1960

All of us had various influences on our decisions to attend Dartmouth, but there were some real go getters and unusually loyal alumni involved in our 14 classmates from Montana going to Hanover.

Given the small population of the Western and Southern states contributing members to our class, Montana seems per capita to have been best represented.

Great Falls High School contributed four members alone, Loren Jackson, Tom McCorkle, Paul McClure, and Pat Morris.

This same high school, Loren notes, had sent four to Hanover in the class of 1959 and was to send four others in the class of 1961.

"We had two very active alumni in town who worked very hard on our behalf," Loren recalls. And Greg Johnson remembers that Great Falls had a newspaper publisher so impressed with Dartmouth that he ran the pictures of all Dartmouth students from Montana in his paper.

Greg and Howard Jelinek came from the small town of Harlowton. There were only 40 members in their high school class, but among them were four future Ph.Ds. Greg's father was the Harlowton town doctor, and Howard's was the school superintendent. The town then had about 2,000 population; it has just 1,000 today.

Greg, a longtime employee of the CIA, remembers that a local rancher who graduated from Dartmouth in the 19405, Warren B. "Buck" Jones, did a lot of recruiting of new Dartmouth students. Greg made his decision of Dartmouth over Brown after taking a long ride with Jones.

I heard from Howard recently. Now a resident of Laguna Beach, Calif., the firm he founded, South Pacific Electronic Design Associates, Ltd., of Christchurch, New Zealand, has been developing a lowcost earthquake sensor it hopes to market.

Of course, another Montanan in our class, Harry Fritz of Missoula (still lives there), entertained us at the San Francisco reunion with his excellent rendition of Abraham Lincoln. He's about as tall as the 16th President was, too.

Gary Meehan and Erik Mickelsen both still live in Lewistown, where they came from to go to Dartmouth. The other member of our class from Montana who still lives there is Ed Sedivy of Bozeman.

"I applied sort of on the spur," he told me. "I just stumbled in back there, but after that we started getting Bozeman people interested, and for 20 years we were getting one a year in, some on the football team."

Pat Morris, now with the U.S. Forest Service back in Washington, D.C., said he went to Dartmouth on the suggestion of his guidance counselor.

Of the 14 Montanans in our class, one, Craig Cornell, died tragically soon after graduation in a plane crash.

The two others, so far unmentioned, are Bob Bolingbroke and Ed Geraghty, both now living in California.

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