1960

"Round the girdled earth they roam." Just having sent an e-mail message from the business center of the Sofitel-Metropole Hotel in Hanoi, I suddenly looked up, and there was Rick Roesch. What would be the chance of two officers of the class of 1960 meeting like this in such an exotic locale? We might even have been staying in the hotel (we were in separate wings) at the same time and likely never run into each other.

I was just a tourist, visiting the LA. Times correspondent in our new Hanoi bureau. But Rick was there as a Citicorp executive to attend a ceremony in which Citicorp gave $100,000 to a Vietnamese hospital for disabled children. He invited me to the press conference, and the hospital staff gave a sumptuous lunch afterwards, with shrimp wrapped around sugar cane and other delicacies.

Rick and I enjoyed breakfast together, and it was nice seeing his wife, Linda, too. At an earlier stage in his Citicorp career, Rick had extensive Asian service in Bangkok and elsewhere.

The next day Rick and Linda flew off to Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, to help open a Citicorp office there. Citicorp has offices in 99 countries.

After returning home, Harp Dunning told me about running into Marty Weiss while both were camping with their sons, and in Marty's case with his wife and daughters as well, in 1989 on the floor of the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania.

Marty, who has recently been elected president of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, remembers, 'I got up about 6 a.m. and went to brush my teeth at the 'water source' while wearing a Dartmouth '6O sweatshirt given to me by my son (Dartmouth '84). A voice rang out behind me crying "60 out"; it was obviously Hap, who was my neighbor in Hitchcock Hall freshman year and whom I hadn't seen since we graduated...

"Hap had arranged for a Massai tribal goat feast in honor of his son's 16th birthday, apparently a remarkable feat (typical of Hap). What a wonderful surprise!"

Presumably, all survived the feast, except the goats.

Other news comes that John Dimling will become president and CEO of his firm, Nielsen Media Research, when it splits from Cognizant this summer. Nielsen measures the Viewership of television programs, a vital statistic used in calculating advertising rates, and John has been with it for 13 years.

As time marches on, memorial gifts to the College in honor of late classmates are becoming more common. A notice recently relates that a total of $785.93 was given through mid-February to the 1998 Alumni Fund in separate gifts in memory of NedPatrick, Steven Vaughn, Bruce Flashner,Richard Aronsohn, Andrew Purdy,Edmund Starzyk, Samuel French, and Robert Akin. May they rest in peace.

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Hap Dunning ran into Marty Weiss while both were camping with their children on the floor of the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania. KEN REICH '60