Attention classes of 1978 through 1984! Yes, you! We know you read our column, checking for names of old comrades. Well, since you don’t get much other news about the great class of 1981, we thought you should know that for the last year we were named Class of the Year!


Just wanted to share that good news with you. (Okay, and maybe rub your noses just a bit.)


And now it’s time to make the doughnuts: Wendy Whitlock Cornish has a new lease on life. She is now living in Palo Alto, California, working in S.F., and hardly ever needing to use her car. Ann Jacobus Kordahl is also in San Francisco, writing creatively for children as her own have been going through Dartmouth. In a nearly parallel existence on the East Coast, Pat Berry is writing creatively and has a daughter at Dartmouth. And Ann and Pat are among the many classmates who have developed their own blog. It sounds like you two should be swapping some good stories.


Jim Slavin has been found alive and well and living in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. He and Doreen have been busy raising kids. No wonder he’s been so mysterious all these years.


It was great to run in to Frank “Pancho” Ryan at a recent Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network event in N.Y.C. Pancho has his own architectural design firm.


Thinking back on some of the other ’81s I saw at reunion for the first time in many years: Gary Weiner and his family made the trek in the family van from Salina, Kansas, where Gary is an ophthalmologist. Mike Komara is an electrical engineer cum consultant with all kinds of experience and patents in wireless communications. He came from Florida with his daughter. Linda Gundal came from Germany, Tom Waldo from Alaska, and Pam Hedstrom was just back from Haiti, where she had been working to try to help them sort out the mess in their financial infrastructure. And how wonderful was it to see Annette Taylor! Annette is a microbiologist/immunologist and the director of a genetics lab near Denver.


Everyone from George Alexakos to Tariq Zaman has joined our new “Class of 1981” LinkedIn group. It is really an essential forum for us to collaborate in areas of shared professional interest or to help classmates establish beneficial connections to others. I, for one, didn’t realize that Tom Farmer recently founded his own communications firm, built on his extensive experience in broadcast journalism and marketing strategy. Or that Jeff Meer has been all over the world for the past two decades, first as a U.S. State Department Foreign Service officer and more recently as an advisor and advocate serving a myriad of public health and development nonprofits. So please join the LinkedIn group. (Sorry all you other ’78s to ’84s, this one’s for ’81s only.)


—Robert Goldbloom, 324 Warburton Ave., Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706; (914) 231-5117; rgoldbloom@optonline.net; Brian Cusack, 26 Ocean Ave., Marblehead, MA 01945; (781) 710-7228; briancusack13@gmail.com