Class Note 1989

Class of ’89s are making lots of waves in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine these days, which seems just about right to me. I’m hoping you caught the profiles in the May/June issue of Harmeet Dhillon, the new vice chair of the California Republican Party, and Chuck Wooster, Vermont farmer and writer. If you missed the articles, go dig up your magazine or find them at dartmouthalumnimagazine.com. Ellie Mahoney Loughlin and I were lucky enough to drop in at Chuck’s farm in early April for a delicious taste of the maple syrup that had just finished boiling away in the sugarhouse. 


Dan Parish and I had the chance to catch up with Geeta Anand, who traveled from her home in Mumbai for the Greenways weekend—the 40th anniversary of coeducation at Dartmouth. Our Pulitzer prize-winning classmate still works for The Wall Street Journal as a senior writer and has been based for the past five years in India, where she lives with her two teenage daughters and her husband, Greg Kroitzsh ’87, who recently opened a brewpub in Mumbai. Some of you may remember that Geeta’s book, The Cure, was turned into a Hollywood movie starring Harrison Ford.


Finally, I write this at the end of a difficult week in late April. Despite the riot of spring colors all around, it has been a week to mourn. Four people killed and more than 170 wounded in the horrific Boston Marathon bombings and its aftermath. Many of our classmates were locked in their homes during the manhunt for the bomber.


But the April 15 bombing also came just hours after news of the death of our beloved classmate, Jamie Kershaw. Here are some of the words used to describe Jamie on the 1989 Facebook page: humor, energy, warmth, intense brightness, a shining light, smart, funny, spreading love, a heartbreaking loss of a wonderful man.


I’ll leave you with this description from Alec Scott. “Jamie Kershaw was a small-town boy from upstate New York, an IBM brat, who set Dartmouth on fire. He was struggling to figure out how to be gay. He was friends with everyone, the crew gods, the protesting shanty dwellers, the Kappa Kappa Gamma girls, involved in everything. His day-by-day was utterly chock filled, and maybe he could squeeze you in for lunch next Tuesday. You’d see him all over campus walking backwards, leading tours. In the fraternity system, he struggled to find his place, eventually settling on a co-ed house. He was so busy that you had no idea how he got those great marks—Phi Beta Kappa. He performed ‘I Got You Babe’ at Collis, with Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis, the future ambassador to Hungary, as Sonny to his Cher. He was warm and sweet and complicated. The funniest person I’ve ever met. After Dartmouth he went to Stanford law, acing that also. Casque & Gauntlet, paddling the Connecticut to the sea, he loved to ‘Carol Merrill’ major sites—do that display thing that the Price is Right woman would do—and so there were great shots of him Carol Merrill-ing the Great Pyramids, while he was in the Middle East on an Arabic language study abroad. I just caught up with him in L.A.…still the funniest person I’ve ever met.”


A fuller obituary will appear on the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine website.


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