1944

Couch potatoes take note: at this writing, Phil Puchner and Eric Barradale, former roommates and stellars on Dartmouth ski teams, are in training for the world cross-country ski championships in March at Lake Placid. They'll be competing in 10-, 15-, and 20-kilometer races against some 400 other masters, 75 years and older, from countries around the world. "I finished last three years ago," says Phil, "and I'm out to improve my ranking." A retired engineer living in Idaho, Phil still does some surveying "whenever anything interesting comes along."

Incidentally, Eric, along with his wife Joan, and Jim Elliott, are already hard at work on a new class of 1944 directory, due on the newsstands early in 1999 to ready us for our 55th Reunion. Be sure to fill out that address-questionnaire when it hits your mailbox.

Nice phone call from Del Field from his old hometown, Kansas City, Mo. Del is a retired livestock and feeder salesman and says though he still has an office he and wife Carol spend most of their time with their feet up, taking life easy.

And a nice turnout in Hanover January 12 for the "inaugural" lecture by Prof. William C. Spengemann, named last spring to Pat and Bill Hale's Dartmouth chair in English. Pat and Bill were on hand, of course, along with son Kip '72 and his wife, and a heady group of local '44s.

An oral history project in music by a Yale scholar got a ringing endorsement in a December New York Times story from Wiley Hitchcock, a distinguished professor emeritus at City University of New York, a leading scholar in American music.

I just had fun reading a Pennsylvania newspaper story about die reunion between Bob Rader and a fellow P-47 Thunderbolt fighter pilot who was shot down on a mutual mission over France in 1944. They hadn't seen each other in 53 years and got together, out of the blue, via a fighter pilot veterans organization.

That was one quietly happy grandfather's voice I heard when Ja Densmore called to say that granddaughter Priscilla Densmore Kern had been accepted at Dartmouth, early decision, into the class of 2002. She is the daughter of Marty and Ja's daughter Alexandra, who is married to Ed Kern '67.

Hanover resident Wemo Epply says: "I dropped by the renovation of Webster Hall, and the burly Brooklyn foreman told me that his crew had ruined a $15,000 power drill trying to break up a block of granite the size of a Buick. 'Then,' said the foreman, "somebody called a Vermont stonecutter, and he came in with a chisel and a three-pound hammer, tapped it in four places, and it split like a cake of ice.'"

Retired business administration professor Bob Tompa sent me an "Important News Release" that was making the rounds: "Senior Citizens are the Nation's Leading Carriers of Aids! Hearing AIDS, Band AIDS, Roll AIDS, Walking AIDS, Medical MDS, Government AIDS, and most of all Monetary AIDS to their children!"

Three deaths: Win Turner last November and Howard Gilman and Horace Mosser in January. Our sympathies.

That's it. Blessings.

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

Phil Pucliner and Eric Ibarra dale arc in training for the world cross-country ski champion skips. FRITZ HIER '44