Class Note 1988. The sixth annual Omondi Obura ’88 Peak Bag challenge for suicide prevention set new records October 5. Some 1,000 students, alumni, and others from 14 countries, 24 states, and seven continents joined in “bagging peaks”—shorthand for scaling hills. The ’88 men’s lightweight rowing team launched Peak Bag to honor Omondi, who died by suicide in 1989, and the $80,000 raised this year will support Campus Connect, Dartmouth’s suicide prevention training program. Visit our class Facebook page for more, with photos, including a radiant Michelle Stowe,who observed Peak Bag by getting married. Special thanks to Pam Crandall and Bruce Sacerdote ’90, who helped double student participation. Several weeks later, Dartmouth and the UN Development Programme cohosted a high-level symposium on youth well-being that highlighted Peak Bag.
From Seattle, Brent Frei just sent the oldest of his five children to Dartmouth. Sophia ’29 has twin sisters in 11th grade—“I think everybody should have twins. They’re marvelous,” Brent says—and two younger brothers. Brent was just inducted into the Dartmouth Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame. A cofounder of Smartsheet, Brent has launched four companies: He took Onyx Software and Smartsheet from inception to IPO and his HarvestWest helps investors own Pacific Northwest farmland as an alternative asset class. “My approach has been to identify a hard problem, then find a group of smart people from Dartmouth to solve it,” he says. At one point, Onyx counted 26 Dartmouth alumni on its payroll.
Brent came to Dartmouth from Grangeville, Idaho, population 3,000. He laughs recalling how he left a steady job at Motorola decades ago to take a $9-an-hour internship at Microsoft. There, he “worked all day and taught myself to code at night.” He thought up his latest project while clearing farmland by hand with his then-80-year-old father. Couldn’t he invent something that would leverage technology to do that heavy lifting? So, he founded TerraClear Inc., which uses smartphones, drones, and robotics to map and clear rocks from farmland: “Imagine a Roomba for rock-picking.” TerraClear serviced 200,000 acres last year, primarily in the Midwest, where corn and soy farms are concentrated and several thousand dollars invested in clearance is saving farmers tens of thousands yearly in damage to planters and combines.
In Hanover, Jack Steinberg, Jevin Eagle,Jani Rausch, Rachel Dratch, Saad Iqbal, John Hommeyer, and Larissa Roesch joined Susan Wright for the Hopkins Center reopening—after a two-year, $123.8-million expansion. Chris Ludwig and Joe Jackson, meanwhile, completed a half-marathon on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Chris and his wife, Iesa Figueroa, split their time between Newton and Falmouth, Massachusetts, having launched Max, 24, and Phoebe, 21. Chris has retired from consulting and now mentors young people, runs, and just joyfully resumed piano lessons after a 40-year hiatus.
Your ’88 scribes assumed their roles despite warnings we would find ourselves begging for updates, then trying to dragoon, browbeat, or press-gang freshman pals into dishing about pets and progeny. Those nay-saying Debbie Downers clearly knew little of you overachievers, whose accomplishments and adventures vastly exceed our allotted space here. We’ll keep sharing highlights, with expanded newsletter content to follow. Please keep writing, and if you get a cold call from one of us (probably the jobless one) looking to interview you, please answer.
—Sarah Jackson-Han, 6213 Winnebago Road, Bethesda, MD 20816; smjhan2@gmail.com;Bill Bundy, 442 Cedar Lane, New Canaan, CT 06840; bill.bundy@mac.com