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that tiny speck of land 2000 statute miles from the nearest sizable city or landmass.
We congratulate Steve Covell ’67 on being chosen as Grand Marshal of the 2011 Good Old Days Parade, held April 9 and 10 in Pacific Grove. “A tireless worker on community projects,” Steve has lived in P.G. since 1962 and has been a building contractor in the area since 1980. He and his wife Jan have two grown children living in San Francisco, and he is a member of the PG Rotary Club and of the Board of Directors of the University of the Pacific, from which he graduated in 1971 with a degree in business and marketing.
In 26 years of leading these trips this was the most challenging one to plan and execute. Easter Island has limited accommodations and is not used to large influxes of tourists at any one time. I had to secure our hotel rooms and ground transportation five years in advance. The biggest challenge, though, was the weather. The eclipse would happen at the start of the Austral Winter and the end of the wet season, and the probability of seeing totality was 40 to 45 percent. In fact, any significant cloud cover would cause what eclipse-chasing aficionados refer to as a “cloud out.” It rained hard and steadily on July 10, and at pre-eclipse briefings tour members looked like they might throw me into a volcanic crater as a sacrifice to the ‘weather Gods.’ Having chased eclipses for the past 36 years since 1973 as a member of a Harvard Observatory team, I reminded the group that in 17 prior eclipses I’d seen a lot of dramatic, unexpected things happen meteorologically in the hours just before an eclipse begins!
Joel Harris ’68: view of eclipse from Easter Island July 11, 2010.
1968 Joel Harris ’68: Last July Patti and I led 92 “umbraddicts” to South America and Easter Island through my astronomical tour company, Twilight Tours Inc. (www.twilighttours.net), to observe the July 11 total solar eclipse on
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Sure enough, the storm front passed over during the night and left only scattered clouds and stiff winds for us to contend with on the morning of the big event. As can be seen from the accompanying photo, conditions were nearly ideal. The only clouds arrived at the final moments of totality, and these actually enhanced the “diamond ring effect” heralding 3rd contact - the formal conclusion of the total phase of the eclipse. I was a hero instead of a goat!
and Whitney Rocketdyne in Canoga Park, CA, where I serve as the RS-68A engine program’s risk focal and corrective action board integrator.
1969 Greg Giustina ’69: My professional teaching career spanned thirty years. I taught special education and elementary school in the public schools of Wyoming, Oregon and Arizona. I taught middle school and high school in the Philippines and Thailand. The Far East has been my home for twenty-five years. Recently I retired from teaching in order to pursue a demanding meditation and yoga regimen and a lecture schedule advocating World Peace. Last year I wrote a book which documents the final day of urban warfare, May 19, 2010, on the streets of Bangkok, Thailand. My book, Metro-Rage, published under the pseudonym, Greg Lee, is available at amazon.com and a few select book stores. Bill Hirsch ’69: I was born and raised in Arcadia, CA, just a furlong from Santa Anita Racetrack, and after graduating from Stevenson I studied Business and Animal Husbandry at CSU San Luis Obispo. I currently live in Floral Park, NY, and Hallandale, FL, with my wife Mary Ryan, a Sports Commentator for network and cable TV and life-long horsewoman. I am the Founder/Director of the highly popular Trackmen Golf Club (www.trackmengolfclub.com) and the Managing Member of three Trackmen Golf Club Racing Stables, four Quindecim Stables, Wade Racing LLC, and Twenty Star Stable. I have also published several Turf Gourmet Dining
The next total eclipse, on November 14, 2012, will occur in Australia and will traverse the city of Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef. While eclipse chasing is my avocation, my day job, is as a systems engineer and rocket scientist at Pratt Bill Hirsch ’69 at the track