Jean and I are well settled into our continuing care retirement community (CCRC) and we like it a lot. Several ’51 classmates have written to describe similar downsizings and simplified lifestyles.


Howie and Nat Allen were trend-setters; they left their longtime Brookline, Massachusetts, home for condo living in Jamaica Plain in Boston 10 years ago. Richard and Caroline Bergman moved down the road to a CCRC in Bradenton, Florida, following some health setbacks. And Ted Hazen, retired from the faculty at Texas A&M University in College Station, is in the queue for a CCRC now under construction. Ted is a biochemist; he received advanced degrees from the University of New Hampshire and Harvard after graduating from Dartmouth. He and his wife, Anne, are active volunteers, she in a local hospice program and Ted in a very busy food pantry.


Bob and Joan Crossley fell in love with the mountains of Wyoming on a vacation drive 20 years ago. Says Bob: “We stopped for a cup of coffee in Pinedale, and before we left town we had purchased a lot with magnificent mountain views.” Pinedale’s population has doubled (to 2,000) in the years since but “the pace of life still resembles that of the 1950s.”


Bill and Trudy Merkle (Old Greenwich, Connecticut) describe a breathless travel schedule, visiting their three sons and three daughters plus friends from coast to coast. Teaching literacy classes in English to local immigrants is another source of pleasure and satisfaction.


Jim Culberson (Asheboro, North Carolina) has reluctantly hung up his skis but still golfs regularly and “crossed off one of the items on my bucket list as I went pheasant hunting in North Dakota.”


Henry Nachman represented our class and spoke at an “especially moving” memorial service for Aaron Rausen. Aaron, a pediatric oncologist, devoted his professional life to finding cures for childhood cancers. A number of speakers at the service were former patients who “are here because of Dr. Rausen.”


Sadly, I report the deaths of ’51s Peter Hill, Charles Hines and Dudley Page.


—Pete Henderson, 450 Davis St., Apt. 455, Evanston, IL 60201-4610; (847) 905-0635; phenderson82@yahoo.com