Planning for our 60th and final June reunion, now just 18 months away, has taken a significant leap forward with the agreement of Alden Fiertz to serveas chairman of the event. His designation, which occurred at a meeting of class officers held in Hanover in early October in conjunction with a mini-reunion-type gathering for the Yale-Dartmouth football weekend, was accompanied by the acceptance by class treasurer Dan Van Dorn of the additional responsibilities of reunion treasurer. Further plans will be reported here as they develop.


I had the pleasant experience of attending Bob Ringstad’s and Bart Lombardi’s annual fall luncheon for New York City area classmates. Bill Montgomery was there, and I am sure that a full report with photographs will appear or may already have appeared in the class newsletter. I sat next to Alan Davis, in town from Port Chester, New York, who told me there, and expanded in subsequent telephone conversations, that he was in the process of completing and readying for possible publication a biography of Gen. John Stark, without doubt New Hampshire’s most preeminent Revolutionary War hero. The project, Al said, had been 16 years in its development.


Al’s interest in Gen. Stark actually goes back to college days when Al lived with his family in a house built on what had been Stark’s farm in Manchester, New Hampshire, in Stark’s time Derryfield, from where the general had led New Hampshire militiamen into battle at Bunker Hill, Trenton and, most gloriously, Bennington and Saratoga. But it was only in the early 1990s after military service, Harvard Law School and a long career as a corporate lawyer that Al found time to undertake the necessary research, seeking out archival materials at, among other places, the New Hampshire, New York and Bennington historical societies, as well as the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth. The result is a 400-page manuscript drawn in large measure from contemporary sources that, when published, will bring a renewed and well-deserved recognition to one of our lesser-known founding fathers.


A happy and healthful 2011 to all.

—Dave Drexler, 100 Waters Edge Dr., Jupiter, FL 33477; (561) 747-3874; dave@drexler.com