Class Note 1948
Received a lovely note from Ellen Springstreen.She heard from Bob Eckerson that he had recently fallen and had to move to an assisted living facility. He is slowly on the mend and looking forward to our 75th reunion, as does Ellen, who enjoyed the 70th. Her granddaughter, Jess Menville ’16, is a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps and was recently home after a seven-month deployment. Ellen didn’t know Lou until his time as a student at New Brunswick Seminary, but understood his love of Dartmouth and commented on his activities there from letters she recently uncovered. Like many of us he came to Dartmouth in the summer of 1944. It was broiling, and he and his roommate, Bob Kirkpatrick, moved from room 302 to 114 at Wheeler at an increase of $10 a month because it was lower and cooler. Lou attended a lecture by Robert Frost and commented, “First half very interesting, but the second half I spent petting his Collie.” He sent the laundry home weekly and enjoyed the goodies that were always in the returned crate. He was drafted in January 1945, served in the Army in Germany, and returned to Dartmouth in the fall of 1946.
I got a call from Mort Thalhimer ’46 (graduated in 1948, Navy V5 flier), who said my recent comment on the Army shirt (explained below) reminded him of a recent visit he got from a woman who had a Navy summer jacket with his name on the collar that she wanted to keep as memorabilia. To make it more complete he found a set of shoulder boards and wings for her. As for my Army shirt tale: Army always kept its squash courts very hot because this made for longer, exhausting rallies. In our match at Dartmouth, the unheated courts were well below freezing. If you dropped a ball from your waist it wouldn’t bounce above your ankle. I kept the points short, made lots of finishing shots, and the match was over before my opponent or the ball warmed up. Following Army-Navy custom, he offered me his shirt and said it was the first match he had lost. I declined the shirt and observed with only a little poetic license that it was the first I’d won.
—Dave Kurr, 4281 Indian Field Road, Clinton, NY 13323; (781) 801-6716; djkurr@verizon.net
