1978

Washington Update: A year ago Dan "Harpo"Reicher and MelindaKassen did their environmental crusading outside the walls of big government— Harpo at the National Resources Defense Council and Mindy at the Environmental Defense Fund in Boulder, Colo. Well, today Harpo is environmental counsel and deputy chief of staff to Hazel O'Leary at the Department of Energy and Mindy is environmental counsel to the House Armed Services Committee.

It was Dan's idea (endorsed heartily by O'Leary) to declassify the records of all the looney experiments that were done on people in the early years of the Atomic Age. (Yes, the mad-scientist experimenters learned, it's bad for the human body to be injected with plutonium.) Dan's wife, Carole Parker, works in the Defense Department's Office of Environmental Security, and they live in what The Washington Post described as a "charming Victorian home" in Takoma Park, Md.

Mindy, another former thorn in the side of the DOE, is now crafting the policy and broad budget blueprints for the Defense Department, which includes the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons complex. Is this a great country or what? Mindy is having predictable Boulder-to-D.C. culture shock, and she observes that this is a particularly acrimonious time to be working on the Hill.

Elsewhere along the avenues of power, Lisa Kaeser is senior public policy associate with the Allen Guttmacher Institute, which studies and researches reproductive health issues. Not too long ago Lisa married Bill Schmidt, who heads the Washington office of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, and they are expecting this month.

After six years as director of Save the Children in Thailand, Mickey Levitan returned to the U.S. in July and was selected to be a White House Fellow. This is an incredible honor, which Mickey well deserves. He'll be working with the Domestic Policy Council and generally learning the ins and outs of Washington. (For example, the White House Fellows recently had lunch with the Supreme Court Justices.)

Out in Bethesda, Marty Altemus is doing clinical and basic research in neural endocrinology and pharmacology as chief of the Adult Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) section of the National Institutes of Mental Health.

Hope Dobrow recently married Steve Goodman, a lawyer, and moved from Montreal to McLean, Va., where she's looking for a job (she was doing budgeting and business planning for the air-ground system department of CITA, an airline-dedicated telecommunications company). Ellen Meyer and Paul Shorb are building a house in Garrett Park, Md. Their boys, Trevor and Cameron, are three and one, respectively.

Query: I'd like to hear from '78s in the world of high-tech wizardry (note the Compuserve number below). For a start, NathanHine and Ted Moynihan are busy engineering, developing, and designing hotmelt inkjet printheads at Spectra Inc. in Hanover. Nathan and Nellie 'B3 have two kids, Kalen 9 and Amos 3. Ted, his wife, Brenda Phillips, and their kids Allison and Liam recently hosted a post-and-beam barn-raising on their property in Plainfield, N.H.

5317 White Horse Road, Knoxville, TN 37919-9344; Compuserve 74132,2751