The sound and fury
The Newsletter of the
great class of 1958
Vol. 52
January, 2010
Tom Maguire: Dear John: My fraternity brother, Mike Wygant, and his wife, Lee, were invited to Traverse
City by our regional International Affairs Forum where Mike spoke to and answered questions from an audience of around 200 about the Central Asian Republics Kazakhistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajakistan, and
Krygyzstan. Ours is a reasonably sophisticated gang: James Baker and David Broder were recent speakers, so
Mike obviously followed good company.
Mike began with the domination of this Asian region by the Soviets, and described the culture, economic and political similarities and diversities of these now independent countries. He pointed out the continued influence of Russia (which still treats these countries as its fiefdoms) and of
the Chinese and the United States (our Special Forces launched the initial attack on Afghanistan from a base in
Uzbekistan.) Afterwards, Mike continued his remarks during a small dinner gathering. I was approached with
or overheard comments ranging from very favorable to enthusiastic about his presentation. Prior to the lecture,
our local newspaper had interviewed Mike, and he had spoken to an international relations class at our local college.
Subsequently, Gladys and I took Mike and Lee on an extended tour of the area, pointing out our many
cherry orchards (which produce over 75% of the sour cherries in the country) and vineyards and wineries and,
of course Lake Michigan, which they had never seen. (Many do not realize the vast area of the lake - 400 miles
long by 100 miles at its widest to almost 850 feet at its greatest depth.)
Mike and I talked late into two nights solving most of the nation’s problems and expressing our frustration over the inexplicable alienation of many alumni by the Dartmouth Board of Trustees. (As we know, participation has dropped from over 70% in our day to some 50%; I never would have given a dime after our 50th
had I known that the Board was to be diluted and our petition members kicked out after serving their terms.)
But all in all, we had a great time. A photo of the four of us is enclosed.
Lee, Tom, Gladys, and Mike
Chik Onodera: Dear Editor of the Sound and Fury: I have sent by separate E-Mail a photo taken recently in
Tokyo with the Bill Breers, class of ‘57, Theta Delta Chi, the Chick Igayas, ‘57, Theta Delta Chi, and the Onoderas, Theta Delta Chi.
The picture was taken in front of the Tokyo Club, Downtown Tokyo, upon the visit of the Breers to Japan to attend the Kyoto Prize Award ceremony. Bill is the one who recommended me for the Award.
We had a wonderful dinner reunion, reminiscing about the Good Old College Life in Hanover, including
fraternity life at Theta Delt.
From left to right: Chik Onodera, Kay Onodera, Peggy and Bill Breer, and Chick Igaya and his wife
With my best regards, Chik.
P.S.: I am joining Steve Waterhouse at the Carnival in Vail, Colorado in February, 2010, but Chick Igaya cannot
make it due to his heavy involvement as V.P. of the International Olympic Committee in the Vancouver Olympics, which are taking place at the same time.
Phil and Diana
Livingston
in
Alaska
Bob Blair: Frank Gado’s recent long letter regarding College investments, investment policies and the mindset of those trustees charged with overseeing these investments, does raise what seems to me to be a good argument for seeking greater diversity of background among the trustees make-up.
I have not read the bios of the current trustees but perhaps we have, or have had, too many financiallyoriented types as trustees. It seems, albeit from my relatively uninformed perspective, that the College’s collective goal in selecting trustees has been to not only find people who are both very capable and have the time, but
to also weigh the numbers towards those who are financial ‘powerhouses.’
This approach, if true, obviously bestows two advantages: the first is that the College has the opportunity to benefit from the guidance of trustees who are probably leaders in their own fields, the second is that such
people have a higher chance to be a source of future financial largesse to the College.
I would suggest that if Dartmouth’s trustees had come from many fields and ranges of financial well-being, those charged with making the investment policies might have adopted a more conservative program than
the investment mix that was chosen in the last two to three years.
I believe the College’s investments, like most of our own, will recover to healthy levels, but it is a sobering thought to think about the magnitude of hard won alumni contributions that are represented in the percentage of current losses.
The argument for having some trustees who are in business for themselves, and who are not movers and
shakers in the financial or corporate business weorld, seems intuitively evident. I don’t truly know this, but I
suspect the current trustee make-up, absent the interjection of the alumni/ae petition trustess, is and has been a
highly self-perpetuating process. Bob
Sandra Roak; Please remove Dave from the mailing list - he has Pick’s Disease (a frontal-temporal lobe dementia) and no longer enjoys the newsletter. Thank you. Editor’s note: Sandra - We will see that this is done.
We are so sorry for what you and Dave are going through and our prayers are with you.
Frank Sands:
Hi John. To complete the frosh hockey ‘58 lineup, Dick Stewart is in the back row at right just behind
Dick Shanaman; 4th from left is Tippy Thalheimer (Just to right behind Andy Thomas).
Hey John: How about giving Gado’s diatribes a vacation? He’s had his say at significant expense to
Dartmouth, his day in court literally and his gripes out-voted by alumni open ballot. There’s got to be more
relevant things to discuss and occupy our time and attention. Please!!!! Happy Holidays!
Editor’s note: Frank: I was the one who began the discussion - remember? - with the editorial in which I suggested that, in light of the losses in the College’s endowment resulting from the Trustees’ investment practices, if
there were conflicts of interest between the trustees’ roles as investment advisors to the College and their roles
in the private sector as investment bankers, then the “significant expense” that everyone seemed to be latching onto as the excuse for giving up the50-50 representation on the Board of Trustees would look like “chump
change.” So laying the blame on Frank for the“significant expense to Dartmouth” was striking, because this
was the type of disparaging comment, as you might recall from my initial piece, that got me started in the first
place.
I agree that there are more relevant things we might be discussing, but as alumni, shouldn’t we at least
be entitled to ask questions about what happened to the money we contributed?
Finally, Frank, I’m hoping you might agree that dismissing Frank Gado’s research on the questions I
raised - as “gripes” and “diatribes” - adds more heat than light to the exchange.
Al Gazzaniga:
Harv Wilson: Ed. Note: Harv sent the below attachment from the 12/02 edition of The Dartmouth
college works to avoid conflicts in investments
By Tatiana Cooke, December 2, 2009
Dartmouth, in suspending the search for a new chief investment officer and ceding control of the College’s investment office to a Board of Trustees committee in November, created the potential for significant
conflicts of interest — several trustees are in the investment industry. College officials, however, affirm significant safeguards have been put in place to avoid conflicts in the temporary arrangement, which is not uncommon
among colleges and universities.
David Russ, Dartmouth’s previous chief investment officer, left the College in June to head Credit
Suisse’s new Investment and Strategies Solutions Group. The investment office currently reports to an investment committee, chaired by Trustee Stephen Mandel Jr. ’78, that was previously a Board finance subcommittee.
Former Trustee Peter Fahey ’68 Th ’69 is assisting Mandel, who founded the investment firm Lone Pine Capital,
as vice-chair of the investment committee. Fahey is a retired limited partner of Goldman Sachs.
“I have been told that we take every precaution to ensure that we don’t have conflicts of interest when
we are thinking about specific funds that are related to specific members of our Board or specific alums, and
we follow the rules very carefully,” College President Jim Yong Kim said in an interview with The Dartmouth
Editorial Board on Tuesday.
Mandel will recuse himself from any matters related to his firm, according to Dartmouth senior vice
president and strategic advisor Steve Kadish, and Dartmouth’s general counsel’s office is currently reviewing
the College’s conflict of interest protocol, Kadish said. In addition, Kim said that in the name of transparency,
any transactions involving a potential conflict would have to be advertised in a newspaper.
William Jarvis, the managing director of the education nonprofit Commonfund, said in an interview with
The Dartmouth that the College’s situation is common — investment committee members often have experience
in the investment industry — and is not problematic as long as safeguards are put in place.
“Not everybody has a chief investment officer — sometimes you have an investment committee,” he
said. “I wouldn’t say that there’s necessarily a set structure or formula that has to be observed.”
Cornell University, Yale University, Princeton University, Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University and Williams College all currently have chief investment officers, according to their
respective web sites. Middlebury College’s endowment is overseen by its administration and the investment
committee of its board of trustees.
Dartmouth’s investment committee will provisionally oversee the investment office for the next year,
Kadish said.
“If this doesn’t work out well, or if there are things that we learn about doing this that shows it isn’t optimal, then I think we will make a change,” Kadish said.
Kadish said that Mandel’s service as committee chair will give the investment office the opportunity to
work with and learn from “one of the best investors in the U.S.”
“It’s a very healthy moment of learning what we have and then deciding where we want to go,” Kadish
said.
Although recent investment committees have functioned without a vice chair, Fahey’s experience will
make him a valuable member of the team, Kadish said.
“Peter has had the advantage of being on the Board and on the investment committee, and has had the
chance to work with the investment office for about six months,” he said.
Nick Stevens: Hi, John; As is your conscientious custom, you continue to create a classy-looking newsletter
with comprehensive content and cogent editorial comment. Your something-for-everyone policy of letting anyone speak his mind is exactly right, and I thought your reasoned rejoinder to Skip Coggin’s objection to including political discussion in the S&F (Oct issue) was both deft and civil; it was neither lengthy nor belabored, nor
did it impugn Skip’s right or his motives to comment as he did. You simply restated your long-standing policy
as to what you publish. Your subsequent apology in the Nov issue was generous to a fault since what you were
apologizing for was not a snub to Skip but rather a simple reminder of existing practice. --Nick—
Skip Coggin: Dear John: I accept your apology in the November issue of the Sound & Fury, but I was partly
to blame because my letter to which you referred was a little hard to follow. My English teachers always taught
me to avoid “compound sentences or paragraphs” putting two different thoughts in the same sentence or paragraph, and I broke that rule. I’ll try to be clearer in this letter.
You also asked for a photograph of lovely Erika Knierim, with whom I had the pleasure of winning the
Women’t Board of Ravinia’s dance contest this summer. Ravinia is the summer home of the Chicago Symphony, and Gersh and Sally Abraham live within walking distance. They kindly provide me and my wife with a
parking pass so that we can walk there, too. Erika is a recent law school graduate, and is looking for a job; she
is one of the members of our Transition and Support group that I described in the October newsletter.
Unemployment is a crisis in our country. We have the highest unemployment rate (10%) since the Great
Depression, particularly people over 55, and most of the unemployed have been out of work for almost a year!
All of us probably know someone or several people who are unemployed. It will mean a great deal to them if
you just pick up the phone and offer assistance, to talk, to buy them lunch or to make a contact on their behalf.
There but for the grace of God go us!
Ted Harris: Hi Murph - Eileen and I had a great dinner with Joe Blake and Tryg and Victoria Myhren in
Denver at the Brown Palace late September. Joe is frantically busy in his new job as Chancellor of the Colorado
State University system. Tryg is busy as ever, taking on responsibilities at Denver U. His son Tor is co-creator
of “City Lax - an Urban Lacrosse Story.”
Sam Smith: John - Was happy to receive the Sound and Fury by email. That solves my summer problem
when 2nd class mail is not forwarded. Would it not make sense to find out who wants to receive by email - in
order to cut down on the number of issues that go out printed on paper, and thus cut down on the postage and
printing costs? Larry Weltin tells me that Andy puts the newsletter in our class website, but since the production of the newsletter is not on a specific schedule, a specific email distribution when it is ready would be best.
Maybe I should be talking to Andy.
Ed. Note: Thanks for your thoughts, Sam. I think your idea is worth a shot. The only concerns I have are about
the process in which we “find out who wants to receive by email.” As you might know, the history of our classmates in responding to outreach for new ideas is a rather spotty one, and I’d hate to see any classmate “fall
between the cracks” of the communication grid and miss out on both the email transmission and paper/snail
mail versions of the Sound and Fury.
Thus, the burden should be totally on our classmates, not only to
1. Opt out of the printed version, but also, to
2. Keep Andy and our class current with any email address changes.
So here goes - to all classmates - if you’d rather receive the newsletter by email only rather than on
paper by snail mail - drop a note to Andy Thomas. Don’t do it through me. Andy is the one who has everyone’s
email address, and he is copied in on all the newsletters - whether we do the printing and mailing from North
Carolina or from Hanover. So let Andy know if you wish to opt out of the printed-on-paper newsletters.
Andy’s email address is Dahtmuth58@aol.com.
When you notify him, tell him that you don’t want to receive the paper version of the newsletter any
more, and that you just want to have the Sound & Fury sent to you via email at your email address. Then, make
sure Andy has your correct email address. (And be sure to keep Andy current with any changes)
Finally - I repeat: Don’t give me any of this information or expect me to make the changes. If you do,
I’ll probably lose the instruction, disregard it, or forget entirely that you sent it to me. Do it with Andy.
Thank you Sam for getting me off the dime on this.
A True Story
I was having trouble with a certain bathroom appliance so I called Benjamin Franklin plumbing. The
plumber gave me the sad news that repairing my fixture was out of the question. He pulled out a catalogue and
convinced me that if I bought his top of the line model for $830.00, my problems would be solved.
With the dismal record of our football team the past two years and the College losing around $900 million in the funding of its endowment, guess the name of my new appliance.
The Honest to God Truth:
(And it may very well be that
some vengeful Yalie owns
Benjamin Franklin Plumbing)
My brand new toilet is called
“The Dartmouth”
A final note (Something you might have known all along): I am on the Watch List of Suspected Terrorists.