We start with some back-to-the-necessary, with one of our class’s few farmers. Walter Jeffries has expanded his family’s Topsham, Vermont, farm into a premiere producer of naturally pastured pigs. His Sugar Mountain Farm is in its 10th year as a naturally raised and no-weird-stuff farm. Walter, wife Holly and children Will, Ben and Hope are building an on-farm butcher shop with natural cooling systems. Backwoods Home magazine listed Walter as one of the “Ten Real Inspirations” for 2009 for his work to protect traditional rights to farm, fighting against the National Animal Identification System. He is one our class’ most prolific writers. His http://sugarmtnfarm.com blog covers goose eggs, boar and basting poultry, to name a few nature and nutrition topics. Walter writes a regular column, “A Day In The Life” for Livin’ The Vermont Way magazine, Mother Earth News, The Valley News, Burlington Free Press and other publications. Sugar Mountain appears in the new book Primal Cuts: Cooking with America’s Best Butchers.
More publishing: Heid E. Erdrich’s most recent book is Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems. Her cookbook, Original Local: Indigenous Foods, Stories and Recipes from the Upper Midwest, is due out at the end of 2013 from the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Heid directs Wiigwaas Press, an Ojibwe language publisher, and the Birchbark House Fund for endangered languages. She reports: “Mabelle Drake Houston made frybread for me and my sisters and all our kids last year, and Ray Burns is president of Lac du Orielle Tribal and Community College on his home reservation in Wisconsin.”
Mary Finegan writes, “My oldest graduated from Boston University and will be starting a six-month postgraduate film and television program in Los Angeles. This leaves me free to ski, hike and travel on my three-day weekends and my vacation weeks! Happy to host guests who want to join me or to meet ’86ers in their neck of the woods.”
Marion Halliday is getting back into tennis “happily back down to a 4.0 rating; it’s fun to have more Ws than Ls again.” Her eldest son, Rob, is completing freshman year at Tufts, majoring in mathematics; younger son Sam will be heading to Wake Forest in the fall on a running scholarship.
Jeffrey “Jones” Morrison writes: “I completed my 25th year as a history teacher at Greens Farms Academy [GFA] in Westport, Connecticut. My son Soren (9) and daughter Byrn (12) attend the school. My wife, Kate, is dean of students at GFA. We live in Weston, Connecticut. I am pleased to note that GFA has sent, in recent years, a number of very talented students to Dartmouth.”
Peter Gibson writes that he, Greg Dow, Scott Rabschnuk, Liz Fries, Sarah Page, Teddy Conway, Caroline Diamond, Jessica Healy all attended an April dinner in honor of Sarah’s dad, Richard Page ’54.
Mark Proctor finished Harvard’s eight-month program in leadership development in preparation for being president of the Physician’s Organization at Boston Children’s Hospital. Mark is vice chairman of neurosurgery there. Son Max went to the finals of the state tennis tournament and heads to Hamilton’s class of 2017. Son Kenny is an avid rower for Community Rowing on Boston’s Charles River; his boat took bronze at the North East Junior Championships.
Mark is one of 11 profiled crew members in coach Whit Mitchell’s book, Working In Sync. All 11 were members of the freshman heavyweight crew boat, getting together soon after we all arrived in fall 1982 and going on to great success on the water. Others are Charlie Peterson, Dan Kollmorgen, Garth Mark, Hans Stander, Malcolm McIvor, Mike Rich, Sam Hartwell, Sam Kinney, Scott Sandell and Wolf-Dietrich Weber.
—Mark Greenstein, 107 Fenn Road, Newington, CT 06111; msg@ivybound.net; Davida Dinerman, 12 Kings Row, Ashland, MA 01721; davida@ dinerman.com
