1944

There's no lack in the luster of '44. Our fame and fortune just won't go away. How else can you account for Dave Nutt in the movies and Bob Conroy on national television and the late Walt Blackadar in print and Bill Foye receiving an honorary degree and Howie Johns carding a hole in one on a par 4 and A1 Hormel having his post-war apartment cleaned by prizewinning author Grace Paley?

I mean, there are stars and more stars and then there are constellations!

Details: If you caught the film I.Q. with Walter Mathau as Albert Einstein, you might have spotted Dave Nutt sitting behind Meg Ryan at a nuclear-physics symposium supposedly held at Princeton in 1955. Dave volunteered to be one of 150 amateur movie extras for three days of shooting. He says it was interesting, but the most fun was at Christmas when his grandchildren got to see him on the big screen.

Then,Brentanos may not have 500 copies in the window, but other bookstores can surely provide a copy of Never Turn Back: The Lifeof Whitewater Pioneer Walt Blackadar. An M.D., Walt made kayaking history in 1974 by rescuing slighdy nutty Evel Knievel from the waters of Idaho's Snake River, and later that year he successfully ran the un-navigable Turnback Canyon on the wild Asek River in Alaska. Walt died in a separate kayaking accident in 1978.

Prof. Bill Foye couldn't make reunion last June because he was receiving a D.Sc. honorary degree from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Services, where he taught for some 40 years. He was also honored last October by the American Chemical Society, and he has new and first editions of a couple of his books underway.

As for Howie Johns out in Tucson, who's ever even heard of anyone hitting a golf ball 360 yards, let alone putting it in the cup? Where was ABC Sports?

Finally, Al Hormel turns the clock back to the time after the war when he and Marilyn were living in Greenwich Village in New York City. "Grace Paley was the building janitor," he said, "or janitress. She cleaned and tidied up around the place.I remember seeing her own room a couple of times, and it was fall of books." Grace Paley went on to win numerous awards for her own books of poetry and short stories. She still lives in New York but has a summer home in Vermont, just north of Hanover.

Sadly I report five deaths: Lem Arnold,Calvin Allen, Lubor Capek, Walt Acher's wife, Ruth, and Dan Donovan's wife, Kay. Our sympathy.

P.O. Box 24, Cornish Flat, NH 03746