CLASS OF 1963 | 2016 | ISSUE 1
Appearing for the first time in these notes, Tom Buxton, who lives on Whidbey Island, Wash., reports that he retired as director of program management at Boeing in 2000 after 32 years there. When he first started, he recalls that Boeing was “coddling along” the new 747 but wasn’t doing it well. Of course, the bugs got worked out and the rest is history. The last plane he worked on was the 777, “Boeing’s last metal plane; the newer 787 is plastic.” He has been married for 36 years to Tara Anderson, who had children from a prior marriage. Just in the last three years, they’ve gotten into grandparenting with the birth of three grandchildren. After Wes U, Tom went to Carnegie Mellon and got a degree in industrial administration. Then after a sojourn at Exxon, it was on to Boeing. Prior to his professional career, Tom easily “chose the Peace Corps over the war in Vietnam.” After training in the U.S. in creating agricultural cooperatives, was sent to Peru, in the Andes, east of Lima. The success of their team’s work depended on the presence of a strong local leader—which they didn’t always have. Tom did charitable work before retirement, which he still continues. He “nurtures” churches—helping with fund-raising to build, then flourish. He says he’d seen lots of good programs that focused on a specific problem but churches focus on the wellbeing of the whole person (and this he calls his “hobby”). Tara, is “big-time gardener” and, as they are both avowed “climate freaks,” they have sworn off travel, seeing it as leaving too big a footprint. So their travel is confined to the Cascadia region.
Living quite a long way from the Cascade Mountains, Bob Siegle in Philadelphia is not going to retire anytime soon. He loves his work as a pediatric radiologist and when I talked to him he was actually taking a 10-minute break. After Wes U he and Dan Hottenstein went through both their initial MD training and then their specialty training in radiology together. After his internship, Bob went into the USAF and served as a general medical officer at a base in Columbia, Mich. His focus was generally on pediatrics. His wife, Rita, is also retired, having worked as professional grant writer. They recently returned from a three-week trip to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
Dale Henderson went to the London School of Economics (M.S.Econ.) and then on to Yale (PhD). During his career, he spent 34 years in two stays at the Federal Reserve Board, ending as a senior adviser. In between and afterwards, he was a professor at Georgetown He has also taught at a number of other universities, including Yale and Copenhagen and has been a visiting scholar. His research-support activities include cofounding the International Research Forum on Monetary Policy, which holds regular conferences. He has published widely in the his field and is currently working on what he says may be his “last” research paper, a comparison of alternative methods for analyzing productivity increases, which may be too specialized to be of interest to the general public. However, he has two items which might be more interesting: a public lecture he gave in ’09, “All the Wrong Incentives: A Financial Perfect Storm”; and a monograph coauthored in ’13, “Maintaining Financial Stability in an Open Economy: Sweden in the Global Crisis and Beyond.” (He would provide URLs to where they can be found). Dale is also doing some remodeling to the home where he and his wife Bonny live. They have a son and a daughter and are hopeful that grandchildren will follow.
When a freshman at Wes U, in order to get a good gym grade, Dale tried out for the freshman soccer team. While he did get the good grade, it was a uphill struggle for him, since he’d never played any high school soccer, However, “I did appreciate the chance to participate in sports including soccer, wrestling and lacrosse though I was not much good at any of them and dropped them all by my junior year. Thank goodness I was better at other things.” The summer between his third and fourth year, Dale went to Malawi with Operation Crossroads Africa. His US team, interracial by design, cooperated with a team of African students in building a sports team dressing room adjacent to a school and playing field. The small size of their project was due to the government’s lack of support.
Under the heading of “one thing leads to another,” Dale suggested I contact Bill Roberts, who also went to Africa with Crossroads, to see if he remembered others. Bill, who worked in Gambia while there responded, with the names of Jim Dinsmore, Russ Richey and Dave Holdt and suggested that Dave might recall others. Dave had worked for Crossroads in Somalia during the summer of ’62, but had had a very interesting experience while in Nairobi. He and a couple of Crossroads friends were in a bar and hit it off with a nice African lady whose last name was Kenyatta. She invited them to her house the next day to meet her parents. Quite excited, they reported their forthcoming visit to Crossroads authorities and the next day they visited and spent a wonderful time with Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, who was just out of jail and about to become President of Kenya. Dave reports Mzee was a wonderful host and gentleman, delighted to talk to them and very appreciative of Americans coming to his country to help out. After a few hours there, a bus load of other Crossroads volunteers pulled up in front of the house having been alerted by Operation Crossroads of this wonderful opportunity! Mzee laughed, asking if he was now going to have to spend the next couple of weeks talking to “lots of American volunteers.” Dave recalled another less pleasant experience in Africa. He and two friends decided to hike up Mt. Kilimanjaro to a lodge run by an American priest, spend the night, and return the next day. But they left late and had not gotten to the lodge when it got dark. Suddenly they found themselves surrounded by 12 African men with bows and arrows. Neither group spoke the other’s language and it was not looking good. Suddenly a 10-year-old African boy happened by and heard them talking English, which he spoke quite well. He intervened and then explained to the Africans what these white men were doing and led them to the lodge (followed by the 12 armed men). After knocking on the lodge door, they were greeted by the priest who had a .45 in his outstretched hand. It turned out that about three miles away was an African priest in a similar lodge, who had been robbed by African bandits the night before—which explained why suspicion abounded. The American priest was from Connecticut and was very happy to have been the one who had taught the 10-year-old to speak English. Dave is now leading a memoir writing group under the auspices of UConn. He finds it helpful in his own memoir writing, and he enjoys the participants, who range in age from 70 to 94.
Please feel free to send me the names of classmates you’d like to read about in this column. And I’ll do my best to contact them.
BYRON S. MILLER | tigr10@optonline.net
5 Clapboard Hill Rd., Westport, CT 06880