1984

Mining the various press releases and Christmas letters I have received, we begin with the academic side of things. Peter Wolcott writes that he and his family—wife Ellie and daughters Clara (3), Lena (7) and Elisa (10)—will be spending the next school year in Kristiansand, Norway. Peter, on sabbatical year from the University of Nebraska-Omaha (where he is associate professor of computer science) will be a visiting professor at Hogskolen i Agder. (For those of you who don't read Norwegian, that translates as Agder University College.) As for Peters family, they will be "absorbing Norwegian language and culture through the total immersion method!" Good luck to all on their cross-cultural adventure! Lisa Liberati is also taking on a new academic adventure. She has begun a new job as director of student services for the Princeton Review. (Where she will make sure they say great things about Dartmouth, of course!) Lisa lives and works in Santa Monica, California, these days and is sorry to report that she probably won't make it to reunion due to the demands of the new job. Finally, moving from the heights of academe and the sunshine of Santa Monica to the grueling world of public schools, the Scarsdale Inquirer reports that David Chao has been nominated to fill a position on the Edgement, New York, school board. David grewup in Edgemont (which is near Scarsdale) and returned there with his family in 1987. He and his wife, Marianne, have three children, D.J. (6),Annekka (4) and Gehrig (2). In addition to his involvement in local school management and politics, David coaches little league soccer, and mayor may not still work in the investment sector. (The newspaper article is not clear on this point!)

Speaking of the world of investing, Scott Lasser published his second novel last year. What does a novel have to do with Wall Street you ask? Well, Scott's novel, tilled All I CouldGet, tells the story of Barry Schwartz, a Wall Street bond trader, who watches his personal life self-destruct as he works 80-hour weeks and obsesses over how much money he is making. Scott knows whereof he speaks. He worked at Lehman Brothers in New York and now lives in Colorado, where he works as an investment executive for Vectra Bank. I suspect he isn't the only '84 who sees a bit of himself in his main character!

I also heard from David Shedd, who wrote a wonderful e-mail upon his return from a trip to Spain with his family. He writes: "I just came back from taking my wife, Nancy, daughter, Allie (14 years old), and my parents on a vacation to Madrid. It was an extraordinary experience to see the country through Allies eyes. Things that I had seen before and were normal to me were astounding to her. She'll never be the same. The world is a very different, and much larger, place to her now. Arguably the most incredible part of the trip was that we happened to be in the right place at the right time to have to work our way through the crowd of that massive peace demonstration. Almost exactly 1 million people were demonstrating in the streets of Madrid that night, and Allie saw it all happening. People at restaurants would ask us what we thought, and genuinely cared about our opinions, whether they agreed with us or not. I'll be the first person to say I love my country, but it's fascinating to see what a couple thousand years more of history does to the way people treat political matters."

Amen.

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REUNION June 13-15 2003