1951

When I wrote about '5l connections to East Tennessee in a recent column, one name was missing. I knew that DaveWhite was there, but I was unable to reach him. Now we have finally gotten together by telephone and I'm pleased to report that Dave and Sandra have rounded out ten years of living in Knoxville and seem to like that hilly country every bit as much as I did back when I tramped through the Great Smokies with the high school hiking club. "We bought the top of a ridge (outside Knoxville) and built our house on it," says Dave. "I sit here with a view of the Smokies out one side of the house, and the Cumberland Mountains out the other side."

That's far different topography from what the Whites had been used to in their many years in Tallahassee, where Dave had become an "academic physician" specializing in microbial ecology research at Florida State. Seems that back in 1986 the University of Tennessee persuaded him to move north and accept the title of "distinguished scientist," and the rest is pleasant history.

In theory Dave operates with one foot on the UT campus in Knoxville and the other at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in nearby Oak Ridge, (cradle of the Hiroshima A-bomb, but a mecca for peaceful research these many years now). Under this dual sponsorship, he presides over the Center for Environmental Biotechnology, a high-tech lab dedicated to "manipulating microbial communities" for the good of the environment.

This means developing valuable new products or procedures, and finding ways to combat longstanding major environmental problems—"the bad stuff," Dave calls it. For example, they have developed a process for breaking down the petroleum in oil-contaminated soil, and another for "binding up radioactive nucleides (heavy atoms) so they won't go anywhere." Sounds like a real cutting-edge operation.

About ten years after our graduation, Bob Kidd felt the overseas wanderlust and chucked a sales career with duPont to join the Peace Corps and go to Thailand. Thus bitten with the Southeast Asia bug, he got into the Foreign Service with AID and spent chaotic years in the wilds of Vietnam and Laos, dodging occasional mortar attacks and getting evacuated by helicopter when things got hot. Then followed many years of more peaceful service, in food distribution, mostly, in Yemen, Mauritania, Kenya, and the Ivory Coast.

It was in Kenya that he met and married Michele, an attractive French lady. Bob retired three years ago to a house in Fairfax, Va., near Washington, D.C. But in the long run Michele was lonely for France, so they now have another home near Lorient in Brittany, and a trans Atlantic commute every few months. They get the best of both worlds, and Bob says retirement suits him—"It's great to get up in the morning and just do whatever you feel like doing that day."

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