A snowbound classmate, intoxicated with memories of Nelson Rockefeller, writes: “I was clearing out attic and cellar, grudgingly accepting migration to my wife’s chosen senior living encampment. Everything there is on one floor, and there’s no deep end of the pool. My crochety Alfred Prufrock moment faded when I uncovered a coffee stained, faded copy of There’s Something Happening Here, our 25th reunion yearbook. It survived being left once in the rain on the veranda, and it’s as wrinkled and disheveled as I am. I had never looked at every page and had not seen it in decades. Nostalgia seduced me for two hours. I discovered pure gold from remarkable guys I didn’t even know. Three decades back David Agan, a fellow DOC veteran, wrote: ‘We made it. Our graduation day was a metaphor for the times.’ Dave still devotes his life to serving refugees, reducing prejudice, and welcoming diversity. Aldie Caram wrote, ‘I still feel the world needs to change a lot and a good starting point is right here, within.’ Chuck Morey, already finding success in theater, went for the perfectly timed laugh line: ‘The real reason for my abiding interest in the dramatic arts is really quite simple. I wanted to meet girls.’ A deeply moving essay by John Myers reflected eloquently on life, love, loss, faith, family, and assessing lifelong commitments: ‘How’s life? Ask me in 40 years and I’ll look back and tell you.’ Rob Nichols wrote about going from learning how to build a chicken coop to ‘creating or rehabilitating homes for more than 250 disadvantaged people in New Hampshire.’ Nick North survived Vietnam and gradually went from ‘being estranged from Dartmouth’ to drifting back, saying, ‘I was only a boy then, after all.’ Dan Papp looked back gratefully on inflection points: ‘I now run my own life again, instead of my life running me.’ Admitting ambivalence about Dartmouth, C. Stewart Rogers said he quietly kept up with alumni news. ‘I imagine,’ he said, ‘that some of the extended conversations that were interrupted in mid-1969 are, as yet, unfinished.’ Family physician Jeff Saffer reflected upon the journey, his good friend Richard Jenson, and his sustaining philosophy: ‘I believe in the power of the human spirit and that each of us has an important story to tell.’ Jim Staros totally cracked me up: ‘I set the Dartmouth College department of chemistry record for consecutive number of explosions, a record that I probably still hold.’ Every ’69 should dust off the book and savor a neglected treasure. It is true, as one classmate said, that there really is music for our singing, after all. Don’t wear the bottoms of your trousers rolled.” Check out the lively, inspiring 1969 website and contribute your wisdom to our newsletter and Class Notes! Thanks to all our correspondents!

—John “Tex” Talmadge, 3519 Brookline Lane, Farmers Branch, TX 75234; (214) 673-9250; johntalmadgemd@gmail.com