www.andover.edu/intouch Reunion, scheduled for June 12–14, 2015. Please plan on joining us to swap news and memories. Our chair, Tony Herrey, has been working on plans to make the event especially enticing and invites your inquiries and suggestions. Other global travelers this past year included John Almquist, who, with his wife, Lolly, and her sister, visited Vietnam and Cambodia and then, in December, Cuba. John reported that, while he had been out of the pistachio-farming business for several years, he still owns and manages “a small grove of the heart-healthy nuts.” Charlie Flather, for his part, sailed the Mediterranean on a square-rigger last September, visiting Malta and circumnavigating Sicily. Other classmates kept their excursions closer to home. Marv Steinberg and his wife, Delores, traveled to Denver to visit their son Jim, daughters Susan and Julie, and their families, including a newly arrived great-granddaughter. Their older son, David, is a hand surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Marv himself, now retired, enjoys emeritus status in Penn’s Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. He and Delores have 12 grandchildren. Ed Nowaczek and wife Carol picked up stakes in Annapolis, Md., last fall and moved to a West Side apartment in Manhattan, where they will be close to their son Charlie and his wife and three children. John Hirsch, in Chicago, said that, while he and longtime friend Natalie van Straaten had traveled to seven continents over the past quarter-century, this year they were planning only a 10-day visit to Martha’s Vineyard in September. “Otherwise,” John reported, “I’m still dabbling: a little painting (watercolors), some cooking, yoga regularly, and, when the weather allows, sculling in the lagoon between Lincoln Park Zoo and Lake Shore Drive.” Speaking of travel, you’ll be fascinated reading Seeing the Eliphant, a book Bill King commissioned, supported, and helped research, which chronicles his great-grandparents’ travails as they ventured by sea and land from Maine to California during the Gold Rush. The author is Kenneth R. Martin, and you can order the book via Amazon. Bill’s fascination with his ancestors’ saga began many years ago when he had to write a maritime history report for a course at Harvard, and his mother and great-aunt sent him to the family attic to retrieve an antique steamer trunk crammed with photos, letters, legal documents, and his great-grandfather’s journal. In our nation’s capital, I joined Dick Suisman and his wife, Ingrid, Ken McDonald and his wife, Chandley, and Tony Beilenson and his wife, Dolores, for a convivial dinner Dec. 3 at Las Canteras, the Peruvian restaurant in Washington’s AdamsMorgan neighborhood co-owned by PA charter trustee Gary Lee ’74, who guided us to several delicious dishes. The following week, we reconvened for an elegant holiday party that Dick and Ingrid hosted at the Phillips Collection. Joining us for this occasion were classmate George Beatty and his wife, Noelle ’50.
Ed Hobbie, in South Deerfield, Mass., said he still enjoys outdoor pursuits: bird hunting, trout fishing, and skeet shooting. Rachel, one of Ed’s three daughters, is a librarian at nearby UMass Amherst and lives with him. Manny d’Amonville has continued to produce handsome note cards using photos he’s taken of the natural world around his home in Plymouth, Mass. When Tony Herrey and his wife, Maria, lunched with him in Plymouth last October, Tony and Manny wrote me messages on one of Manny’s cards, which featured his fine photo of a jaunty little bird. “Sometimes they don’t forget you,” Bob Goddard wrote on a cover note when he mailed me a recent commemorative issue of Life with Liberty, the award-winning Liberty Mutual Insurance employee publication for which Bob was editor-in-chief in the 1960s. This issue included an interview with Bob, in which he recalled that he had been able “to do exactly what I wanted to create a top-notch, nationally recognized publication—which it became.” Since retirement, Bob concluded, “I’ve enjoyed spending time with my family, including my two wonderful daughters and four grandchildren.” I must share the sad news that we have lost four more of our classmates: Bob Simonton, on Aug. 31, 2013; Sam Ballard, on Dec. 5, 2013; Fred Simpich, on Jan. 5, 2014; and George Clifford, on Feb. 6, 2014. Please see their obituaries in the In Memoriam section.
1951 ABBOT
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The holidays have come and gone. The warm afterglow will last a long time. We’ll need it. Temperature 6 degrees in Essex, Conn., at 6 a.m. as I write. John Plews, in response to an e-mail I forwarded in November about the advent of winter, replied from Hawaii, “After 12 years of schooling in New England, I am content to view snow on Mauna Kea from the beach. Aloha, John.” Ed Nef’s film, Mongolia: Mining Challenges a Civilization, was awarded a first place in the documentary category at the Online New England Film Festival. Congratulations, Ed! A great quote from Tony Thompson, from his Stanford ’55 November-December class notes,
“I used to think an octogenarian was some sort of American squid. Now I know better. Happy birthday, classmates! With the possible exception of a few vets and prodigies, most of us celebrated our 80th this year.” He listed all in that category, and in a separate note to me added wistfully that the list once included George Stewart, Bob Kimball, Packy Maxwell, and Bob Barton. Jerry Schultz writes to assure classmates that he has “not slipped into a slough of despond and continues to work on three Beethoven sonatas and the Goldberg Variations, with that degree of energy allotted to me by the father of gods and men. (Pater andron te theon te.) ‘Only undefeated because we have gone on trying’ and ‘now under conditions that seem unpropitious.’ Two observations on music that I have come across in the past 60 years are worthy of note: (1) Schnabel: ‘Mozart is too easy for children and too difficult for adults’; and (2) Hindemith, in noting the extreme paucity of Bach’s output during his last 10 years, as compared to the copious early years, explains this by the phrase ‘The melancholy of potence’ (a.k.a. ‘What else is left to do?’). One other note of interest only to pianists is Schnabel’s note on the last note of LvB’s last sonata: ‘Nur ein Achtel!’ (‘Only an eighth’), the soundless last 16th rest (saying ‘Stop here!’) being an integral part of the composition. P.S.: ‘LVB’ was the ticker symbol for Steinway & Sons before it was sold to a private equity firm. I was privileged to meet Aunt Maud [Steinway Paige], one of our customers in the ’50s.” On a sad note, Dick Hueber left us Oct. 31, 2013, after a brief illness. Following Princeton, he served as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps. He later earned an MBA degree at UVa. He worked at the Young & Rubicam advertising agency in NYC before returning to Syracuse, N.Y., in 1963, where he led his own businesses. Summers were spent at the family cottage, Trail’s End, on Skaneateles Lake. He moved to New Jersey in 1991 and became an avid runner. He worked with Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic until his 1997 retirement and was also very active in many projects and activities at Princeton. Surviving are his wife, Rita Alles, sons Philip Hueber ’75 and Peter Hueber, daughter Sara Hueber Collins, and six grandchildren. Our efforts with Andover and the Military continue to grow. Please take a moment to read about it on the PA website. Our second newsletter was very well received. Editor Charlie Dean ’79 wrote an extraordinary story of Andover faculty and their military exploits: “Bill Brown ’34 at the Remagen Bridge; Peter McKee over Germany in his B-24 Liberator…and Josh Miner, Diz Bensley ’43, and Fred Harrison ’38, all with the Army in Europe.” (Those mentioned were some of the faculty around our time. Many more were cited!) Charlie adds, “Today we have the committee honoring our veterans, a website with close to 900 registered living veterans, an endowment fund, and a biannual newsletter, and, on Oct. 31, we held our fourth annual Veterans Day program and dinner on campus. Phillips Academy is proud of its veterans.” Andover | Spring 2014
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