1989

Indulge me as I relive some of the reunion weekend in my first try at writing a column. For those of you who were not there, the reunion organizers did a fabulous job of orchestrating a genuinely special event! Apart from dizzying heat, the weekend was filled with surprises, laughter, swimming in the river, Phi Delt, resume talk, a thunderstorm, wistful memories, golf, pregnancy, parenthood, a touch of gossip, and many a compelling tale of Dartmouth '89s.

My co-columnist, Tom Avril, forgot to mention that he is a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and covers New Jersey local stories, including suburban mall festivals, grisly serial killings, and the perilous lives of exotic dancers. I just moved to D.C. and work at a health-policy organization. No exotic dancing, only consulting on reform options for state governments. Mary KayMcGeown and I live in a group house, so she will probably serve as an occasional consultant to this column. She is a program officer for Family Health International.

Kelly Busby is rocking the cable world and breaking into broadcast journalism as a reporter for a tennis show. Allison Moir appears regularly in print as a writer for Forbes FYI magazine and travels on glamorous business trips. Mike Blechner and Geoff Gilmartin both started at Dartmouth Medical School this year. They decided to relive their freshman year and become roommates again. Kim Bensen just took a new position as a health and life-sciences consultant in Boston after a three-year stint designing software for an education-research organization.

High-energy Jean Robertson Getraer took her newborn in tow for the whole weekend and was spotted at the river, the Bema, and AD. Pete Mac Donald is enjoying Stanford Business School, while former housemate Craig Rau is on his way to becoming a doctor at Georgetown. When I saw him at the reunion, Pat Giersch, a Ph.D. candidate in Chinese history at Yale, was about to leave for remote western China to do research for his dissertation. Liz Tauc and Fred Walters got married July 4th weekend in Vermont and have headed west to San Francisco. Liz will be the director of admissions at a private school in the city, while Fred is starting medical school at UCSF.

As someone at the reunion said, we can't all be featured in People magazine or TV Guide (i.e. Andrew Shue), but vast numbers of our classmates are lawyers or lawyers-to- be. After clerking for a year, Brian Frazier,Jennifer Downs, and Scott McElhaney are all setting up regional fiefdoms at firms in their respective hometowns (Nashville, Kansas City, and Dallas). Jamie Kershaw practices law in California—though, as his speech at our class meeting showed, his standup comedy talents may outshine his penchant for litigation. Pals Adam Glick and Chris Hildebrand have both become lawyers and, as rumor has it, proposed to their girlfriends on the same night! Steve Lehman has ventured into the worlds of a New York law firm and marriage but still flies planes, scuba dives, and drives really fast.

Those who did not make it to the reunion—you were missed. With her usual mysterious flair, Laura Bedford is rumored to be returning from her three-year stint in Paris, where she works in international finance for Bank of America. Overseas travel prevented others from making it to Hanover. Dave Gluck left Brooklyn to lead a youth trip through Israel, and David Frey, a Ph.D. student in Eastern European History at Columbia, spent the summer in Budapest "fine-tuning" his Hungarian. LizEilender, my freshman roommate-turned- lawyer, missed the reunion because of her honeymoon.

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