1961

Henry Eberhardt, our class agent, said it best: "We're back." After several years of struggling to meet our goals in the Dartmouth Alumni Fund, the class raised $140,889, which bettered our goal of $126,161 by 15 percent. We had 55-percent participation, up from 52 percent last year.

The campaign leadership reads like a list of the class leadership in the past three decades: Art Kelton, Dave Prewitt, Gerry Kaminsky, Ron Wybranowski, Victor Rich, Ron Boss, and Peter Palin. To these men, Henry said, "We couldn't have done it without your help. Many, many thanks for all the time and effort you put in for our class of '61 and Dartmouth."

Within the class, we had 40 men within the major-donor category gifts of $1,000 or more; their gifts of $91,460 totaled 65 percent of our class total. In our Green Derby pool, we finished in the middle, ahead of '63 and '66 and behind '62 and '64.

The next step is our 35th Reunion campaign, and for reunion campaigns, we as a class have always stressed participation. To get to 70 percent, we're going to have to get donations from another 87 classmates. Almost half of the total is in the 36 classmates who gave last year but forgot to give this year.

Did you see where John Zabriskie is back in the national news in a big way? He's leading Upjohn & Co., where he is chairman and chief executive, into a merger with Sweden's Pharmacia AB. "We found there to be a perfect fit between the two companies," said John, who will be president and chief executive of the surviving company. "I think the shareholders will be rewarded very nicely by this because we will be taking costs out, while building sales."

New Orleans is still reverberating through the class, as the folks who were there talk it up with other classmates. Our preacher, Duane Cox, and our hosts, Pani and Ken Kolb, have sent personal notes. It was a fabulous weekend and a powerful harbinger of our next Hanover reunion in June and our next out-of-Hanover reunion in Chicago in 1998. Cleve Carney and Bill Glenn should be pinning down tentative dates for Chicago soon. Getting to Chicago should be even easier than New Orleans: Just about every community above 250,000 population has nonstops to either O'Hare or Midway.

The dates in Hanover are pinned down, June 13-16,1996.1 that Roger McArt, our reunion chair, will be announcing details at our class meeting during Dartmouth Night weekend, which I will pass along to you pronto. Roger still needs volunteers. Call him at his office number, 203/341-2204, and leave a message on voice mail if he doesn't answer. And don't forget the Vail, Colo., mini-reunion on Feb. 1-4.

One other invitation. As president of the Dartmouth Club of the Piedmont, I'd like to invite you to a special evening in Chapel Hill on Dec. 16. Dartmouth plays the University of North Carolina in basketball in the Dean Dome. The game will be preceded by a 5 p.m. buffet dinner, with Nelson Armstrong, Dartmouth's director of alumni affairs, as speaker. We're inviting the team to a post-game reception. We're also inviting other clubs in the region. Why not have a group of '61s there to cheer in our 35th-reunion year?

Bowman Gray School of Medicine, Medical Center Blvd., Winston-Salem, NC 27157-1015