In Praise of Class Notes

All the news that's fit to print, and then some. Why one reader is riveted to dispatches from alums he's never met.

I AM OBSESSED WITH CLASS NOTES. For most people, it is the first place they turn when they receive their alumni mags, to skim the bold-faced names in their class secretaries' reports before flipping to the front of the magazine. Notes are an opening bit of pleasure, a personalized hors d'ouevre before the main course. I read every class.

This time-consuming habit started just after graduation. I was living in an isolated village in rural South Africa, about six hours north of Johannesburg. I had no telephone, e-mail or television. Mail came twice a week. When I got my Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, I stretched out on my battered mattress on the ant highway that was my floor and gave myself over to Class Notes. I savored my class, though I rarely knew the particular classmates mentioned. I perused the three classes ahead and behind mine, since there was a chance I knew someone there. I found my uncles class, my cousins class, my friends' fathers' classes, the classes to whom I had served beer at reunions each June, the classes with famous alums. I ended up reading all of Class Notes.

When I returned to busy, informa- tion-laden America, I continued to read the whole section. Besides the rare times I was able to surprise a classmate by commenting on news of his father, the reams of words that my eyes passed over had no ulterior purpose I could articulate. But after a dozen years of reading them I have concluded there is something unique about Dartmouth's Class Notes.

in the front of the magazine. In the December 1995 issue, Warren Daniell '22 (father of professor Jere '55) talked about his 1920 pedestrian marathon, when he walked 86 miles from the College to the Massachusetts border in less than 24 hours. In March 1999 Joe Roberts 32 figured out the Great Depression so brutalized his class that only 421 of the 622 classmates who matriculated were able to graduate. In May 1999 Cliff Holmes '40 told the story of practicing his mountain climbing in a Baker Library elevator shaft until a staff member saw him and reported a "ghost in gray gabardine slacks." In Nov/Dec 2002 Bud Petersen '49 remembered sneaking onto the Colleges History comes alive in the back pages of DAM. In the past few years I have learned more Dartmouth lore and legend from the class secretaries (who have such fantastic names: X Larrabee '44; Harry Zlokower '63; Wade Herring '80; Townley Slack '88) than from any article golf course without paying—the old first hole was not near the clubhouse. With the buck fifty he saved, he filled the tank of his 1940 Buick convertible and drove every week down to Colby Junior College to woo his future wife, Elsie.

All of the more than 50,000 Dartmouth alums seem to live extraordinary lives. In jan/Feb 1987 Jerry "Pig Trousers" Leveen '61 was eulogized as one who followed his heart rather than money. After looking down on New York Harbor for years from a skyscraper while working in finance, he had quit his job and become a tugboat captain. In November 1996 Chuck Herberger '42 discussed his interest in a Stonehenge-like circle of boulders in Salem, New Hampshire. In Mar/ Apr 2002 I learned that Don Hall 'SO signed a contract with Sir Winston Churchill to use some of Churchill's art- work for Hallmark cards (the men are pic- tured together in a photograph hanging at Blenheim Castle). In September 1998 I learned that Harvey Goldstock '51 smoked five 7-inch cigars a day while running his linen rental business. The next month I discovered that Rick Foster '56 owned 35 Lipizzan show horses.

Despite my careful reading, I have never seen my own name appear in Class Notes. Even when Dartmouth wedding guests are listed, I somehow get left be- hind, as if alphabetical exhaustion pre- vented the secretary from getting beyond the Y's. (My sister, Wendy Zug Brown '89, however, appeared in her Class Notes in April 1999- At the time she lived in Yellowstone National Park and reported that her pet cat had slipped outside for a brief moment and was "quickly returned into the food chain" by a passing coyote.)

Of course, most Dartmouth men and women are just like you and me and wal- low in quotidian bogs of corporate jobs by day and dishwashing and bill paying by night. For the soul, Class Notes offers a monthly dose of poetry. Jonathan Silverman '87 often gives his class reports in haiku, and others sometimes throw out racy limericks. The steadiest versifier comes from the class of 1929. The anchor of the opening page of the Class Notes, Mary Lougee Ripley fills the '29 report with news and views and always ends with a poem from her husband, Rip '29. He writes in wry verse about such things as the bird that plastered his Sunday Times with droppings, the failings of President John Tyler and the evanescence of bronze statues. My favorite Rip poem, from January 1999: "As pleasures go fleeting the joy of good eating/Seems sometimes most all that remains/So here's to the pills that take care of my ills/I hope I find one for my brain."

Read the Class Notes of any alumni mag backward and a startling notion will crop up. The stories, taken as one coherent narrative, are the biography of one person—or, since the '70s, one couple. The newest classes breathlessly talk of getting jobs, going to graduate school and changing cities. As you go along to the '80s, they are getting married and having children. The '70s tell of career changes, divorces, children at the alma mater. The '60s focus on early retirement, second spouses, traveling. The '50s discuss retirement homes, cholesterol levels, blood pressure. The '40s speak of grandchildren. The 30s ruminate about classmates who've died. Mr. Dartmouth Class Notes is an amazing guy, especially since he was joined by Ms. Class Notes, amazing in her own right. Dartmouth women marry non-Dartmouth men. They tell of their own particular joys and sorrows. They add a fresh and furiously loyal dimension to Class Notes.

Compared to his and her brethren at other magazines, our Class Notes couple is older, more consistent and more gar- rulous. Since the Class Notes appeared in the first issue of DAM in 1905, there have been around 70 classes represented each month. In the summer of 1983, the notes ran from the class of 1914 to 1982; in the summer of 1993 from 1918 to 1992; and last summer from the Ripleys' entry for the 1929s to that of newcomer Jill Haltigan for the 20035. Almost every class contributes a column for each issue of DAM, and their reports are so richly filled with stories that the section stretches for 35 pages. Mr. & Ms. Harvard Class Notes, on the other hand, are pathetically thin and patchy, with only 54 classes reporting in a section that covers less than a dozen pages.

Unlike many other Mr. & Ms. Class Notes, ours is complicated. They might be a little sanguine in their early years, but as they age you find more honest reports of the vicissitudes of life. Unlike the ultrapositive Mr. & Ms. Harvard, they write of gloom, of less-than-golden parachutes, of unpalatable food at retirement homes. At one moment—with one class—they are upbeat, the next minute—one year later-they are mired in a slump. At times Mr. Dartmouth seems to care intensely about the Dartmouth quarterback. Other times, he is spancelled by a faulty pacemaker battery. Perfect husbands, imperfect administrators, at cetera—until there is equilibrium between successes and failures, complaints and congratulations.

Most realistic are the farewells. Each July a new class begins appearing in DAM, and each year or so another member of the old guard discreetly falls away. Some disappear without a trace, but others, usu- ally run by the ever-loyal widows of Dart- mouth men now gamboling on heavens green, sound a plaintive note. In Septem- ber 2002 Alice Renard Wormser, widow of a class of '27 alum, wrote the saddest note: "To my dear husbands class of 1927: Thank you for all the good times I have en- joyed with him and your great class. I hear- by tender my resignation as secretary and will no longer send in the meager news I've not gotten. Good luck to all." With that final entry, the class of 1927 passed into Class Notes oblivion.

But Mr. & Ms. Class Notes putter on, forever 70, forever riding show horses, sneaking onto the golf course and handsomely haunting Baker Library. a

JAMES ZUG is the author of Squash: A History of the published last fall by Scribner.