roommate at Yale, along with Chuck Bates and Brent Goodsell. Thom was already laboring with only one lung after surgery and therapy for cancer. He passed away a few months later. Don spoke with Thom often in his final days, and he constantly told Don what a special event our reunion was for him. Although he came to the campus knowing only Brent, Chuck, and Don, within hours of his arrival he felt as if he had also spent four years on the hill. “Such is the legacy of NMH. We all reach out and serve and love.” Thom’s one year at Andover as a postgraduate had been a living hell. He told Don frequently that Mt. Hermon was a very special place, a kind of heaven. D.L. Moody would have been proud of our class, as it adopted Thom and brought him into our family. Brent Goodsell also shared memories of Mt. Hermon with Thom, and wrote an extraordinary tribute to him in the Yale Alumni Magazine (from the Sept/Oct 2014 issue): “Thom was all about planning and organization—which I am sure made him an excellent attorney. A date at our Yale dorm was like a military campaign. Roommates were, of course, evicted. The lighting was checked and double-checked; how many candles and where should they be placed; what offending articles needed to be put out of sight. The most important thing was the playlist. In those days that meant stacking the records on the player—always in what he thought were progressively more romantic tunes...We never knew how dates worked out, but Thom was invariably infuriated.” Don was very impressed with Brent’s beautiful writing. “I bet he learned how to do such work at Mt. Hermon.” Don is working on a new film that will be ready by next reunion. He still invests in U.S. real estate with some Chinese partners, with whom he has been trying for some time to buy the Northfield campus with the hope of someday opening a new international school there. D. Lloyd Jones was continuously in the hospital circuit (150 days) since February 2014 to heal a pressure sore that had tunneled and caused osteomyelitis in his right hip. By last May, with no medical success in Florida, he and his wife Anne went to Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston. After surgery to remove his right hip ball and several inches of bone, Lloyd was admitted to Spaulding Rehab in Cambridge, where he stayed until early July. The next stage of recovery was three months at home in Maine being able to sit up only one hour a day. At the time of this writing, he was hoping to get the OK from his doctor to travel to his Florida home in mid-January 2015 to enjoy warm weather, friends, and neighbors. Lloyd is especially looking forward to getting back to the bridge table and even possibly entering some fishing tournaments. Ricker Winsor loves living and working in Indonesia. He and his wife, Jovita, live a local life that is rich in many ways. Ricker’s exciting new connection with Novica, in association with National Geographic, is selling his paintings through their global site: novica.com. He and Jovita also have an export business of handmade items from Bali and Java. Ricker continues to paint and write as well as organize his large photo archive. I had a wonderful trip to Germany, Austria, and northern Italy this past summer (2014). Highlights 64 I NMH Magazine
were finally seeing Neuschwanstein Castle, spending a week on Lake Garda in Riva, viewing Giotto’s famous cycle of frescoes on Mary and Jesus in the Arena Chapel in Padua, hiking in the Bavarian Alps by Hintersee near Ramsau, and hearing a magnificent organ recital in the restored Frauenkirche in Dresden. I am deeply saddened to report the sudden death of John Peter Van Hazinga, 68, while hiking in the Adirondack Mts. on 10/11/14. During his college days, Van worked on a research team that discovered ancient biological life in Mould Bay, Canada. He graduated with honors in geology from Dartmouth College in 1967 and enlisted in the US Coast Guard, serving as an officer during the Vietnam conflict. Following the war, he worked as a contractor and builder in Colorado, Texas, New York, Massachusetts, California, and New Hampshire. In recent years Van lived in Hillsborough Upper Village in New Hampshire, where he was an organic gardener, woodworker, poet, and lover of farming and wilderness. I had the privilege of visiting him on numerous occasions over the years when I would be back in New Hampshire on summer holidays, and can attest to his incredible organic fruits and vegetables. He also shared many of his poems. He was a quiet, gentle, philosophical soul. Formerly married, he leaves three children and six grandchildren. He is also survived by his sister, Cynthia Van Hazinga ’61.
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ROBERT EASTMAN PO Box 218 Shaftsbury VT 05262-0218 rheastman4@comcast.net
PAMELA STREET WALTON PO Box 33 Spofford NH 03462-0033 pawalton@myfairpoint.net
From Pam—I do remember our fabulous 50th reunion, but where have the past six months gone? On Sunday the weekly clock is wound…and before you know it, it needs to be wound again. Sound familiar? Life passes at warp speed. Maybe your memories of July–December will return as you read what others experienced/enjoyed in 2014. We’re relocating/downsizing our residences, replacing worn-out body parts, celebrating the birth of grandchildren, traveling far and wide, volunteering for organizations/helping friends in need, and generally living life to the fullest. Since class notes are due twice per year and well before their publication, as I compile this column, Christmas Vespers has just been held on the NMH campus, but when you read this column, the class of ’65 will be about to celebrate their 50th! Elizabeth Peterson Ghaffari is sorry to have missed our 50th and hoped everyone had a good time. She is currently marketing her third book, Tapping the Wisdom That Surrounds You: Mentorship and Women. The book has 80 short stories by and about real women and their experiences with mentorship (championboards.com/tappingthewisdom).
There are some stories from her Northfield days, so perhaps you will recognize the experiences. Maybe Elizabeth will return for our 55th. Liz Spear Graham wrote to Franny BridgesCline that Amelia, Liz’s fifth grandchild, had just been born. Liz and Fran spent a wonderful week together in Amsterdam in early November—a benefit of reuniting with friends at reunion. Nancy Jackson Moncure feels sad for classmates who had conflicts and were unable to be part of reunion. “The school went all out for us… great to reconnect with old friends and make new ones as well.” Last August, Nancy had rotator cuff surgery, so no shoveling snow this winter, but I’ll bet she’s back on the tennis court in record time. She and her husband, John, took a trip to France in September 2014, which tells me she is healing well. Jean Thompson echoed Nancy’s reunion comments, saying she still thinks about what a fantastic time she had at the 50th. Jean continues to help friends while they travel by babysitting their dogs and cats, and has even added chickens to the list of animals she’ll tend. Her personal family pets now include a small dog, which belongs to a dear friend who feels she cannot properly care for him over the winter. Jean says, “He’s a sweet boy and fits right in with the rest of the family.” Jean, Marcia Eastman Congdon, Nancy Schouler Smith, Pat Dunklee Putnam, and a mutual Northfield grade-school friend met for lunch in West Lebanon, N.H., later last summer to continue the lively discussions begun at reunion. They were hoping that Marcia Stacy Kemp would be able to join them, but she was recovering from surgery. Marcia wrote that reunion was wonderful—she loved kibitzing with classmates and Sally Atwood Hamilton ’65—but that she spent much of the summer recovering from four hospitalizations for mitral valve repair. She finally feels great and is planning a vacation to visit family in Sweden this summer. Our adopted classmate, Sue Chapman Melanson, wrote that the cottages at Oak Hill Farm in South Hiram, Maine, are doing well, and she and husband Art have date night by both sitting on the School Board of Sacopee Valley, that her 50th high school reunion in Wellesley, Mass., was also fantastic, and that in May she and Art adopted a vegan diet. Kudos to the Melansons! As I began this column, I noted that I don’t know where the past months have flown. My husband, Ken, and I spent the summer enjoying Spofford Lake, and I played lots of tennis. In August my 55-plus 3.5 tennis team won the USTA New England Regionals, which meant we were invited to Nationals in November! In October (2014) we attended a family wedding in Durango, Colo., and spent the next two weeks touring Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and Sedona. The first week in November, my tennis team played in Nationals in Phoenix, Ariz. The icing on the cake was having my partner and I win one of our matches and losing the other match 10–8 in a third set tiebreaker. Sara Simon Stevens’s news definitely beats my acclaim to playing in the USTA Nationals. Her daughter welcomed healthy twin daughters (Chloe and Phoebe) in November 2014—Sara’s 15th and 16th grandchildren. The blessed event was scheduled for late November, but as furniture/