It’s the hot and muggy dog days of August as I write this. I guess the humid weather has everybody semi-comatose because there is very little to report.

“At 80 I don’t do a heck of a lot,” claims Belden Bell. Nevertheless, he’s on the board of trustees for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, and co-chairman of its Legacy Society. He’s also working for Republican presidential candidates and got his youngest daughter, Heather, married off a few months ago (how difficult a job was that?) with one still to go (how difficult will that be?). Belden lives in rural Fauquier County, Virginia, with wife Rae, two golden retrievers and an unrepentant parrot. All that seems like a heck of a lot to me, Belden. What does the parrot have to repent?

That’s all the current news, folks. Just so you have something to read I checked the Class Notes for October 1976 as reported by secretary Benjamin Bixby. Things were busier in those days. Abbott Meador was a member of a group that received a $24,000 grant from the Maine State Commission on the Arts and Humanities for producing a film about Maine. Jay Greene was elected president of Western Steamship Services Inc. Also moving up in the business world were John Hall Jr., Joe Malley and Phil Lippincott. Ambassador to Yugoslavia Laurence “Larry” Silberman secured the release of a U.S. citizen imprisoned in Yugoslavia for a year, apparently “on trumped-up charges of espionage.” According to The New York Times, Larry was quoted as saying, “When we get to the point where we don’t care about an American citizen innocently imprisoned, then we’re not much a country anymore.” Do those words still ring true today?

Please take few minutes as Belden did and drop me an email or note. Some of us are doing a heck of a lot, even at age 80. Tell the class about it.

—Bruce Sloane, 124 Hull School Road, Sperryville, VA 22740; (540) 987-8859; bsloane@wildblue.net