Got an update this month from Jay Torian, which was a nice surprise. He described himself thusly and wasn’t sure if I would remember him: “I used to have long hair and played guitar a lot back in the Hanover days.” Of course I remembered him, it was Dartmouth, after all—how many people did that describe?! He wrote me a nice, long update, so I’m going to sit back and let him take the column reins for a few paragraphs.


“I’m living in Newton, Massachusetts, and married to a Dukie who’s a doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. We’re expecting our first child at the end of March. I’m associate director of web development at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI); we manage the institute’s websites, web marketing and social media channels. Prior to that I had a run as a net software developer for a handful of tech startup companies around Route 128, most notably VistaPrint.com. We had a good IPO but I was always interested in mission-based work, so I moved over to DFCI. Dana-Farber is a great company to work for; I’ve been there eight years.


“Lastly and maybe most interestingly, my wife’s grandfather, Irving Sager ’35, is 100 years old. He’s literally one of the last three members of the Dartmouth class of ’35 and is an amazing guy. He’s truly a great American and a fantastically charming person. He worked on secret radar technology at MIT during WW II and ran a successful business in N.Y.C. for many years. He’s told me stories about Dartmouth in the 1930s—things such as tying a rope and skiing behind cars and other things. He had his 100th birthday in December and we’re having a baby soon—so you start thinking about the full circle of your life.


“And to anyone who may remember me as a guitar player, I played with a few bands around Cambridge and Boston for 10 to 12 years after school. I played places like TT’s, Middle East, MamaKin and Lizard Lounge, recorded at some studios in the area and had a couple songs played on local radio at 1 a.m. It was fun, but eventually less so over time. I still love my guitar collection though!”


Thanks so much, Jay. And for anyone who saw it, Irving Sager and the two other remaining class of ’35 alums were also featured earlier this year in a really interesting piece in The Wall Street Journal.


Orit Halpern co-curated a show earlier this year at Parsons School of Design titled “Furnishing the Cloud.” The show examined how we have historically imagined the architectures of our common stock of knowledge—the universal library, the endless bookshelf, the collective brain—and proposed new infrastructures for storing, accessing and processing “the cloud.” Orit also published a related book, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945, in January with the Duke University Press. Congrats!


I also am happy to welcome Gib Dunham and family to my newly adopted hometown of Irvington, New York. He tells me he also recently saw Jeff Yasuda and Peter Moore on a trip to the West Coast. 


And I heard that Jess Andre and family have recently relocated from Los Angeles to Seattle. She’s reachable on Facebook if anyone in the Pacific Northwest wants to get back in touch.


—Suzie Fromer, 76 Dogwood Lane, Irvington, NY 10533; suziefromer@gmail.com