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Phil Kron wrote in to remind us gift planning is a significant aspect of Dartmouth’s capital-raising activities and represents a second way, after the Dartmouth College Fund (DCF), for us to join the alumni family. And perhaps a lot of classmates who have already included Dartmouth in their estate plans have just not let him know. “I’d really like to urge them to contact me so I can add them to our Bartlett Tower Society (BTS) list to be named or be listed as anonymous,” he advises.


To get in the BTS means including Dartmouth in your estate plans. The simplest way is name Dartmouth College or an affiliate (i.e. Tuck School, Dartmouth Rowing Club, etc.) as a beneficiary in an insurance policy, IRA or other benefit plan. Then no lawyer is needed! The gift should be a specific amount or a percentage of an asset, unconditional and usually unrestricted. Another way to give is through a brief provision in your will. If you really want to get sophisticated you can get involved with gift annuities, charitable remainder trusts or other special gift programs. Your personal financial planner or the gift planning staff in Hanover can help you. All the BTS members were listed in the Jan/Feb issue of DAM, including the 59 members from our class. And Joe Cramer has become our 60th member. Let Phil know at (772) 631-3766 or mlbkpck@aol.com if you want join the BTS. “We are already in a class by ourselves, relative to the DCF; let’s do in gift planning as well!” he urges.


No one else wrote me this cycle so I want to try another route to compete with our outstanding newsletter for copy. Instead of a current event, write to the column with an undergraduate memory. Here’s one of mine to kick this off.


It’s 1957 in Royal C. Nemiah’s “Classics I” class. I am not a major or doing well here. He has the gift of President Garfield—he can write on the blackboard in Latin with his left hand and Greek with his right—at the same time. He has my attention for a change. Spinning to face us triumphantly after just such a display, he expostulates, “Does anyone know what this sentence says?” I raise my hand. “Mitchell?” he exclaims incredulously. “And what say you?”


I rejoin with utter confidence, “The Greek sounds like ‘say ne mu sus agape’ and translates, ‘My life, I love you’ in English.” Victory is mine. I have hit it spot on!


“How on earth do you know that?” the old gentleman prays I tell him.


“It is the last line in Lord Byron’s poem, ‘She Walks in Beauty in the Night,’ ” say I.


“Young man, you have earned a C+ for this course in spite of yourself.” 


This column cannot exceed 500 words so edit your copy in true Hemmingway style or I will. But probe the Stygian depths of your memory for a tale calculated to keep us in suspense. 


—John M. Mitchell, 300 Grove St. 14, Rutland, VT 05701; jmm00033@comcast.net