Sometimes it pays to clean out the basement. Gary Gilson recently stumbled on three tapes that included a game he and John Kramer ’56 had broadcast on WDBS. Not just any game—the NCAA playoff against West Virginia. “It was the game Dartmouth won in overtime, thanks to outstanding performances by Jim Francis, Ron Judson and Gene Booth and especially Larry Blades, who scooped up a loose ball at the end of overtime and threw in a shot that beat the buzzer and West Virginia.” Unfortunately, the tape runs out four minutes from the end of the second half, “but I will keep looking.”


After the article about Dartmouth’s Delta Upsilon chapter’s struggle to pledge its first African American appeared in the DAM, several classmates posted their own experiences on the class listserv or contacted me directly because, as Staff Krause put it, it “apparently touched a lot of nerve and memories.” Gordon Evans (who lives in Oregon) recounts a similar story. He remembers that in April 1956 Phi Sigma Kappa became Phi Tau because of the national’s exclusionary clauses by race and religion. The national sent a representative who insisted that “we should limit our pledging only to men from pre-selected groups. He convinced no one.”


Staff’s remembrance is different from most. Back in the mid-1950s he wrote an original musical titled 1955 that “revolves around the Rosa Parks’ busing boycott and on-campus fraternity discrimination.” A group of music and theater majors at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona, gave it a fully staged reading in 2005, and now Staff plans to rewrite it as a full-length musical.


Some time before he got his second new hip Bob Adelizzi was inducted into the California Homebuilding Foundation Hall of Fame. The citation read in part, “With a career spanning more than four decades, Robert Adelizzi’s vast experience includes banking, real estate finance, homebuilding, land development and real property law.” Tommi affirms that they’ll both be at the 55th reunion in June 2012.


Art Koff’s trip to San Francisco combined a talk at the Aging in America conference and dinner “at their favorite cozy Italian restaurant just down the alley-way” with Kim and Susan Alfaro. Art also appeared on NBC with Lester Holt to talk about the economic difficulties faced by older Americans. According to Art, more and more of them are starting small businesses to earn some money.


Ted Bradley, out in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is living what appears to be the life of a contented retiree, including a 30-day cruise around South America.


A resident of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, John Brennan “still goes to the office, Brennan Insurance Agency, for five days a week as he has for over fifty years,” according to his wife Suzy. Last winter, he skied the Back Bowls at Vail with his son and grandson.


Thanksgiving and the holidays of the new year mean gathering together with those who matter most to us, the best time of all for wishing one another good health and all the happiness we can muster in 2012.


—Michael Lasser, 164 New Wickham Drive, Penfield, NY 14526; mlasser@rochester.rr.com