Class Note 1985
There was a tease of spring this last weekend in February in the northeast as warm air and sunny skies helped the winter snows begin to recede. You never know what March may bring—“In like a lion, out like lamb”—but even this early taste of springtime feels good. Almost as good as having quite a bit of news to share this column so here goes.
Seems Vail, Colorado, is as good a place as any for two fellow ’85s from Mid Mass to reconnect! As shared by Jon Sollender: “We were enjoying ourselves at a wonderful Italian restaurant in Vail when from the table next to ours came the gentle question if ‘that’ was a Dartmouth sweater (I, of course, was casually dressed in my class sweater—yes, it still fits). Asking was the husband of Brenda Clark from Mid Mass. I, a Hitchcock grad, swapped several stories with her and her family, especially about skiing. She turned quite red when I asked her if her children knew anything about skiing down the stairwell of Mid Mass: ‘Brenda, how could you not tell your kids what you did down the Mid Mass stairwell at least once a winter semester?’ ” Jon, his wife and four children (ages 17, 16, 14, 11) live full-time in Aurora, Colorado, and spend winters and summers around Vail. Jon did write that his oldest was in the college application process, with Dartmouth on her list. Perhaps he will be spending more time on the Hanover Plain again (though maybe not on the stairwell of Mid Mass). Other classmates upholding the Dartmouth legacy tradition include Eleni Daskalakis Henkel, whose oldest son Matthew, and Jory Macomber, whose oldest son Sam are both matriculating this fall with the class of 2015. Congratulations! Eleni lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, with husband, Peter, and their three kids and is a partner with an executive search firm specializing in searches for investment professionals. Jory is assistant headmaster at Holderness School, coaching the ski team and raising three kids with wife Martha Cornell ’86. I certainly hope that Sam Macomber will uphold his family’s ski racing tradition too and will be making a few turns for the Big Green.
Matthew Dickerson has just published his eighth book—The Mind and the Machine—to glowing reviews. Matthew is a professor at Middlebury, teaching in both the computer science and environmental studies programs and juggling various distinguished lecturer invitations. Vying for the “almost as prolific an author as Matthew Dickerson” title is fellow classmate Jim Rasenberger. Jim recently published his third book titled: The Brilliant Disaster, a history of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Published coincident with the 50th anniversary of the invasion, the book includes, as described by Jim, a “double dollop of Dartmouth.” One of the people Jim writes about in the book is his father, Raymond Rasenberger ’49, who played a small but significant role in the crisis, working with the Kennedy administration to bring home more than a thousand men whom Castro took prisoner after the failed invasion.
Hope you saw the December New York Times “The Boss” column featuring our very own Harlan Kent. From cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu, to Bain Consulting, Isotoner Gloves and now, since 2009, CEO of Yankee Candle, Harlan is “the brand guy.” He comments that they have more than 75 fragrances and introduce an average of 20 new fragrances a year. As he describes it: “Candles are evocative—they transport people to an earlier time.” Maybe Harlan can develop a fragrance evocative of Mid Mass for Jon and Brenda? Then again…maybe not!
All the best to all of you!
—Leslie A. Davis Dahl, 83 Pecksland Road, Greenwich, CT 06831; (203) 552-0070; dahlleslie@yahoo.com; John MacManus, 188 Ringwood Road, Rosemont, PA 19010; (610) 525-4541; slampong@aol.com
