Generational Bridges to the World's Troubles: Personal Stories: How Dartmouth '64S and '14S Are Making a Difference in the Lives of Others

Generational Bridges

To The World’s Troubles

Personal Stories:

How Dartmouth ‘64s and ‘14s

Are Making a Difference

in the Lives of Others

Edited by

Ronald B. Schram D’64

With Special Stories by

President Jim Yong Kim D’82a

President Emeritus James Wright D’64a

Dean of the College (1959-1969) Thaddeus Seymour D’49a

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Published by AuthorHouse 4/25/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4685-5949-1 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-5950-7 (sc)

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Contents

I. Introduction

II. Prologue

III. Our Mentors

IV. Legacy of Class of 1914

V. Personal Stories:

How Dartmouth 64’s and 14’s Are Making

A Difference In The Lives Of Others

VI. Epilogue

Dedication

To the Great Dartmouth

Class of 1964

In a Class By Itself

and

to Our Special 50 Year Connection With

the Great Dartmouth

Class of 2014

"The world’s troubles

are your troubles

. . . and there is

nothing wrong with

the world that

better human beings

cannot fix"

President John Sloan Dickey

1946

I. Introduction

I am the President of the Dartmouth Class of 1964. In 2007, I edited a book of sports remembrances to celebrate our 65th birthdays, most of which occurred in that year. The book was a huge success. Those who agreed to write an essay describing how sports have influenced their lives enjoyed the reflective experience. Many of those who did not have told me they wished they had. And all of us got insight into a dimension of our classmates we had not known. I remember in particular an email from classmate Bill Streitz who wrote What a fun book! I thought it would mainly be about super jocks who wore the Real jackets. It was a welcome surprise to see the breadth, diversity, truthfulness, etc. Age is a great leveler.

In January 2011, I announced to my classmates that I wanted to edit another book of remembrances to celebrate our 70th birthdays, most of which will occur in 2012. Not a second edition of the Sports book but instead a book that would open up an entirely different dimension of our lives.

Just as we were starting our Dartmouth careers, JFK in his inaugural address in January 1961 voiced these inspirational and memorable words: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Many 64’s heeded those words, some right out of Dartmouth either in the armed services or the Peace Corps, others in their career choices in the public and non-profit sectors and still others as volunteers in their communities during their professional careers and even more post retirement. It is time to capture these experiences and to learn why our classmates chose a particular public or non-profit activity and how they have tried to make a difference in society. This is not about the financial contributions we may have made but the effort we have invested in helping others less fortunate.

I was reading the Winter 2010 issue of the Dartmouth Medical School magazine and came across a quote from a DMS professor of medicine that captures the essence of this project: ‘it is our stories that bind us together – our stories and our compassion."

The insight into unknown dimensions of our classmates has taken on new meaning as the pace with which we are losing classmates seems to be increasing. Since the Sports book was published, we have lost authors Scott Creelman, Rick Isaacson, and Russ Turmail and we are all lucky to still have access to the poignant stories they wrote for that book.

Scott was the latest to leave us and when I read his memorials in September 2011, I learned details of his civic engagements that even I, as one of his good friends, had not known. I learned that he had been a long time supporter of his local Food Bank and held an inspiring and unwavering commitment to reducing hunger in his community. He joined the Board of the Food Bank in 2004 and was instrumental, as co-chair, in the success of its capital campaign from 2004-2006 raising $4 million to expand its warehouse food storage facility to serve more than 108,000 people in his community. The other co-chair of the Campaign commented at the time of his passing: [I recognized that] he was both a visionary and an in-the-trenches extraordinary board member. I learned from him, respected him, and will miss his spirit, his optimism, and utter dedication to making a vast difference in the lives of those in his community. I said to myself: these are the kinds of stories that we need to preserve.

Giving back to our communities is a natural instinct for those who like us have been given many opportunities: to whom much is given, much is expected. Luke 12:48. And the instinct is cross-generational. The Class of 1964 is forming a special bond with the Class of 2014 which will celebrate their graduation the same weekend in June 2014 when we will celebrate our 50th reunion. When they first joined the Dartmouth family in September 2010, we interviewed almost 200 14’s and learned that already many of these young people have been engaged in substantive, meaningful projects in their communities.

This book is an opportunity for us to bond with the 14’s by sharing common stories. The 14’s are enthusiastic about this project and we are excited to be able to get to know them better as they get to know us better.

I urged my classmates not to be intimidated by this project. These stories have remained untold for too long. I acknowledged that part of the historical resistance to share these stories may be our collective and natural humility. However, I reminded them that these stories define who we are and extend our relationships with each other. I emphasized my confidence that we had all made a difference, no matter how small we may think our efforts may seem. I reassured all my classmates that you don’t have to change the world, just your little piece of it. To put that point in perspective, I shared The Starfish Story written by an unknown author:

The Starfish Story

Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work. One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up.

As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean.

He came closer still and called out Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?

The young man paused, looked up, and replied Throwing starfish into the ocean.

I must ask, then, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean? asked the somewhat startled wise man.

To this, the young man replied, The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them in, they’ll die.

Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can’t possibly make a difference!

At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said, I made a difference for that one.

My classmates have responded with enthusiasm. Of the 57 essays/poems written for this book by 64’s, 24 were written by classmates who also wrote an essay for the Sports book, while 33 were written by different classmates.

The commitment of the 64’s and 14’s to help others has been nurtured not only by our families but by Dartmouth mentors. The expectations for the 64’s were set by two extraordinary men who influenced our personal growth throughout our four years in Hanover: President John Sloan Dickey and Dean of the College, Thad Seymour. As we neared and then entered our retirement, the 64’s were further inspired by the example of our adopted classmate, President Emeritus James Wright. The 14’s have been equally fortunate to be mentored and inspired by the President who welcomed them into the Dartmouth family, President Jim Yong Kim. As a tribute to their role in our lives, I have invited the three living members of this group to write their own stories for this book and have included the convocation address with which President Dickey welcomed the 64’s into the Dartmouth family in September 1960.

As I read through the collection of stories, five observations came to mind:

1.   The diversity of giving back experiences is striking. There is no single way in which the 64’s and the 14’s are making a difference in their communities. They have each applied their unique talents to the opportunities with which they have been presented. Henry J. Kaiser, the founder of modern American Shipbuilding, was right when he observed that problems are only opportunities in work clothes.

2.   When we talk about helping others in our community, the 64’s and 14’s have rightly defined their community to be global. President Dickey was right to remind Dartmouth students that the world’s troubles are your troubles and the 64’s and 14’s are finding ways to help others throughout the world.

3.   The 14’s have found their passion for helping others sooner in life than most of the 64’s but as in the story of the tortoise and the hare, the opportunity to make a difference continues until we reach the finish line.

4.   Most authors acknowledged that while they did not seek any personal gain from their giving back efforts, they received as much personal satisfaction from helping others as the others received from their gifts. Paul Keoghan, the host of the Emmy Award-winning TV show, The Amazing Race, and a tireless fundraiser for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, describes that incredible feeling you get from helping someone and says succinctly what our authors have felt: Whatever you give, you get back tenfold.

5.   Giving back is really a form of leadership. Each one of us can make a difference by our own efforts. President Dickey in his 1960 convocation address stated simply that leadership is man’s only tried and trusted answer to great urgencies. The essays in this book represent a cross-section of examples of personal leadership in response to community urgencies.

I hope you enjoy the stories. They have done what I hoped they would do. They have given us an insight into a dimension of our classmates we had not known. And they have extended the special bond between the 64’s and the 14’s.

April 1, 2012

Ronald B. Schram ‘64

Editor

It’s not what you gather but what

you scatter that tells what kind of

life you have lived.

Anonymous

II. Prologue

The poem that follows underscores the theme of this book: that making a difference in the lives of others does not usually garner much public attention. People help others because they want to do so. It feels right inside. They don’t need external recognition for their actions. The authors of the essays in this book tell their stores in a tone of humility. Like the poem’s title, I’m sure each one feels that I did what I could.

The poem was written by Bob Bartles ‘64 who served as president of the class of 1964 from 1975 to 1980 and was honored as class president of the year in 1979. Bob has been a member of the Alumni Council and has served Dartmouth in countless other ways. He was also a trustee of Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, New Hampshire from 1983 to 1992, and in 2006 he rejoined the Board. Bob is the only ‘64 who is married to a Dartmouth graduate, Loren McGean ’92.

I Did What I Could

by Bob Bartles ‘64

I played the game.

I ran the good race.

No search for fame.

No hero’s place.

I never asked.

Just wanted it to be

when awards were passed

that none came to me.

Don’t call my name.

Don’t seek me out.

That’s not why I came,

what it’s been all about.

I did what I could

to help out my friends

and did what I should

to make my amends.

I’ve got no regrets

for what I have done.

Left no losing bets

I wished that I’d won.

I turned most of the stones

that I found in my way.

Paid back all my loans.

No dues left to pay.

For all my hard work

without any disgrace

perhaps in this world

there’s one better place.

I’ve followed my heart,

tried to do things right.

Always doing my part,

kept up the good fight.

Now I look back

to add up the score

and find that I wish

I could’ve done more.

There is no fault

in this one desire.

No rules and no laws

that will ever require

that I should do more

to help and to serve

my fellow man who

fell off of the curb.

Some people will win

and some will still lose.

Some don’t ever get

their own right to choose.

These last are the ones

who need a strong hand

to help them escape

from life’s deep quicksand.

So every day

I’ve tried to give

a helping hand or two

to those who still live

under crushing debt

or in deep despair.

Their pain and sorrow

this life’s constant fare.

The desperate fear

of disease’s cost.

The cold empty pain

of loved ones they’ve lost.

A child’s great fear

of hunger’s big test.

The lonely feel of

a dream’s lost quest.

War’s harshest truth

of great treasures lost

in real wealth, not gold,

of lives that it cost.

No one can endure

without a helping hand.

I have just these two.

Here’s where I stand

with both outstretched

and filled up with love

for everyone who needs

some help from above.

It’s the choice that I made

quite silent and true.

There was no other.

It’s why I love you.

Kindness is the language which the deaf

can hear and the blind can see.

Mark Twain

III. Our Mentors

Everyone needs a mentor to guide them along the right path and to inculcate in them the values by which they will lead their lives. For most of us, our initial mentors were our parents and grandparents. However, Dartmouth students enjoy the benefit of further mentoring from special leaders.

For the Class of 1964, we have learned how to make a difference in the lives of others from three giants in Dartmouth’s legacy of leadership.

While we were on campus, Dartmouth was led by John Sloan Dickey ‘29, Dartmouth’s 12th President, who served from 1945 to 1970, and Thaddeus Seymour ‘49a, who served as Dean of the College from 1959 to 1969. Before assuming his office, President Dickey was a special assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State and later to the Secretary of State, a member of the Office of InterAmerican Affairs and the division of World Trade Intelligence. Even after assuming office, he was a principal actor in public policy serving on President Truman’s 1947 Committee on Civil Rights, the U.N. Collective Measures Committee in 1951 and as consultant to Secretary of State Atcheson on disarmament.

Before becoming Dean of the College, Thad Seymour was a Professor of English at Dartmouth. He served as President of Wabash College in Indiana for 9 years and then as President of Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida for 12 years. In 1997, Thad and his wife Polly became Winter Park’s Citizens of the Year in recognition of their continued service in the community.

During our years as alumni including the years as we planned our retirements, the ‘64s were influenced by our adopted classmate James Wright ‘64a, Dartmouth’s 16th president who served from 1998 to 2009. A member of the faculty since 1969, he was a Professor of History at Dartmouth, served as Dean of the Faculty from 1989-97, Acting President during the first 6 months of 1995 while President James O. Freedman was on sabbatical and Provost from 1997-1998. He is widely respected for his work with U.S. military personnel who were wounded in the course of service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Class of 2014 has been equally blessed to learn how to make a difference in the lives of others from another giant in Dartmouth’s legacy of leadership. Jim Yong Kim ‘82a took office as the 17th President of Dartmouth on July 1, 2009. He is the first physician to serve as Dartmouth’s President and also an anthropologist. President Kim is a cofounder of Partners in Health and a former director of the Department of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization. He has dedicated himself to health and social justice work for more than two decades, helping to provide medical treatment to underserved populations worldwide.

In all your learning get

not only wisdom but also

build the will and acquire

the capacity for doing something

about those things which need doing.

President John Sloan Dickey

The Commitment of Leadership

The 1960 Convocation Address

by President John Sloan Dickey ‘29

We meet today in a setting and under a symbol which two weeks ago focused the attention of several thousand guests of the College gathering here for a public convocation on The Great Issues of Conscience in Modern Medicine. The special symbol of that Convocation, with its four impinging areas, remains to remind us all that just as a physician stands answerable to patient, profession, society, and self, every highly educated man who presumes to minister to any part of the human plight faces, in one form or another, these omnipresent claimants for the attention of his conscience. These eighty-some flags overhead dramatize the reality, of our modern world, that these claimants speak to all of us in many tongues and that every man’s knowledge must be a shared possession.

The fact of our bothering to gather together today as students and teachers in this historic ceremony marking the opening of the college year is itself a symbol of significance; it bears witness to each of us that going to college is a shared experience.

During the past two years I have addressed myself on this occasion to two aspects of this shared experience that enlarge and enrich our individual lives, whether Hanover Plain be our home for four or forty years. I besought then and I again bespeak a sharpened awareness on the part of each of us, whatever his station of duty, of that commitment of self which goes into making this place of higher learning the kind of community that is both a haven for the intellect and a hearthplace where in unique measure the warmth of the Dartmouth fellowship can be ours for enjoyment.

This fall’s election will focus attention on the stake we all share in the larger community of the nation. It has been clear for some time that, regardless of which party wins, this election will mark the close in American public life of the postwar period. The span of man’s life, the processes of change, and the circumstances of our time have combined to dictate that there shall now be a changing of the guard in both men and measures.

Other soothsayers will be telling us at some length and with great certainty who the new men are and what the new measures must be. I shall not venture far into that melee this morning. Rather I should like to offer for your continuing consideration a few observations on your relationship to this changing of the guard in our public life.

On this same occasion, 28 years ago, on September 22, 1932, President Ernest Martin Hopkins opened the college with a prophetic address entitled Change Is Opportunity. He faced an undergraduate body drawn from a country laid low by a complex of economic and social deficiencies which, for want of more adequate understanding, we called the depression, a term as fearful in its way for the millions whose lives it blighted as was the plague for medieval man. Even though the American crisis of the thirties was essentially domestic, in contrast to today’s international turmoil, I have not the slightest doubt that you are facing challenges of change in this country as well as abroad which have no precedent in human experience. Dr. Hopkins specified strength, in every human dimension, self-discipline, and leadership as the prime requirements for meeting the crisis and opportunities then facing the country and our youth. Despite all the spectacular scientific advances of the past quarter century, we do well not to fool ourselves about this -- there is no miracle drug to take the place of that Spartan prescription for what ails us at such a time.

Between now and election day we will be hearing much about youth and leadership. Indeed reports of the part played by university students in recent political upheavals in Hungary, Korea, Japan, Cuba, and elsewhere have led many to wonder whether youth and leadership are not synonymous. As you know, the American undergraduate is sometimes compared unfavorably to his foreign counterpart just because he is not similarly storming the barricades of his existing order.

We need not waste energy on an argument that does no credit to either the courage of the foreign student or the judgment of his American counterpart, but if even idealism must have its chauvinistic testimonials, I am prepared to assert that such comparisons if taken seriously are slanderous in their misunderstanding and their underestimation of American youth. Such unfairness is bad enough, but what in my view is worse is the terribly mistaken picture of his place in today’s world and of how be prepares for it that such incitements to contrived riot present to the American student.

It will do no harm, however, to say plainly that this view of the matter is not a back-handed plea for outlawing that native bumptiousness which is the biologic birthright of youth in every time and all lands. Education can properly be concerned with helping man to fly without committing itself to repealing the law of gravity. Likewise, I trust it is not necessary at this point for anyone who stands in the Dartmouth tradition of free intellectual inquiry to offer assurances that no new limit is proposed on that incitement to independent-mindedness by which all public-mindedness must be both created and judged.

No, on these matters Dartmouth stands where education has always stood: we’re on the side of youth and also on the side of the wise counsel that if we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold. But it is no betrayal of American youth or of the liberal spirit to teach by word and example that leading by the light of reason in today’s world is not child’s play.

It would ill befit us in the comfort of our freedom and security to pass casual judgment on the raw courage and the sacrifices of life itself that thousands upon thousands of foreign youth have offered up to some cause of revolution in recent years. Whether within the pale of our approbation or not, they have been responding to the circumstances of their lot and more often than not the circumstances of their lot seemed to leave them no alternative except the primitive course of leading with their bodies rather than their reason. The least we owe them is to understand that.

I take it that this is what the French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre, himself a leader of the intellectual left, meant when, in commenting on the Cuban revolution, he said: Since a revolution was necessary, circumstances bade the children accomplish it. .. . In turn, Sartre tells us that life, even on the so-called far left, is not just one big revolution when he also observed that: The greatest scandal of the Cuban revolution is not the expropriation of the planters but the accession to power of children.... The point here, I think, is that any revolution worth its cost must rather quickly go beyond the excitement of revolt and when it does it confronts man with his ancient need for leadership and the management of power.

But the point I would emphasize here is that America and American youth in particular face a very different task of leadership than that of revolting from an outworn past by throwing the rascals out, either with bullets or ballots. I suspect that in the perspective of history your task is vastly more difficult as well as vastly different, but as I have said, I prefer not to pass judgment on how difficult it is for someone else to die, whether of necessity or foolishly. It is enough here for us to attempt to be worthy of the task which is ours.

In all things where reason is to light the way we begin with an effort to know and understand the fact which, as Mr. Justice Holmes once put it, life offers us for our appointed task. As is usual in human affairs, there are more facts than we can ever entirely know and understand about our situation. But, as always, we can begin knowing.

Although there can rarely be agreement among us on the definition of our most pervasive problems and especially with respect to their place on the agenda of time, there are few among us who do not recognize that even we in this most fortunate America have some fast growing up to do: in our race relations, our educational aims and standards, our moral philosophy, our use of the democratic process and, perhaps above all, in our understanding of the government necessary for civilized existence on a planet where suddenly, in terms of time and space, everyone is in everybody else’s backyard and, as we ought to expect, mostly damn unpleasant about it.

If you would get some feel of the first of those tasks consider the long, drawn-out deliberation and determination whereby this fall this campus is for the first time free of external racial and religious barriers to fraternity membership. And if you would know just a little of the difficulty that faces men who seek to have this enlightened land participate, let alone lead, in establishing a minimum measure of law over the conduct of nations, examine the hairbreadth margin whereby the House of Delegates of the American Bar Association only last month gave grudging endorsement to the effort of President Eisenhower and others to have this country now accept, without the reserved right of a national veto, the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice.

Reason alone can lead us to positive answers to such problems. Mobs, whether composed of students or savages, can only destroy and never create because they are a mechanism of hate rather than of mind. There are few things more fundamental to a man who aspires to the power of higher learning than an acquired distaste for mobs. Never doubt that this distaste requires our constant cultivation. This is especially true for the American student because it is his lot to inherit an appointed task of personal and national leadership that simply cannot be performed in hotheaded self-indulgence.

We all easily agree that this is the fact life offers America as her appointed task and, at least in between Presidential election campaigns, most of us, regardless of our political theology, rest rather comfortably on the assumption that we are responding to the tasks of leadership about as well as can be expected. At the tactical level I have no broadside of complaint as to the conduct of the cold war either at home or abroad. And I share with most of our countrymen the enormously important confidence that in the main America has both the right friends and the right enemies.

My misgivings come when I ask myself whether American society generally, or on either side of the aisle of political leadership, we are committed to aspirations for the international community that will generate and sustain the ideas from which alone comes the forward thrust essential for any great leadership. If there is room for real doubt about this - and I shall leave it for own pondering — then in the long run all else is in doubt. It would be naive or insincere in the extreme to encourage undergraduates to believe that they are ready to take the world to town if only they could get a hand on the wheel and a foot on the accelerator of affairs. This is not the truth of things even though it is sometimes so represented by those who are more interested in using youth than in their education.

What is true is that you are now preparing yourself for the certain day when imperceptibly, or perchance suddenly, you will discover that the stick in your hand is not a club but instead the tiller of a human enterprise entrusted to your hand and heart. And if that enterprise should prove to be simply yourself and a fine mind, you will still know the challenge and the rewards of the leadership for which you now prepare.

Whether the enterprise in your case be a mind or a nation, and regardless of all else in the way of intellectual and moral preparation, you would also do well to begin now the unending task of cultivating a capacity for being undismayed because the dismayed are the faint of heart, when heart is at issue. And never doubt it, leadership means being at issue with yourself as well as with your enemy. Above all, you will need that capacity for commitment of which we spoke last year because only out of commitment is any man fulfilled with his fellows, whether in the embrace of fellowship or loneliness of leadership.

The idea of leadership gets part of its vitality from the fact that it embodies within itself two opposite, alternating pulls of human experience. On the one hand the lessons of tyranny are deep within us and the democratic idea still walks warily in the presence of any leadership. On the other hand there are few more predictable social reactions than the way our society, in both its public and private sectors, cries out for leadership at times of crisis. I sometimes test the validity of this reaction by wondering whether, if we could imagine a society without deadlines. Such a society would ever have had any need of the idea of leadership. I am brought back to earth from this speculation by realizing that the immortal society I was hypothesizing is in fact man’s view of Heaven. Whatever our view of Heaven, we surely agree that one of the most conspicuous elements in the fact life offers us on earth today is a pervasive and continuing urgency in matters of public policy.

We cannot here enter into a discussion of what has sometimes seemed to be an unresolvable dilemma, namely, reconciliation of democracy and leadership. It is my deep conviction that life on either horn of that dilemma is intolerable for our society and, indeed, was so regarded by the Founders when they gave us our republican form of government. The democratic idea is always under challenge --- that is the inner nature of the creature and its good health depends upon it; but it is just when these challenges are most insistent and urgency is chronic that the democratic idea must look to its own leadership for its own survival. Its own best leadership is a democratic process infused at every level with men who follow because they could also lead — and vice versa.

The time permitted for solving a problem has always been one of the fundamental factors on any job. Whether the urgency be the brief sixty minutes permitted you to shine on the all-too-familiar hour exam or the fact that for nations war is a race to victory where the prize is survival, our mortal and finite world at every point is bounded by time factors.

I believe myself that today’s central challenge to man’s moral and political development is that the time factor permitted to him in the past for a gradual evolutionary growth has been suddenly and drastically cut short by the scientific revolution and the cascade of physical power it has loosened onto a socially and politically primitive international community. It is almost as if some change in man’s physical environment suddenly threatened his biologic survival unless he should be able by the efforts of his own mind to short-cut the ageless evolutionary processes of change by quickly altering his genes to meet the new conditions of life. Man’s built-in resistance to social change has undoubtedly in its way served man well, but can there be any doubt that it also and inevitably tends to make us impervious to even an awareness that the time factor in our public affairs has suddenly been cut to the point where man’s most ancient reassurance, that time cures all things, has become his most dangerous delusion?

And is it not certain that realistic awareness of this urgency and the will to meet it will come to us only as we can match awareness of our problem with a sense of having some answer for it? It is because I believe this to be so and because I do believe that leadership is man’s only tried and trusted answer to great urgencies and that bold minds are his only hope for creative solutions, it is because I believe these things, that I believe in you and in the greatness of the fact life now offers us for our appointed task — your education at Dartmouth.

And now, men of Dartmouth, as I have said on this occasion before, as members of the College you have three different but closely intertwined roles to play:

First, you are citizens of a community and are expected to act as such. Second, you are the stuff of an institution and what you are it will be. Third, your business here is learning and that is up to you. We’ll be with you all the way, and Good Luck!

Your diploma is only paper.

The way you use your education

will determine its value. Use it as

a force for good in a world which desperately

needs men of courage and conviction.

Dean Thaddeus Seymour

In Our 1964 Yearbook

Reflections on Gifts and Giving Back

by Dean Thaddeus Seymour ‘49a

One day in 1954 Arthur Jensen, Chairman of Dartmouth’s English Department, came to Chapel Hill to interview candidates, and after our conversation, he invited me up to Hanover to meet the members of the department. I remember the B&M sleeping car being dropped off at White River, the taxi ride along the Connecticut to Hanover, and the long climb up the stairs of Sanborn House, where I was greeted by Mabel Seavey, the department secretary. The carved paneling of the Shakespeare Room was quite intimidating for an anxious graduate student.

That was when my real college education began.

I was grateful to be hired (a one year appointment as an English Instructor at $3600 for the year) and to begin my lifelong loyalty to Dartmouth. My small, austere office was in the basement, Number 4.

So now it is almost sixty years later, and I look back on a life of rich rewards and treasured memories. The Class of 1964 reflects on their gifts and their giving back, and so do I.

After I left Dartmouth in 1969, I was privileged to serve as president of two colleges. Every year, as new students arrived, I would give the usual speech of welcome to start the year, and for twenty-one years (nine as president of Wabash College and twelve as president of Rollins), I concluded my remarks with words known to generations of men of Dartmouth: Your business here is learning. We’ll be with you all the way. The rest is up to you.

I have always respected and appreciated the quality of teaching at Dartmouth and the teachers who were with their students all the way. I recall so many of them still, giants in the earth, and I learned so much from them. And I learned so much from my students, especially about giving back.

In 1990, I returned to my first calling and taught English at Rollins for nearly twenty years. My subject was poetry and my inspiration was Robert Frost, who taught us that a poem ends in a clarification of life . . . a momentary stay against confusion. I remembered those evenings in 105 Dartmouth, where the crusty, white-maned poet spoke and read to Dartmouth freshmen. His inspiration shaped my teaching, and I always visit his handsome statue (a giving-back project of the Class of 1961) overlooking the Bema.

Retirement from the daily demands of administration gave me more time for other things I cared about. I helped found our Habitat for Humanity affiliate and have served as its chairman for nearly twenty years. We are currently building our 48th house in Winter Park, eight of them sponsored and built by Rollins students and faculty. Other interests have included service on our Library board, where I help Polly with the New Leaf Bookstore, a volunteer effort which supports the operation of the Winter Park Public Library. Last February the New Leaf marked $1,000,000 raised since 1979 by selling used books. Service on several boards has offered opportunities to reach out and help the community, and a recent interest has been the challenge of transportation for older adults who can no longer drive. For a number of years, I have been a volunteer driver as well as board member of the Independent Travel Network.

Dartmouth and the example of its students taught me to appreciate service, and I look back with great admiration to the example of those who went to Mississippi or joined the Peace Corps or worked with George Kalbfleish and the DCU. So many students exemplified what John Dickey described as conscience and competence.

And Dartmouth taught me something else, perhaps most important of all. It is what Ernest Martin Hopkins meant in 1945 when he passed the torch to his successor, John Sloan Dickey. He quoted from Robert Louis Stevenson in The Lantern-Bearers that to miss the joy is to miss all.

My Dartmouth years were the best of my life - - - teaching, deaning, coaching, and just plain fun. The joy came particularly from students and the opportunity to share in their four years. What a pleasure and privilege to join them again through the pages of this book.

Members of the Class of 1964,

you have used your Dartmouth

education to exceptional ends.

President James Wright

At Our 40th Reunion

Semper Fidelis

by President Emeritus James Wright ‘64a

Semper Fidelis is more than a slogan.

In November 2004, American Marines, joined by US Army units and by British troops, initiated a major offensive to retake the Iraqi city of Fallujah in Al-Anbar province. This led over the next several weeks to the heaviest sustained fighting of the war in Iraq. Marines had not seen such intense urban fighting since defending Hue during the Vietnam War.

I was surprised by how interested I became in the accounts of this battle. I followed it on television news, on National Public Radio, and read the accounts of Dexter Filkins and other correspondents who were in the city. This was a bloody fight with a great deal of street fighting and conventional small arms fire. My interest was not in the military experience but in the human experience. The soldiers and marines fighting there had human faces—and were taking heavy casualties. They were the age that I was when I had served in the marines over 40 years earlier. And they were the same age as the students that I talked to and taught on the Dartmouth campus. Late that month we learned that Jeff Holmes was killed in Fallujah on Thanksgiving Day. He was in Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Marines. His father, Scott, worked at the Dartmouth electrical ship and was someone we knew and respected. Susan and I wrote to Scott and Patty Holmes, extending our personal condolences and those of the Dartmouth community.

I mentioned to a friend, Peter Michael Gish (D’49), a retired marine officer and a combat artist, that I wanted to reach out to do something to support those who were sacrificing so much. He suggested that I visit the wounded marines at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. He arranged this with a contact he had in the office of the commandant of the Marine Corps. I went down to the hospital in July 2005.

Since that first visit I have gone another two dozen times to Bethesda Naval Hospital, Walter Reed Hospital (the two combined under the Walter Reed name at the Bethesda site in the summer of 2011), and the Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego, California—where I had been a patient in the summer of 1957 after being injured in an accident at the Camp Matthews Marine Corps Rifle Range in La Jolla.

On every trip I have followed the same basic pattern—I go bed to bed, talking to the wounded servicemen and women. I ask them where their home is, when they had enlisted, where they had been injured, and how they had been injured. Sometimes the patients are heavily medicated or have injuries that inhibit speech, but of those able to engage in a conversation none have been unwilling to talk to me about these things, even as they lay in obvious pain and discomfort. Infused and bound with multiple tubes and monitors, and with blood or pus still draining from wounds, or, too frequently, draining from the stumps of missing limbs, they share some experiences and observations. Often family members are with them and there are pictures and cards, drawings by young children and stuffed animals surrounding them.

At this time I have probably had over 300 remarkable conversations with young people who assumed a major responsibility at a young age, who confronted horrible and tragic situations that most of us cannot easily imagine, who never express any sense of self-pity or of anger. If anything there is, remarkably, a slight tinge of guilt sometimes—why did I survive while my friends died? They insist that they only want to go back to their unit. At first this surprised me as I understood it to be enthusiasm for their war. I came to understand that this is all about loyalty to their friends and comrades. They want to be with them and they want to help them.

I have never left these visits without being moved emotionally, sometimes to the verge of tears. I have never left these visits without being inspired by the stories and by the attitudes. From the outset I would encourage these young men and women to think about continuing their education. I would tell them that I had joined the marines at age 17 with no expectation of going on to school but when I was discharged at age 20 I had decided to attend college—and once I started I never stopped. And I still hadn’t stopped! I told them that I was the president of Dartmouth, the only marine ever to be president of an Ivy League school. I insisted that they could do anything they wanted to do—they were far better prepared than I ever was.

They are often eager to talk about continuing their education—and if their parents are there, they are especially eager to discuss options for their son or daughter. The patients often have questions about specific schools: whether they can transfer credits; whether there are undergraduate majors in business; whether the residence halls have elevators since they have trouble with stairs on their prosthetic leg or legs. I could not answer these questions specifically. I could only offer to connect them to someone at the school they were considering. I recognized that they needed some better counseling.

In the fall of 2005 I contacted David Ward, the President of the American Council on Education. The ACE is the largest higher education consortium group. They represent institutions ranging from community colleges to large research universities. I explained to David that there was a real need to provide counseling in the hospitals and wondered if ACE couldn’t assume leadership on this. I offered to assist in any way that I could. He quickly agreed and within several months we had a program in place at Walter Reed and Bethesda Hospitals as well as Brooke Army Medical Center. A year or so later they developed a counseling program at Balboa Naval Hospital. I had told President Ward that I would help to raise money to support this incremental program. I was successful in raising $350,000—and not surprisingly, some Dartmouth friends and their companies were critical supporters of this. Subsequently I was able to secure funding from a foundation that has continued the program. (As I write this, I am involved with ACE and officials in the Pentagon to find ways to expand significantly this type of counseling.)

It was a very rewarding experience for me. I encountered a world and a set of issues that had not been a part of my experience. I also met at the hospitals and in veteran’s groups many individuals who were deeply committed to assisting the wounded veterans and who assumed this responsibility professionally and personally.

As a result of my experience helping to establish this program and some of the publicity that followed, I became increasingly involved with other veterans activities. In the winter of 2008 I spent a day on Capitol Hill, working with Senators Jim Webb, John Warner, and Chuck Hagel on a new GI Bill. My focus was on including an option for private schools. The senators agreed with this language and in June 2008 President George Bush signed legislation with the so-called Yellow Ribbon Program, providing for a partnership between the VA and private colleges and universities.

The Dartmouth that I came to in 1969 was in transition and in tension—anti-war, anti-ROTC. But it was also marked by a sense of community, despite all of the tension. And that Dartmouth was a place where a culture of sharing was important. Alumni taught me this but so did colleagues on the faculty. And students. I began that first year at Dartmouth serving under President John Sloan Dickey and I completed that year attending the first commencement presided over by President John G. Kemeny. Each reminded us of the embedded values of Dartmouth, values of service and of responsibility--important reminders especially at an institution in the process of transition and in a society in the midst of fundamental change.

Nearly 30 years later, in September 1998, on the occasion of my inauguration as the sixteenth president of Dartmouth, I urged everyone to remember that we were privileged at Dartmouth, and that with this privilege came responsibility. Recently, while reviewing some of my presidential speeches, I was reminded of how often I returned to the theme of recognizing an obligation to reach out and to make a difference for those who do not share in our good fortune. Of course this is a theme that is rooted in the founding document of Dartmouth and it is one that my predecessors—and my successor, President Jim Yong Kim—in the Wheelock Succession have reiterated regularly. I often returned especially to Presidents William Jewett Tucker and John Sloan Dickey, quoting their inspiring words. Members of the Class of 1964 know well the message of Mr. Dickey. As individuals we can make a difference; as members of Dartmouth we need to make a difference.

It would be nice, even poetic perhaps, to say that I made my first trip to Bethesda hospital back in 2005, conscious of this responsibility and eager to fulfill it. Few things in life are so willful or intentional. I went there because I was concerned about the great sacrifices of such a small fraction of our population and thought that maybe I could be of some small help to those who had given so much. In any event, anyone who is in a position to help someone else soon recognizes the selfishness of such actions. I have often stated that I have been the major beneficiary of my work with wounded veterans.

In the spring of 2006 one of the marines whom I met at Bethesda Hospital wrote me a letter. Samuel Crist told me that he had thought about my message that he should continue his education and had decided that he wanted to go to Dartmouth. I was surprised but I called him and we talked. I suggested that he continue his therapy treatments—he had received gunshot wounds in the leg and arm at Fallujah in November 2004—and perhaps enroll in some classes at a local college just to try out some things. He did and was very successful in both therapy and school. He matriculated at Dartmouth in the fall of 2007.

In the fall of 2007 there were a total of three marine veterans who matriculated as undergraduates at Dartmouth. The admissions office had admitted a fourth marine but he had deferred for a year in order to complete recuperation from a serious injury he had suffered in Iraq from an explosive device. I had never been recruiting for Dartmouth on my hospital visits. I was recruiting on behalf of these wounded servicemen and women, seeking to connect them with a school that would work for them. That school, I knew, would be the beneficiary. I was delighted when Dartmouth became one of those places. The close network of marines resulted in those veterans being heavily represented in the early years. The Tuck School has been very active and successful in admitting veterans into the MBA program. Dartmouth has had 15 or 16 undergraduates in each of the last few years and probably a half dozen graduated by 2011.

In the small world department, I learned later that Samuel Crist was in the same platoon as Jeff Holmes and was a friend of his. And in the smaller world, I met another marine, Michael Rodriguez, when he was attending Colby-Sawyer College. Michael graduated from Colby-Sawyer and enrolled in the MALS program at Dartmouth. He had also been in that platoon—and had been with Jeff on Thanksgiving day when they were ambushed, suffering multiple wounds from the same assault that killed Jeff.

In the spring of 2009 as I was preparing to step down from the Dartmouth presidency, I decided that I wanted to climb Mount Moosilauke. I had never done this and I wanted to stand at the top of this iconic Dartmouth mountain. Susan was pleased to join me and I asked a few colleagues to come along as well as several students. These included two of the Dartmouth marines. One was Samuel Crist, the marine whom I had met in Bethesda recovering from gunshot wounds suffered at Fallujah. He had become quite fit and was willing, even eager, to join in this exercise. Michael Stinetorf was the other. He had been in Dartmouth graduate Nathaniel Fick’s platoon in 2003 during the invasion of Iraq. I reminded the two marines that they had a special responsibility: Marines don’t leave other marines out along the trail.

I had increased my treadmill exercises and walking that spring in preparation for this hike. I was pretty confident. Far too confident. I learned early on that I could not keep up with the pace of those young legs leading the climb. Everyone thoughtfully