1964
1964
We don’t normally rehash executive committee meetings in this column, but with the dearth of other items, we will do so for the one from September 19. First up was a review of the five official classsponsored projects. The Vietnam project under the direction of professor Ed Miller has been receiving annual grants of some $5,000 from the class for some years now. The executive committee voted to appropriate $5,000 from this year’s dues to continue this project. Prof. Miller reports that our funding for this year supported research by Dartmouth undergraduate students in Vietnam, including travel expenses, as well as the stipends for two students to do preliminary work on Prof. Miller’s oral history digitization proj ect. This latter proj ect is part of a much larger effort supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. It is heartening to see our funds being leveraged in this way. In the spring 2023 version of Prof. Miller’s history course on the Dartmouth Vietnam Project, 11 students interviewed alumni and others, including our own Ivars Bemberis and Tony Thompson. We next took up the climate initiative begun by our late classmate John Topping and now dedicated to him as the John Topping ’64 Fund. We voted to support students doing research on climate change with a grant of $5,000. Rockefeller internships that support the building of student leadership are being continued to support three interns. We voted to continue with a grant of $10,000. The high-performance program of the athletics department has been granted $1,000 once again. The Class of1964 Outstanding Leadership Award was reviewed with Bob Bartles leading the discussion. To date there have been five awardees. We voted to budget a cash prize of $2,000. Bob indicated this project is becoming a joint project with the class of 2014. Further, it was recommended that the name of our late classmate and Dartmouth President James Wright be attached to the name of our award to recognize his leadership. Finally, it was suggested that our two classes lead an effort to create a permanent endowment to continue this award in perpetuity.
Lastly, we remember Frederick C. Gray, who passed away earlier this year.
Best regards.
—Ray Neff, 3685Fairway Dr., Norton Shores, MI 49441-7016; (616) 551-8595; rk7iejf@gmail.com; Robert C. Goodman Jr. Kaufman & Canoles, P.C., 2101 Parks Ave., Suite 700, Virginia Beach, VA 23451; (757) 624-3238; rcgoodman@kaufcan. com
