1960

In our classmate Bruce Ducker's novel, Mooney In Flight, published by MacAdam/Cage, the protagonist, who lacks confidence in life and is not a pilot, gets into a light plane in an emergency situation in the Bahamasmanages to fly it hundreds of miles and, with instructions from the control tower, lands it more or less safely. It is a thrilling high point of an excellent story, Bruces sixth book, which I just finished reading.

Bruce, a business lawyer in Colorado, wrote his first book in 1975 and, delving into widely varied subjects, has written about such countries as Hungary, Switzerland and East Germany. "I have a short attention span," he explains. His next book, soon out, will be titled Dizzying Heights. I wonder if it all began with a creative writing course he took in Hanover.

One member of our class lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, site of the tragic Virginia Tech shootings. He is Pierson Felch, whose hilltop home is within sight of the campus, and who serves as a volunteer, "a room gofer" as he terms it, at the Montgomery Regional Hospital, which treated the largest number of the wounded. Pierson, who was with Bell Laboratories before he retired, said that during the emergency one of the girls who had been shot received more than 100 floral arrangements. "I'm very afraid that Blacksburg will always be known for what happened here," he told me, sadly.

We've had many academicians in the class, and some are still working. Peter Kushner, a molecular biologist at the University of California in San Francisco, started out as a philosopher but ended up, after the career turns you would expect of a liberal arts college graduate, running a laboratory and doing research into estrogen reception. He is proud to have a son who became a professor of pediatrics and a daughter who has just sold a novel.

Another classmate, Arthur LaFrance, a professor of law at Lewis and Clark, is teaching a semester at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. And Charles Weeks, a teacher in Jackson, Mississippi, has recently been a visiting teacher at St. Paul's preparatory school in New Hampshire. He wrote a book on 18th-century Southern diplomacy. When I found Charlie, he was about to embark on a sixth trip to Vienna, where he has a close friend, our classmate Michael Fitz, who has served as the Austrian ambassador to Morocco and Spain.

Gail Warden, a longtime health care administrator, remains active in the field, serving on three boards. He is the author of a study on the future of the emergency room. A grandfather of three, Gail, who lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, travels widely. I found him between Washington and Chicago. He too has ranged far from his Dartmouth majors of geography and sociology.

And, finally, I hear from Kevin Robbins '98 that he and his wife, Kate, have produced a baby boy, James Tucker Robbins, who is the first grandson of our classmate Lee Robbins.

5522 Nagle Ave., Sherman Oaks, CA91401; (818) 994-9231; kennethireich@yahoo.com