Spring is around the corner, but this column was written in the middle of an old-fashioned New England snowstorm, on the cusp of a new year, as giant flakes fell outside my lakeside window in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts. I opened Yankee magazine to see a picture of a wintry Occom Pond, a reminder of seasons past. Eric Korenman, a radiologist at the nearby Berkshire Medical Center and still an avid photographer, wrote that his son’s ski practice was cancelled because of the heavy snow. He and his family have resided in Massachusetts since 2000.


One of the great pleasures of this job is hearing from classmates around the globe, especially after an absence of many years. Thokozani Xaba writes from Durban, South Africa, where he is the dean of the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Built Environment and Development Studies. He is married with five children, including a 22-year-old daughter who recently completed her medical degree and wants to be a marine biologist. Thokozani and his wife, who is a teacher, also have four sons, ranging from ages 6 to 14. He visits the United States about once a year for American Sociological Association Conference or the African Studies Association Conference, and writes, “Believe it or not, I have become a bureaucrat. I enjoy my visits to the United States because they are one of the few reminders and places where I can still pretend to be an academic.”


Now, onto part two of the David Irwin update. He reports that last spring he drove up to the Wautoma, Wisconsin, farm of Rob Albright for a day of turkey hunting. “For three hours on a Sunday morning,” he writes, “we sat in our tent under a 40-degree rain, watching several toms strut around, 30 to 50 yards out of range.” Rob reports much better luck on their pheasant hunting expedition in the fall. Rob lives in Edina, Minnesota, and works at Alternative Strategy Advisors, the investment firm that he started a few years ago with Randy Jacobus ’88. Rob and Carolyn have a son and a daughter. Dave also caught up with Peter Lurie in New York and reports that Peter has been working in strategic partnerships at American Express.


Ted Chung recounted to Paul Mahoney not too long ago, that he ran into Brooks Entwistle in the customs line at the New Delhi airport last summer. Brooks was headed back to Singapore and Ted back to Chicago. Ted reports that Brooks is the “head honcho” (aka chairman) of Goldman Sachs Southeast Asia, after being the chairman in India. Every summer Brooks and his wife and children fly to Canada from the Far East to spend time at a summer place around Toronto.


Zach Levine, otherwise known as your secretary’s spouse, has a new position as the chair of neurosurgery at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland. He specializes in cranial-based surgery and surgery for movement disorders, including Parkinson’s. He recently had the chance to catch up with his old fraternity brother John Shaw and John’s wife, Elizabeth, at their lovely house during a trip to San Francisco. A Chicago neurosurgery meeting also allowed him to cross paths with his freshman-year roommate Chris Ames, a neurosurgeon and the head of spinal deformity and spine tumor surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. Chris did his residency at the University of California, San Diego, followed by a fellowship at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona, before he settled in San Francisco. Chris is married with three children—Pearson, Sebastian and Scarlett—and has taken up photography in his spare time.


Finally, congratulations to Scott McElhaney, who has been elected president-elect of the Dallas Bar Association.


—Jennifer Avellino, 5912 Aberdeen Road, Bethesda, MD 20817; javellino@mac.com