea that ordinary life is what is important. He paints faces, people, and figures in their depiction of anger, fear, and love. He also creates set-ups for candlelight services and will shortly do one for the Bedford church for its presentation of T.S. Eliot's "Waste Land." He worked for twenty years at the Beacon Press, publishing works in the Unitarian tradition. He is highly enthusiastic about the Alumni College and has attended for eleven consecutive years, failing, however, to meet any other '33 class- mates there. He is grateful to Dartmouth, Sidney Cox, and Orozco for what he gained in Hanover and would like to have the college use his paintings to demonstrate the specificity of its educational contribution. As always, he remains ready and eager to "disturb things a bit."

Reaching Martin Uebel in Culver, Indi- ana, we pulled him away from the clarinet, which he still tootles, for a brief schmooze. Although retired for 13 years from German and Latin teaching at the Academy, he is a dynamo of activity. He is active in his church, runs a Meals-On-Wheels program, is a commander in the Legion, shares in the Marshall County Historical Society program, and helps with the Culver Academy Band. His great recent coup has been the discovery of a Daniel Webster letter in Bourbon (appropriate for Dan), Ind., and his obtaining a gift of the missive for the College. He is high on the present Dartmouth students and recent graduates he knows and feels that they are exemplary. He scouts the Buckleys and Kilpatricks and emphasizes the impossibility of duplicating the Hopkins College in 1990. All in all, a Culverian Mr. Chips is Martin.

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