A letter arrived in the mail from Rob Christie, who wrote from home on Mount Prospect near Lancaster, New Hampshire. Rob’s letter recounted meeting David Kruschwitz at the Lobster Trap restaurant in North Conway, New Hampshire, last September for a fine lobster roll lunch. Dave, up from Limerick, Maine, had just completed a nine-mile loop up North Moat Mountain in nearby Bartlett, New Hampshire. Rob noted that for his part he had just finished a siesta but did share with Dave a model he had built of a cruck-frame addition planned for his front porch. Dave produced an enormous pumpkin and a sack of beautiful tomatoes from his garden. Rob also reported that he attended a high school reunion at Phillips Academy last June with Andy Wexler. Rob claims to have engineered Andy’s election to the presidency of their class, which involves cajoling their classmates to donate money to the school. Andy has had a wonderful career as a pediatric plastic surgeon and has built an international reputation for his facial reconstruction work with Operation Smile.

Mark Haley wrote from Tacoma, Washington, that the death of John Rassias has been much on his mind. Mark was a French major who was privileged to take four courses from Professor Rassias, Dartmouth’s pedagogical giant and a huge influence on Mark. Mark credits Professor Rassias for life lessons that have remained vibrant since college, inspiring an insatiable curiosity about people and cultures around the world that has taken Mark to more than 60 countries and prompted extended stays in Dax, France, during the past decades. Mark noted that the Internet, his MacBook and Skype now allow him to work from anywhere. Mark and his wife, Nancy (Mount Holyoke ’75), spent three months of 2013 in Dax and September 2015 in Italy. Mark and Nancy met when Mark attended business school at Stanford University and Nancy was working as a teaching assistant after completing her master’s in documentary film. Mark now runs a food export company he founded that he describes as large enough to be fun and volatile enough to be challenging. The company specializes in bulk snack and confectionery products. He recently returned from a four-week business trip to nine markets in Asia. Outside of work Mark is writing a study that explores the disappearance of an entire way of life in post-war France that he has witnessed since the late 1970s. For recreation he enjoys biking, skiing and sailing. Mark says he hopes that we all read the marvelous Class Notes from Ed Gerson ’35 before he passed last fall. Mark found Ed’s columns inspiring, maybe because Mark’s father was a member of the class of 1935, maybe because Ed’s columns led the class notes section of Dartmouth Alumni Magazine and maybe because the three remaining classmates were still in touch and sharing news, a nice goal for all of us. I second that.

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—Rick Sample, Retreat Farm, 1137 Manakin Road, Manakin Sabot, VA 23103; samplejr@msn.com