CLASS NOTES
Betty Vermey ’54 and Hannah Kelly Houpt at Bryn Mawr
Ed Sundt ’54 and Ann Newman Sundt ’54
general’s farewell address at West Point in 1961 that I inserted in my “Ode to the Hill(s)” without proper attribution and published in my last column in NMH Magazine. I thought I might sneak them in, but Dave is too smart for me. General, I do apologize! • Last January Stan Peck and his wife, Nancy, stopped by our rental on Hilton Head Island, S.C., on their way to their winter retreat on Long Boat Key, Fla. We had a nice visit and talked about our old friends at NMH. Nancy’s parents once had a home on the beach here. Stan frequently came to Bay Head in the early 1960s as a weekend escape when he was working on Wall Street. • Over the winter months when I am looking after my Hilton Head Island home, I frequently see Susie Craig Hastings. Susie rents a place in a nearby “plantation,” and she and my wife, Betty, do lots of things together. Susie lives in Norwich, Vt., near her son. Ed Snyder, Susie’s old boyfriend at NMH, will be coming east this summer to sell his house in Pittsfield, Mass., and they hope to meet and catch up. Ed lives in Arizona and still conducts his executive search business. • Jay Crawford and his wife, Joan, are traveling this spring through the Balkan Peninsula and the Adriatic Sea. They will be staying with us at our little cottage by the sea here, and we look forward to having lunch or dinner with Jay and Joan at the Bay Head Yacht Club. Jay was born in Virginia and has traveled all over the world as a geologist for the Sun Oil Co. He finally retired to his old college town of Lexington, Va. I teased Jay that this year marks the 150th anniversary of Lee’s surrender to Grant, as Jay and Joan are true Southerners at heart. Jay had a bottle of Southern Comfort well hidden in his room at Hayden Hall his senior year that was never found, even though it was thoroughly searched by Fred “The Fox” McVeigh, resident dorm head. • Dave Jansky, our ace fundraiser, spoke with John Anderson’s wife and learned that John was in the hospital. We wish John a speedy recovery. John, from Medford, Mass., was a one-year student at Mt. Hermon. He played football, basketball, and golf, and went on to Bowdoin College and med school. He practiced as a public health physician in Brunswick, Maine, and then retired to his home on beautiful Casco Bay in
Maine. • I have had several conversations with Bill Young about trying to help him and his West Coast business partner break into the New Jersey environmental market for Bill’s unique product. Bill is in the foam rubber business but produces a niche product called a Bilge Shark. It is a small piece of foam rubber cut in the shape of a shark that is infused with microbes that automatically consume oil and grease in the bilges of boats. I tried it in my own boat and it works like a charm. I have tried to line him up with people concerned with preserving Barnegat Bay here in New Jersey. • Fred Rice reports that he is still trying to sell his beautiful trawler yacht stored in a boatyard on the Hudson River near Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Fred, however, lives in Lyman, Maine. He has had a long and interesting association with boats of all sorts and many adventures. We decided to swap “sea stories”—he sent me one of his and I sent him one of mine, both of us having a good chuckle. • Ralph Perry has been doing some exotic traveling, as usual. Ralph spent 11 days in China and toured the Great Wall, among other places. Then he went to Bhutan, which is near Tibet and where they have a Gross National Happiness Index. He will be coming east in July with his granddaughter. Ralph says that he likes getting together with Phil McKean frequently as they both attend the same Episcopal church. • I’ve extended an invitation to Ed Sundt and Ann Newman Sundt to join us for a few days at our Hilton Head Island rental to scope out the place for a “Northfield Girls’ Getaway” week sometime in the fall. I have offered the place at no cost to Ann and Toni Browning Smiley, Toni diStefano Norton, Marcia Samuel, and Betty Vermey. Hilton Head Island is absolutely beautiful in the fall, as the weather is mild and there are no crowds of vacationers. • I was in Philadelphia on business for the day in spring and called Betty Vermey, who lives in Bryn Mawr, Penn., to meet for a cup of coffee. Betty cares full time for her older sister and couldn’t break away on short notice, but she took a rain check. The previous year she had given my granddaughter and me a private tour of Bryn Mawr College, where Betty was once director of admissions. In the fall of 1953 I had asked Betty to a social
function at Mt. Hermon, and I still have her acceptance letter—the only surviving letter I have from a Northfield girl. • On my way to NMH for the D.L. Moody Society luncheon and following Sacred Concert in May, I thought of calling Audrey Higgins as I passed East Longmeadow, Mass., to see if she would like a ride up to NMH, but the traffic was bad and the thought slipped my mind. When I arrived I met up with Joe Ribeiro, who had driven up from his home in Jefferson, Mass., and Bob Ashcraft ’53, who flew up from his home in Walhalla, S.C. The luncheon was delicious and the concert was beautiful. • I was saddened to learn that Bob Pyper ’55 passed away. Bob was a great runner on our varsity cross-country team in the fall of 1953, as well as on the track team in the spring of 1954. Bob grew up at Mt. Hermon as he was the son of Gordon Pyper, head of the science department and director of admissions. Bob worked in the administration department of the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. We extend our sympathies to his family. • I was further saddened to learn of the passing of Nancy Holton Calhoun ’53. Nancy was the twin sister of Bob Holton ’53, and late in the spring of 1953 she invited me as a blind date to take her to the Chateau Dance. She was the first Northfield girl with whom I had ever gone to any social function. She had a bubbly personality and we both had a great time. I did not see her again until her 40th reunion, when I attended as an observer. I asked her if she remembered me—she did and we had a nice, long conversation. She had a career as a social worker in Syracuse, N.Y. • We received a nice “thank you” letter from the current recipient of our McVeigh Scholarship Fund—Adrian, class of ’18. Though school is challenging, Adrian loves NMH, and is very involved in his robotics class and building an electric guitar from Legos! And thank you all so very much for your generous contributions to the McVeigh Scholarship Fund—it now totals almost $190,000. Let’s try to make it $200,000 by our 65th reunion. Stay healthy, eat wisely, get plenty of exercise, and we’ll meet again in June 2019 for our 65th. Save the date!
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Northfield and Mount Hermon Lisa Tuttle Edge etedge@aol.com • Don Freeman d.freeman4@verizon.net From Lisa Tuttle Edge—Thanks to Dini Woods and Svein Arber, reunion was
delightful; attended by 19 women and 20 men, plus some spouses, and the Alumni Hall food was worthy of the best restaurant. Our class scholarship recipient, Tymir (class of ’16), stopped by MacKinnon Cottage to say thank you. He is a very charming young man from the Bronx who plans to become an aeronautical engineer. From his letter to the class: “[NMH] has helped me to be at peace with myself and allowed me to pursue my dreams.
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