1981

Walter Annenberg and Steve Risberg are like this. (Since you can't see me, I am holding up my hand with my index and middle fingers crossed, the universal sign for chumminess.) They're like...peas in a pod...peanut butter and jelly... Maradona and Sinutabs. If you remember, Annenberg gave $100 million to his alma mater, The Peddie School, where Steve teaches math, coaches hoops, and runs a dormitory. One half of that money was designated for scholarships, the other half for—get this—faculty improvement. No wonder Steve's best friend is Walter Annenberg. No wonder student applications to Peddie have increased by more than 400 percent.

Our classmate has been at Peddie for six years; before that he taught at New Hampshire's smallest public high school, Orford, where he was the math department. When he married Barbara Griggs, Steve had an Insta-Family: Barbara brought five charmers to that union. The oldest just graduated from Plymouth State, and the youngest starts the tenth grade at Peddie this month. Now all they need is three more, and they can play fall-court.

I got my first e-mail message from a classmate the other day. Greg Folders wrote to say that he's in D.C. at NIH working for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He's an editor and writer for a variety of publications for both physician and lay audiences (Hayfever Today? Rhinitis Illustrated?), having finished a science-journalism master's at BU a few years back. In addition to writing about some of the most vile pestilence this side of the Amazon, Folks bikes madly up and down Rock Creek Parkway and runs the occasional marathon: he finished April's Boston Marathon in 3:09.

Wanna know who wrote me next via e-mail? That's right. You guessed it. Computer geek himself, "Big Byte" Bill Burgess.

Call Alex Dmuterko at work. When his secretary, Nicole, answers the phone, tell her that you'd like to speak with Alex and that your name is Abner...or Svetlana or Shaquille or Cobi Jones. Give her some unusual, wonderfully unique name. She will then put you on hold and burst out laughing. At least that's what happened when I called, according to The Turk.

So from now on, please call me "Sandy;" I have suffered enough ridicule.

Alex runs a development subsidiary of Trammel Crow Company; traveling all over the U.S., he buys and razes huge tracts of rain- forest-like virgin land and builds shopping malls. Far more politically correct, Alex's wife, Tosca, is an ophthalmologist, and their three- year-old Gregory Roman speaks fluent Ukrainian. In fact, there was mass hysteria in Chicago's Ukrainian neighborhood, Alex told me, when Oksana Baiul won the first gold medal last winter for that new country.

My freshman-year roomie Mark Molloy wrote to say that he and his wife, Jean, have a second child, Katherine Mary, who arrived by stork to their West Hartford home last August. First daughter Margaret has only been caught twice pushing little sis out onto the stoop and bolting the door.

5101 Fairglen Lane, Chevy Chase, MD 20815; Karen McKeel Calby, 14 Woodland Drive, Darien, CT 06820