Class Note 1990

The confluence of a recent trip to Europe, several conference calls with Spanish work colleagues and some handwringing over local language instruction here in Rockport, Massachusetts, made me wonder if any of you were as positively affected (!) by your LSA/FSP experiences as I was. It also returned me to that eternal question: What really happened on the infamous 1988 winter-term Spanish LSA to Mexico? First the news: 


Tom Parker ties the knot with Beatriz Tickett! The ceremony was held on November 7, 2010. In attendance: Nick Stanham, Lance Geller, John “Mobus” Seelert, Mark Johnson, Brent Frei ’88, Jim Wilhelm, Jim Mills ’89. Tom reports a good time was had by all. 


Dave Lust and his wife, Becky Pels Lust, are “living the dream” in Rapid City, South Dakota. They have four children—Nicholas (10), Isabelle (8), Benjamin (6) and Samuel (4). Dave is a partner in the largest law firm in Rapid City (20 attorneys) and also serves in the state house of representatives, where the house Republicans elected him majority leader last fall. He is home each weekend during session to catch up on work and family matters. Sometimes the kids will join him at the state house to experience the “sausage-making process.” Eight-year-old Isabelle often gets to have a “tea” with the first lady.


Dave met his future bride, Becky, on the 1988 Spanish LSA to Mexico. And so, with three different reports from the scene—from Dave, James Edgar and Bill Wilson—the story emerges. Living in high-walled suburban enclaves in Morelia, Mexico; traveling on weekends to see migrating monarch butterflies; gathering in the cool of the evening for drinks with little umbrellas; our protagonists (not our reporters!) somehow ran afoul of a corrupt group of Mexican federales. An attempted entrapment, a threatened prison sentence and an offer of “a better way of dealing with the problem” ended with a roughed-up, bruised professor and a mad dash for the border leaving behind a set of disappointed host families (how I wish there was space for photos!). 


I leave you with an ode by Mike Lindgren, a participant in the 1988-89 English FSP at University College London, to the LSA/FSP experience: “I was dismayed to hear some years back that this (London) program, once a highly competed-for jewel of the Dartmouth English department’s crown, is no more, because it was a superior experience in every way. A two-term exchange, the beauty of the program was that it unceremoniously dropped 12 of us into the University of London system with almost no outside orientation or interference, scattering us across various north London dorms and then essentially leaving us to our own devices. What ensued for this particular hard-drinking lover of literature and budding anglophile was possibly the most vivid, wonderful and occasionally harrowing year of his life.


“As with most of my Dartmouth-oriented experiences, it is difficult to qualify exactly how they affected my life today, other than to say that my year in England was foundational in some indefinable way to the process of becoming the man I am today, for better or worse. The memories—spending a weekend at the home of one of my new friends in rural Wales, reading Chaucer in the library of the British Museum, playing ‘football’ in Regent’s Park—remain, as do the friendships; my former dormmate, a raucous Portsmouth English lad of 17 when I met him, is traveling to New York City in one month’s time, at which time we will once again renew our friendship, now entering its third decade.”


—Walter Palmer, 87 South St., Rockport, MA 01966; palmerwalter@mac.com; Rob Crawford, 27 Roberts Road, Wellesley, MA 02481; robertlcrawford @yahoo.com