1953

There are so many of the women of 1953 yet to honor that it gives us reassurance that we will be around quite a while to complete the task. At about 20 per year, that makes 30 years to go. Gail Lassiter Malin, Duke 1957, has brought tire class White House a touch of class we would expect from a First Lady, and a Southern one at that. Like so many of the women of 1953, Gail is the heart and the spirit of the great success Bob has known, but always behind the scenes doing things for him and for others.

Her community, her children, her husband, her university and college all receive so much from Gail, and always with the graciousness of the First Lady that she is. One of the early settlers at Harbour Ridge, Gail has become a superb tennis player and championship golfer, well known for winning the yellow ball competition with certain scribes in the class. This is the complex game of not losing the game ball when there are seven seas of water, continents of palmetto, and other floridy, sticky stuff and critters therein about which even God is unaware. Gail kept the ball in play on that course just like she has done with everything else in her life. Gail is the personification of that eternal word for talent, for respect, and for caring love, that warm word "Lady," so we think she will simply be known as Lady Gail from now on!

Now that the sage citizens of New Hampshire have placed their trust is Elsa Luker as one of their legislators, the continuing momentum for women's rights cannot help but accelerate. Elsa has never swerved in her determination to obtain full equality for women in all aspects of American life, and has been gifted to articulate those causes so well that with her membership in one of the most progressive legislatures in the country, we do expect we will hear more. Who knows, maybe we will get a Democrat back in the White House!

Look around the room at reunions for the prettiest blonde in the place, one that's almost five feet tall! Guess who, and if you said Cynthia Van Wirt O'Connor of Green Mountain College fame, you got it. Cynthia spent the last two years of our undergraduate days with us in Hanover, as the spouse of one of our greater golfers and certainly one of the greatest friends of Dartmouth, Richard B.,otherwise known as Okie.

For those of us in the house of the Boomers, Cynthia was a fraternity sister, if that isn't an oxymoron. Cynthia proved in the early fifties that the women of Dartmouth can really keep it all together, even in that den of iniquity, and do it better. She helped save us from ourselves. Jane, who was also a wee student of the class, being two at graduation, and Richard, Danny, and Tim all followed from that wonderful romance of Cynthia and Dick at Dartmouth, and all of us that knew them then as well as now still share in that joy of 47 years of marriage.

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