Class Note 1988

Happy 2016! Nearly 79 percent of our classmates will turn 50 this year. (For you number crunchers, roughly 16 percent of our class celebrated a 50th birthday in 2015 or earlier, another 5 percent will turn 50 in 2017 and two will remain in their 40s until 2018!) Anyway, please mark your calendars now: Plans are afoot for a joint celebration in Hanover during Homecoming 2016 (October 28-30) and, if you cannot make it to campus, local celebrations will be held that weekend in other locations. We would love to see as many classmates as possible at one of these celebrations.

Here is how a few classmates plan to mark the milestone: The one thing that Julia Mairs Weisbecker is not planning to do in 2016 is another Ironman—she’s completed four of them in the last five years. She did enter the lottery to get into Escape from Alcatraz, however. “I’m cycling a lot—did my first gravel race. Fifty miles; loved it! My husband has been gone for three years and it finally feels like I’m getting my sense of self back. Work is good—I still spend a lot of my days teaching balance classes to older adults and working with personal trainers who teach classes to seniors.”

Mike Silberling plans to spend his 50th climbing Pico de Orizaba, the highest mountain in Mexico and the third highest in North America. “I climbed Kilimanjaro for my 40th so have a tradition of being on top of the hill as I go further over the hill.” Mike lived in London for seven years, obtaining U.K. citizenship while there and witnessing the Arab Spring firsthand on business trips to Cairo, Egypt, and Beirut, Lebanon. Mike relocated in 2014 to Nevada, where he is CEO of Affinity Gaming, which owns 11 casinos in Nevada, Colorado, Missouri and Iowa. He divides his time between Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe. “I am happily retired from rugby (and marathons) after a few knee surgeries but I am still as active as possible with a mix of outdoor hobbies that I am not very good at, including tennis, kite-boarding, surfing, skiing, kayaking, paddle-boarding, mountain biking and golf.” Mike’s son, Phineas (16), has stated a preference for California and sunny weather for college, but his daughter, Alice (14), has not yet declared a preference. “I saw Tom Molnar and John Scott quite a bit during my time in London and stay in touch with former roommates Brett McDonald and Victor Limongelli regularly.”

Kip Soteres, who does not plan to make a fuss over his 50th birthday, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Desiree (a singer and actress in opera and musical theater), and their daughter, Zoe (13). After Dartmouth Kip obtained an M.F.A. (poetry) and then spent seven years teaching and writing textbooks for English as a foreign language. He then spent 15 to 20 years working in employee communications and change management in industries such as high tech, banking, hospitals and health insurance. More recently, Kip became an independent consultant in this area. Kip has also remained creatively active; he published a novel called Confusing Words in 2003 and has a few more manuscripts stashed away. More recently, he wrote the libretto for an opera called Eve Apart, a retelling of the Adam and Eve story that was performed in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Pittsburgh, and he is working on several other librettos. Kip speaks to classmates Tucker Durmer and Tom Chiller a few times a year and Lance High and Matthew Biberman as well.

Please let me know how you marked, or plan to mark, your 50th.

—Jere Mancini, 34 Wearimus Road, HoHoKus, NJ 07423; d88correspondent@gmail.com