1944

Sure wish we'd been a fly on the wall or a puck in the net in mid January I when Jack Riley and 16 out of his 17 players on the 1960 Olympic hockey team that beat the Russians got together for a 35th reunion in Tampa. A banquet and 18 holes of golf were on the agenda.

The annual Aspen-Carbondale ski gathering was also full of swishes and swirls. Martyand Ja Densmore, Barb and Jack Snobble and Barbara and Bill McElnea served up good times and good food to the likes of Joan and Eric Barradale Carol and Dick Ranger,Suds Suddarth and Dave Nutt. On the way home, and a couple of blizzards later, the Barradales made it down to Colorado Springs and a rendezvous with Dorry and RicBradley.

Nice to see Dick and Proc Ostberg, first at a ski lodge near Woodstock, Vt., where we dined with them, two kids, and a dozen grandchildren; and second for three days in Ipswich, where we were concert-goers, walkers, and attendees at the Boston Garden Show. Dick spends spare time as president of the Seamen's Aid Society, a hostelry founded in Boston in 1859 to aid old or indigent sailors. It is located next door to the Paul Revere House, and still puts out a meal for 55 cents!

Mickey Smith has a little more time on his hands these days. He has just stepped down from his full term as chairman of the board of the New School for Social Research in New York City. Mickey has also served as a trustee for the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation.

Dick and Suzy Rice have decided against six-months-here-and-six-months-there and have decided that New Hampshire is best, after all. They've sold their winter place in Arizona and settled in year-round in a senior-citizen retirement home near Meredith, N.H.

A dandy story in the New Hampshire Sunday News recently on Jim Browning, who taught engineering at Thayer School for a number of years and subsequently formed the Thermal Dynamics company in Lebanon. There have been a number of Thermal Dynamics off-shoots over the years, which have brought the Upper Valley the nickname "Plasma Valley," and more than a thousand families earn paychecks from the half-dozen companies that evolved from the efforts of Noop and his disciples.

Ray Hensler writes about his mother: "She was 99 in February. She's in a wheelchair, but her mind is most active. She is also rather demanding and impatient, and a few years ago when there was no response to her buzzer light she dialed 911. A few minutes later two cops arrived at the nursing home to 'rescue' Mrs. Hensler in room 39!"

Oversight: In trying to help with the '44 book exhibition at our reunion last June, I completely overlooked Bill McGrail s tome, The Catch andthe Feast, which he and his late wife, Josie wrote in 1969. I even reviewed the book for this very Alumni Magazine (most favorably), and it's right here on a bookshelf. Apologies. That's it. Blessings.

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