1951

Talk about a naive guy! The only responsibilities I heard regarding my duties as class secretary, 2001-2006, were to attend the executive committee meetings and record their minutes. Yeah, okay. I can do that, but the Class Notes and obituaries are done by professionals, aren't they? Slowly I began to learn that Professor Pearson's freshman challenge, me, was about to shoulder all of the above. With encouragement from my predecessor, Loye Miller, I began to navigate the shoals of literary freedom with 500 words of "deathless prose" six times ayear.Myfirst column, mostly a compendium of our 50th reunion, was a lark to report and elicited zero response, except this e-mail from president Henry Nachman: "Congrats on a great column. It was interesting, informative and covered a lot of people. Thanks for a job well done." Twenty-nine DAM columns later I'm still basking in Henrys encouraging words, although I've not heard from him since regarding my column. That's not quite true because he interceded once to rescue a column that was allegedly submitted after deadline. I decided early on that the columns needed a filler, a newsroom term for something to fill up space in the column. That became commentary on 50 th wedding anniversaries, quite common in 2001 and later. In the January 2002 issue I had the delicious pleasure of reporting an interview with a classmate and his wife that went like this: 'After divorcing his first wife and ending two more marriages in divorce he has remarried his first wife—giving real meaning to the aphorism that re-marriage after divorce(s) is truly a triumph of hope over experience." For several issues the primary subject was "favorite places in Hanover when you were an undergraduate," which was fun because everyone I contacted had a ready answer. Baker Library was a clear winner but there were many who recalled fondly the scenery in the vicinity of Hanover such as the golf course, Connecticut River, Balch Hill, etc. In 2002 I resumed the custom of reminding classmates that anotheryear had gone by with a birthday card. One thousand five hundred cards later and still going strong, the incoming prez wants it to continue. The class directory now contains class widows' information and, if her DOB is entered, I am sending her a card as well. Finally, there are the obituaries, 5 o of them that I wrote with help from the College, the families and local obituary writers. Only five classmates went without an obituary and the reason was no information from the family. That was consistent with their past because none of them responded to the 50th reunion year book mailings either.

Special thanks to my assistant, Ray Noyce, whose word processor efficiently transmits my scrawl to Hanover. This just in: Our Woody Klein has authored his fifth book, Liberties Lost: The EndangeredLegacy of the ACLU. It is published by Praeger. Go online for more current news to www.alum.dartmouth.org/classes/51.

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