Class Note 1987
By the time you all are reading this, it will be less than a year until our 25th class reunion, scheduled for June 14-17, 2012. It won’t be the same if you aren’t there, so mark your calendars now and plan to attend.
Recently I was fortunate enough to catch up with two dear friends, and although it hasn’t been 25 years since I’ve seen them, it has been a while and it was eerie how little they’ve changed. I spent a winter weekend visiting Betsy Wall Rutherford, her husband, Ken ’86, and their kids Emily (17) and Andy (14) in Baltimore. Betsy is working at Johns Hopkins University Business School in development and is as organized, buoyant and energetic as she was in Hanover, only now she has more to juggle. Our class is in good hands with her on the reunion planning committee—only I know she will be hounding me to register up until the day we arrive in Hanover next June. I guess time passes but some things never change. During spring break I took my three children out to California for the rightly fabled Pacific Coast Highway road trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco. In addition to taking in amazing views, historic sites and miscellaneous hi-jinks adventures, I spent a couple of days with Evan Marquit, his wife, Laura, and their children Sadie (7) and Julian (5) in San Anselmo. All the mountain biking and back-country skiing that Evan does has preserved his joie de vivre.
From a point east John Schmeeckle writes“I needed a job quick when I finished my master’s degree two years ago, so here I am in Seoul teaching conversational English to university students and business professionals. Regarding the master’s degree (in history), I stumbled across the official 1776 congressional definition of ‘happiness,’ which is going to upset a lot of established scholars when the word gets around. Somebody posted my master’s thesis online at http://gradworks.umi.com/14/56/1456018.html; my next step is to get published or get into a Ph.D. program.”
Other classmates are making a stir, too. Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg ’90, documentary filmmakers, recently won the 2011 Career Award by the Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham, North Carolina. Despite the sobriquet, Stern and Sundberg are in the prime of their careers. After the release of their 1998 debut documentary, In My Corner, the filmmakers have generated an impressive, award-winning body of work during the last five years, starting with The Trials of Darryl Hunt (2006), The Devil Came on Horseback (2007), an exposé on genocide in Darfur told from the perspective of Brian Steidle, a former Marine and African Union monitor, and Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010). Their latest project, Burma Soldier, tells the improbable story of Myo Myint, who converted from a fighter in Burma’s junta to a pro-democracy activist and political prisoner.
—Melissa Wallshein Smith, 77 Benedict Hill Road, New Canaan, CT 06840; melissaj@optonline.net; Wendy Becker, 4 Essex Villas, London W8 7BN, United Kingdom, England, W8 5NA; wendy.becker. 87@alum.dartmouth.org
