1952

Happy birthday. Except for some young sprouts like DickMcDonough and FrankOsgood, we are all turning 70. It's a happy milestone full of children, grandchildren and friends and, of course, insulting cards and gifts reminding us of our antiquity by assuring us that we "aren't that old." Hell's bells. We know we're not that old.

Fifty years ago on the Hanover plain, we were second semester sophomores, and all around us the social order was changing. Frank Lloyd Wright influenced the design of ranch-style homes that proliferated in Lemvittown. Norman Vincent Peale was building us up, Senator Joe McCarthy was tearing us down and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit went to the big city to work every day. Buckskin shoes and tennis balls were white. Telephones and tuxedos were black. The United States was still separate but equal, but at Dartmouth, there was real effort for honest equality. OscarHammerstein II (our honorary classmate) celebrated World War II hi-jinx in the musical South Pacific, while the North Koreans were poised to start a new war in Korea. The Vietminh in Vietnam were ejecting the French colonials setting the stage for yet another conflict. The world population was 2.3 billion (today it is 5.9 billion) and Tibet was gobbled up by the Chinese. On the Hanover plain, we tramped through snow, ice and mud on the way to class and looked forward to our junior year and a new major. NROTC students were apprehending another summer cruise down to Pensacola and then to Little Creek, Va., for amphibious warfare training. It was there under a grove of palms that we learned about the start of the Korean War. And our lives changed in a hurry.

Hardly anyone better exemplifies the rapid course of world history since graduation than Randy Nubel (henceforth and forever known as "Herb" after U.S. Army

induction), who at this moment is in Poland and Slovakia teaching international business and consumer marketing as well as English and learning to cope with Slavic languages. At Dartmouth Herb majored both in art history and English literature. After Army service in Korea Herb gained a master's degree at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. He first joined the Swiss pharmaceutical firm CIBA, and in the mid-'60s the international division of Sterling Drug, NYC, where he had assignments in South America and Europe. Herb's wife of 25 years died in 1995. They had no children so he is free to travel. From 1996 to 1998 he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Slovakia on a business development project to help make the transition to free enterprise and a market-based economy. The average age is 33 and Herb was pleased to be accepted and to discover that he was not the oldest among his cohorts. After Peace Corps service Herb eturned to Eastern Europe to teach business management courses under the auspices of City University of Bellevue, Wash.

Happy birthday. Seventy candles.

P.O. Box 8, Scottsville, NY 14546; (716) 385-1010; (716) 385-8958 (fax); henry_williams@msn.com