1960

As promised last month, here's more about '6O dads and their '91 grads: Don Betterton sent his son, Tom, to Dartmouth, but Don has spent most of his adult life at Princeton, where for the last 17 years he's been director of financial aid. Don was deeply involved in the Justice Department action forcing the Ivy League schools to stop comparing notes on newly-accepted students and making identical scholarship offers to them. Don defends the practice (which the government attacked as price-fixing) on the grounds that it allowed students to choose the college they wished to attend on the basis of academics and personal preference, not money. He said the practice was less like pricefixing than the NCAA's nationwide limitations on athletic scholarships and was merely a refinement of the federal government's own procedures for specifying aid levels for students based on their parents' financial statements. Son Tom is planning to go to graduate school in painting.

jack Nunn has been living in Texas for the past nine years as regional sales manager for Drexel Heritage, a furniture company. His son, Charlie, has been a stock market enthusiast since high school and has landed a job, the Northeast recession notwithstanding, with a brokerage house in Philadelphia.

Alex von Sumner, who's in real estate in New Jersey (and also sports sky boxes), says it will be "years" before the recession is over in his area. His '9l son Alex plans to learn Japanese and get a job using it before going to business school. Alex's daughter Kristen '89 like my daughter Alexandra '9l, wants to be a movie director.

John Peterson is a cardiologist in Seattle who's doing experimental work installing "stints," stainless steel posts that keep coronary arteries open. His '91 son, John, is following him into medicine.

Three '60 progeny who are '91s are still in school, but I reached their dads anyway. JackHerrick practices real estate law in Cleveland and is still deeply involved in his college pastime, squash. He was 45-and-over world champion in 1983 and is chairman of the pro squash tour. His son Graham is a math-biology major and already a published scholar. Joe Cramer has been with Motorola for 28 years in the Chicago area. His son Greg is practice-teaching at Hanover High. MichaelBromer is a neurologist in Minneapolis and an avid orchid grower, with 250 plants in his basement. His daughter Liane is both a history major and a pre-med, which Michael says makes for a better college experience than the all-labs grind he put himself through.

Two months ago, I missed one clergyman in our class, David Sammons, now minister at Mt. Diablo Unitarian Universalist Church in Walnut Creek, Calif. David graduated from Tuck, then was radicalized by the Vietnam war into an activist church career. He helped the "black power" movement, organized an abortion counseling service prior to the Supreme Court's Roe decision, made his church a nuclear-free zone, set up sanctuaries for Central American refugees and opposed the Gulf war. "Religion has to be more than just a quest for personal well-being and salvation," he wrote, chiding me for an editorial comment. "Those who need to be ministered to include many who are struggling in the world to make things better for others, not just themselves." True enough. My worry is that many churches spend more energy on politics than on God.

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