Allan Ryan has a problem. How is he going to fit all of his biographical information into the online fact sheet we have all been asked to fill out before September for the 50th reunion commemorative book? You see, Allan wears many hats.


He has been a lawyer at Harvard for 30 years, the last 15 as director of intellectual property and in-house counsel at Harvard Business School Publishing. He also teaches journalism and government courses at Harvard’s extension and summer schools and a law of war course at Boston College. 


That’s led to his authoring two books, one published in 2012 called Yamashita’s Ghost about a Japanese general convicted of war crimes after WW II (which filmmaker Allan is developing into a PBS documentary soon—stay tuned) and a new tome about U.S. Supreme Court decisions about post-9/11 Guantanamo detainees.


Not to mention that Allan and Nancy have lived in the same house in Norwell, Massachusetts, for 30 years, their two grown children live nearby and that every year he and Nancy go to New Orleans, where Allan had his first post-Dartmouth teaching job. 


Allan’s next job, he says, is “dutifully filling out the exhaustive survey Bob Serenbetz is inflicting on us” and supporting the Class of ’66 Bunkhouse at Moosilauke.


Norm Shaffer earned his M.B.A. from Tuck and went into investment banking, spending the “next 40 years helping companies raise money through private placements of securities to institutional investors” with Goldman Sachs and Bank of Montreal. He retired seven years ago and now Norm and Arline, a practicing psychologist and his wife of 43 years, follow the exploits of daughter Lauren’s two girls; daughter Holly ’03, beginning a postdoc in art history at Dartmouth this fall; and son Chip ’09, an associate at a major New York law firm. He has one other passion; Norm write’s children’s stories, for his grandchildren, of course.


Terry and Vanna Ruggles have been married 48 years, but their Dartmouth ties go back much further than that. Three of Vanna’s Cuddeback relatives, including her dad, a ’28, wore the green. And Terry traces ancestors in Hanover back to the class of 1826. 


Now ostensibly retired for six years, Terry is busy on the board of a community-based TV station in his hometown of Greenfield, Massachusetts, serves on the local historical commission, is passionately fighting to save an historic dam and raising funds for a museum at nearby Deerfield Academy. Real focus, Terry reports, is exercise at the Y and his six grandchildren.


Three Dartmouth couples got a taste of the South Pacific in February. Steve and Barbara Hayes, from Alexandria, Virginia, Jim and Nancy Dorr, and Tim and Toni Urban spent seven glorious days on the Paul Gauguin cruise liner in the Society Islands roundtrip from Tahiti. From the vivid description Tim has provided, which can be found in our class newsletter, it was clear to all three classmates that they were not in Hanover anymore.


—Larry Geiger, 93 Greenridge Ave., White Plains, NY 10605; (917) 747-1642; lgeiger@aol.com