1962

Think back to 1961. Think back to Dartmouth and to Hanover. Chances are that each morning you picked up a copy of TheDaily Dartmouth and caught up with campus news. Most of us didn't have any idea how much effort some of our classmates were putting out often in the very small hours of the morning to put the newspaper together. Can you remember who they were? The editor of The Daily Dartmouth back then was Howard Weinberg, currently the president of Priority Productions Inc. in New York City. We recently called him up. "Howard, I hear that your documentary film Sid at 90 has been getting a lot of favorable reviews. Is that true?" (I wanted to be sure that early in my call Howard understood that I was a wannabe journalist myself and not an agent of the Dartmouth College Fund.) I'm glad I called.

At Dartmouth Howard was interested in photography and worked on the Aegis staff. Along the way friends persuaded him to switch his journalistic impulses to the newspaper. After Dartmouth Howard went to Stanford Law School, but after a term or so decided that journalism and not the law was his passion. He worked at The WashingtonPost for awhile, served in the Army Reserves and then eventually gravitated to New York City. Do you remember when the News Hour with JimLehrer was the McNeil/Lehrer Report? Well, Howard was the founding producer, with more than 200 programs to his credit. He was executive producer for shows featuring Bill Moyers, Dick Cavett, Studs Terkel and producer for CBS News SundayMorning and 60 Minutes.

Howard's most recent work, Sid at Sixty is a short documentary film about Sid Raymond, a durable nonagenarian actor and comedian. It has won awards at film festivals in Oakland, Miami, New York and Washington and recently the Dupont Award for excellence in TV journalism at Columbia.

President of The Daily Dartmouth in 1961 was Dick Bragaw. Dick was an English major in college and continued in journalism, working at The DetroitFree Press and the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News. Currently Dick is president of Bragaw Public Relations Services in Palatine, Illinois.

Alan Rapoport was an editor and reporter for the newspaper for awhile, but medicine swayed him from journalism. After Dartmouth he took himself off to a trade (medical) school and dutifully learned his craft and became a neurologist in Connecticut. He continues to lecture around the globe on his special interest (headache), and maintains a private practice in neurology in Stamford and New Canaan, Connecticut. In his spare time Alan serves as vice president of our class.

There are many more classmates who labored hard to bring The Daily Dartmouth to us 43 years ago as we would sleepily pick up the newspaper and wake up to the world around us. Who could predict how their careers would unfold? I hope to write more of these fine journalists. And, by the way, if you are working on a film, a narrative or a documentary and things don't quite click, give Priority Productions a call and ask for the Script Doctor. Howard Weinberg will make your project right as rain in no time.

11 Sunset Road, Salem, MA 01970;(978) 744-0655 (fax); rjhannah@massmed.org