1955

There's nothing like reading the travel section of the Sunday newspaper to fill one with visions of faraway places of memories of times past or dreams of future events. Doug Archibald falls perfectly into the current reality with the same flavor of a travel columnist. Doug and his family spent Christmas in Les Bossons, France, a village in the valley of Chamonix. Currently four of the family live in France where Doug is a professorassocie at the Institut d'Anglais at the Universite de Caen and his wife, Mitsy, is a student at the same university under the Colby Program. Their daughter, Jenny, assists in the Dartmouth program in Lyon, and Galen, their youngest, goes to school at the college in Caen. That was an encouragement to bring the three older boys from the States for two weeks in the French Alps. If the Archibalds had as good a time as other Dartmouth students abroad report from skiing the Mont Blanc area, they must have.had a super time. The White and Green mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont are forever painted, with a faint brush in comparison with the glory of skiing in Chamonix.

Living in France is nothing new for Peter Robinson, who serves at the Paris office of Richardson-Vicks. He indicates it is an exciting time, for in October he went into a new job as vice president of business development (acquisitions) while simultaneously companies were making bids for Richardson-Vicks themselves. (Paris always was an exciting place to be, as Louis XVI knew well.)

But Nels Jones may have the answer to all these potentially unsettling little details. After 30 years with CIGNA (and its predecessor, Connecticut General Life Insurance company), Nels retired last year full of honors and wonderful tributes and presumably, unlike the shoemaker's children, a certain sense of security. Nels last served as a regional vice president of the Denver agency, having started in Hartford, and having served in Oakland, Calif., Springfield, Mass., and as a vice president of the home office. It must be tremendously satisfying to read the compliment, "The glorious way that Nels Jones lives his life shows his absolute belief that the only limits to growth are those we place on ourselves. He creates in us an irresistible urge to throw off those limits and to become more than we ever thought we could be." (It sounds a little bit like John Dickey with an encouraging word on the Hanover Plain.) Over a range of mountains (maybe two, maybe three, perhaps, even a desert or so), Carl Auer was appointed to a new post, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Great Western Leasing Corporation. This is the equipment financing subsidiary of Great Western Financial Corporation. Merely because it is headquartered in Reno, Nev., should not indicate that there was any gamble in their studied judgement in selecting Carl, for he was most recently director of the financial industries center of Stamford Research Institute International. The latter sounds like a situation that might be familiar to Bob Sherburne, who is an executive recruiter for the banking industry out of Bedford, N.H., with the national firm, Management Recruiters, Inc. Bob talks occasionally with Ralph Sautter (nice thinking) on a professional basis. He indicates that his big hobby has dwindled to astronomy. He has his own observatory, well equipped and seemingly a lot safer since he crashed his plane in mid-1984 and "damn near got killed." Stars in his life nearby include his wife, Joyce, a Britisher, and four sons, including a Berkeley Ph.D., all with different interests. Bob loves the quiet country living (presumably after airplane flying) and a taste of the Caribbean in the winter. (Sounds very sensible.) Bob represented Dartmouth at the installation of Edmund Cranch as the second president of Wang Institute of Graduate Studies. A similar honor came to Preston Fletcher as he represented Dartmouth at the inauguration of Frank Falcone as the 10th president of Springfield College. (Does Dartmouth send you the appropriate hood?)

Mike Plumer was married this past June to Harriet Spitzer; this would seem to make a nice match, for she is director of freshman studies and Mike is vice president for academic research and evaluation at New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury. With all that, he is still doing alumni interviewing and would welcome any good leads.

It would seem appropriate to save some of the nicest news for last. Skip Hance was appointed at the beginning of 1986 as Dartmouth's vice president of development and alumni affairs. He leaves Harvard Law School where he had been director of development for the past two and a half years and prior to that was headmaster of Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Conn. (The presumption is that if you can be headmaster and responsible for 300 girls, boarding, that you are ready for anything.) In spite of occasionally gentle lapses, it is obvious that the College is a great good judge of character, and we can only but express our satisfaction that one of ours is now everybody's.

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