1969

By the time you read this it will be too late to attend our reunion and you will have to wait until August to read about all the good times you missed. For those of you who were unable to attend I am certainly sorry. I assure you that you were missed. Those who were in Hanover will have toasted you and talked about you; asked questions about what you were doing and why you weren’t with us and generally regretted that an opportunity to share our lives after Hanover was not to be. Perhaps in five years or even this fall at the mini-reunion over Homecoming you will reconsider and join your classmates.

The work has been done, the schedule arranged and the ’69 Web site has a thorough description of events and likely attendees. It promises to be a remarkable time when we can wish adieu to our outgoing president, James Wright, and his wife, our adopted classmate Susan Wright, and welcome the soon-to-arrive new president of the College, Jim Yong Kim. It will be quite an experience.

Among new arrivals is a recently discovered member of the class, Dona Heller, now A’69, who was with us on leave from Bryn Mawr with the full approval of Dean Thad Seymour. Dona is married to a ’64 and her father, class of ’35, was a Dartmouth Medical School professor. The class officers and executive committee agreed to extend adopted status to Dona and we hope to see her at the reunion.

Spending time in Kansas City I have been able to contact Doug McKenna, share an evening and a few phone conversations with him and learn about the lawyer life he and Nina are both pursuing in Missouri. Mostly we talked about classmates, the reunion and good times from the ’60s. Doug is in contact with many of the ’69 members of the College basketball team and is looking forward to seeing and playing ball with them in June. They are organizing a game that will include Bob Sturges, John Mathias and Bill Stableford and will honor their deceased point guard Rick Felmeister. Center John Duke has already signed up to attend and Mike Neal is expected to be there. This group along with a few other ’69s and members of other classes formed a semipro team and played in small towns throughout New England during our last few years in Hanover. They called themselves the EBs for “electronic backboard” and apparently had an interesting reputation. Doug tells me their uniforms included day-glo spray-painted union suits, which added to their intimidating and successful play on the floor.

Our ever alert ’69 Times newsletter editor Allen Denison has provided us all with information-packed epistles so we should be well armed to meet and greet in Hanover, and Webmaster Peter Elias has done similar work with the Web site. We all owe a rousing thank you to those two.

I am looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible in Hanover June 15-18.

P.O. Box 1447, Anacortes, WA 98221; (360) 293-1996; wheat69@earthlink.net