I was recently informed that the Alumni Memorial Book Fund memorialized 14 classmates with books placed into Baker Library. This includes Robert M. Beatty, Greek and Roman Mosaics; William P. Doherty Jr., Shakespeare’s Musical Imagery; Hjalmar P. Kolar, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization; William C. Lary Jr., Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry; William K. Tell Jr., The Act of Musical Composition: Studies in the Creative Process; Arthur M. Zich Jr., Iron Age Hillforts in Britain and Beyond; Leonard J. Clark Jr., Play, Learning, and Children’s Development: Everyday Life in Families; H. Flint Ranney, The Mosaics of Roman Crete Art, Archaeology and Social Change; William K. Howenstein, Nobility and Kingship in Medieval England; Stanford Klapper, Leadership and Elizabethan Culture; Nils H. Larson Jr., High Culture and Experience in Ancient Egypt; Walter D. Pugh, Vincent Van Gogh: The Years in France; William H. Skiff, Reforming Ideas in Britain: Politics and Language; Wilton S. Sogg, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution.


I now interrupt to bring you the Barbary Coast Jazz Band playing in honor of our classmate, Charles Dittman Landauer, who joins the funeral procession up Main Street and around the Green. All surviving classmates bow their heads in solemn tribute and remembrance.


I close with the sixth stanza of a poetic limerick written in October 1996, “Death Close By.”


“How can one come to terms with these things?


The stings that a death always brings;


Wounds sharper and deeper,


Cut by the grim reaper,


Inside where our love ever clings.”


—Joel D. Ash, P.O. Box 1733, Grantham, NH 03753; (603) 863-3360; joel@poeticlimericks.com