1974

At the time of this writing winter is almost over in central Virginia. As you read this, though, a better than even chance still exists for one more snowy blast in New England, the source of all our news this cycle.

David Marston lives in Manchester, New Hampshire, and works at IBM Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. David joined Lotus in 1994 and moved into Lotus Research. When IBM acquired Lotus, Lotus Research was blended into IBM Research. David wrote that for the past five years he has been working on vendor-neutral standards related to the Extensible Markup Language (XML). Although this technology is often associated with the World Wide Web, David explained that it has applications in a wide range of software products, especially in facilitating document exchange between competing products, a benefit for consumers, governments and businesses.

Jody Hill Simpson wrote with information about some exciting changes. She and her husband, Rick Simpson (Harvard '74), are moving from Brookline, Massachusetts, to new adventures in the country. In this case the country is Hancock, New Hampshire, in the Monadnock region, an hour from Hanover. Jody is retiring as artistic director of the PALS Children's Chorus, one of the nations premiere treble-voice ensembles. Rick will continue with his consulting work, and Jody will remain affiliated with PALS as director emerita and project manager. Jody earned a masters degree in choral conducting from the New England Conservatory and founded the chorus in 1990. Today the chorus comprises 130 children ages 7 through 14 who have performed at such venues as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Symphony Hall and Tanglewood during the past 15 years. Jody and Rick have three sons. Charlie is in dental school. Jon is Dartmouth class of '08 and currently sings with the Aires. Those of you who attended our last reunion will remember Peter '05, who sang with the Aires in the show they put on for us behind the Hop.

I recently received very sad news from the College that John Sieg died in December. John was living in Derry, New Hampshire, and was an associate professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. Please watch for a complete obituary in the next edition of DAM.

Please write!

Retreat Farm, 1137 Manakin Road,Manakin Sabot, VA 23103; samplejr@msn.com