“We are the stuff of the institution, and what we are it will be. Our business here is learning, and that is up to each of us.” With these stirring words, President John Sloan Dickey welcomed us into the Dartmouth fellowship, the vast horizons of academia, and manhood. For Dan Tompkins, an earnest, bookish National Honor Society member from Upper Montclair, New Jersey, President Dickey’s imperative had an “incantatory effect,” sparking a lifelong intellectual journey driven by insatiable curiosity, unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and the thrill of learning for learning’s sake. With his Ph.D. in classics from Yale in hand, Dan launched a legendary academic career teaching the classics at Dartmouth, Wesleyan, and Swarthmore. He arrived at Temple University in 1976 as the sole member of the Greek and Roman classics department, charged with building it into what now comprises 10 full-time faculty. He has written on Moses Finley, Thucydides, Homer, the ancient city, Wallace Stevens, just war theory, and various topics in higher education, winning the American Philological Association Award for teaching in 1980 and Temple’s Great Teacher Award in 2010. Dan retired from teaching in 2010.

A major contributor to class unity, Dan launched the class website (1962.dartmouth.org). Together with Sandy Apgar, Gary Spiess, John Walters, and the late John Clark, Dan formed the committee overseeing the Class of 1962 Faculty Fellowship, annually providing funding for research sabbaticals for promising tenure-track junior faculty. Inspired by the “Great Issues” series Dan doubles as class omnium gatherum, fathering the class Great Issues listserv, our antidote for Alzheimer’s, where classmates engage in lively debates on a broad range of issues.

After losing Jeanne, his wife of 21 years, to cancer in 2019, Ross Burkhardt returned from Las Cruces, New Mexico, in May to his hometown of Central Valley, New York, to be close to his sisters and a new romantic partner!

I regret to report the deaths of Ellis E. Kern of West Palm Beach, Florida, on April 1; Bruce A. Feldman of Potomac, Maryland, on April 21; and Ted Beal’s beloved wife of 57 years, Kathy, on April 12 at Bethesda, Maryland.

—David L. Smith, RR4 Box 225B4, Galveston, TX 77554; (775) 870-2354; david@davidlsmith.com