1973

Your recovering, former marine class secretary, Bob Conway, took off his pack for the last time (Well, not exactly. See below.) and retired from the USMC effective last August Ist. I have accepted the position of director of legal affairs with the N.Y. State Division of Military and Naval Affairs (DM&NA) in Albany, N.Y. DM&NA is responsible for New York's army and air national guard as well as its naval militia. If I'm not near the corps I love, I love the corps I'm near. Nostalgia time: "Sleep well tonight. Your National Guard is alert."

Speaking of citizen-soldiers, I learned that Washington, D.C., prison chaplain Chuck Minor started his ministry career, after studying at Princeton Theological Seminary and receiving a M.Div. at Yale Divinity School, as an army chaplain. He served in the Sinai, Korea, and Panama. Paratrooper-padre Chuck also jumped out of perfectly good airplanes. It was a win-win situation: If the chute opened, he got to see his boss again; if it didn't, he got to see his real Boss. He later worked in the Ft. Drum, N.Y., protocol office as an army civilian employee while his wife Wilsie (a Radcliffe '73 and Yale Law grad) was involuntarily called to active duty there as an army reserve J.A.G. officer during Operation Desert Storm. Chuck told me that Alexandria, Va., resident Ron Tigner, a banker before he went to law school, works on Capitol Hill in the Small Business Administration on community development and banking projects. Eddie Johnson of Highland, Ind., is a vice president for research in the Sherwin-Williams Co.

Chuck keeps tabs on my former roommate Ben Wilson, who is an environmental law partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Beveridge & Diamond.

John Towers pinned on lieutenant-colonel rank insignia last summer at Camp Lejeune, N.C. Working with the marines as an army artillery liaison officer has apparently not hurt his promotion opportunities in the army.

Hits magazine reports that Rip-It Records has appointed Ted Thompson as its new general manager. Ted brings 22 years of business management experience to the job. In that tough business it probably doesn't hurt to have been a standout varsity football lineman either.

Cal Bowie was awarded the 1995 American Institute of Architecture Merit Award of "Outstanding Achievement in Historic Resources" for his renovation design for the Huffington Library at Madeira School in McLean, Va. Cal's firm, Bowie Gridley Architects of Washington, D.C., saved the school's existing 1935 Georgian Revival-style gymnasium by turning the structure into a new library.

EX-treme vacations. Hope that Hurricane Bertha didn't ruin any of your vacations in the Carolinas last summer. Bertha, a category-three hurricane, passed directly over Camp Lejeune, N.C., last July and really got our attention. The Conways went to upstate New York in June and had a few adventures in the Lake Placid area. Nine-year-old son Phillip got to take the controls of an aloft charter plane (the pilot's, not the bug-eyed parents', idea) for a seemingly eternal period of 45 seconds. We climbed Mt. Marcy, New York's highest peak, enjoying most of the 14.2 miles of the hike. Object lesson: the flat coastal area of North Carolina is not the right training area for a Marcy climb.

Before your summer vacation memories (or nightmares) fade, send me a tale or two. Exaggerations are permitted unless you start out with: "There we were, deep in the Amazon, surrounded by..."

167 Colonial Ave., Albany, NY 12208

Dad Steven Buckler '73, p. 69