Class Note 1974

Congratulations and heartfelt thanks to the 451 classmates who contributed to the 2015-16 Dartmouth College Fund, achieving an enviable 60.5-percent participation rate and setting a new non-reunion year-out record for our class. Under the capable and persistent leadership of Peter DeNatale, Len Smith and other dedicated class agents, each classmate’s gift made an impact.

Our results haven’t always been so strong. Bruce Miller became a class agent in 2003 and then assumed the responsibilities of participation chair for our class in 2006. He led our class that year to the largest single-year participation rate increase in the history of the Dartmouth College Fund, pushing us up from 50 percent to 70 percent. Under his leadership our class posted three consecutive year-out records from 2007 through 2009. The College quickly recognized Bruce’s talents, honoring him three times with the Chairman’s Citation, drafting him into service on the Dartmouth College Fund committee in 2008 and inducting him into the Stephen F. Mandel ’52 Society in 2009. Bruce became vice chairman of the Dartmouth College Fund committee in 2011 and then became chairman in 2012. During the first three years of Bruce’s tenure as chairman, the fund achieved its fourth, fifth and sixth consecutive dollar records, raising the second-highest dollar amount of any college in the country. After eight years of superbly productive service as member and chair of the committee, Bruce recently passed the baton to Catherine Craighead Briggs ’88, the new chair of the Dartmouth College Fund committee. In addition to Bruce’s work for the College, he has also been an active fundraiser for Stanford, where he earned his M.B.A. after Dartmouth. He has served on Stanford’s Business School fund council since 2010 and was named a Stanford associate in 2012. Bruce met his wife, Janice, while both of them were graduate students at Stanford. Janice was initially a math teacher but then moved into a career as a systems architect with the Los Angeles Times. She now tutors high school students in math. Bruce started out in the advertising business on the client side, working in brand management at Procter & Gamble, but he spent most of his career at advertising agencies. He founded an advertising agency, Suissa Miller, with a partner, which they later sold and merged with a sister agency owned by their holding company. Bruce is now retired and lives in Sherman Oaks, California, with Janice. They have two daughters. Younger daughter Allison ’10 is in her second year at Wharton pursuing her M.B.A. after working this past summer at IBM on Watson, the artificial intelligence initiative. Older daughter Lindsay (Vanderbilt ’06) earned her M.B.A. from Wharton and currently works in marketing for Amazon in Seattle, where her husband is a gastroenterologist.

Be safe and send news.

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