Spring 2017 Class News
Please note, entries with photos will be added to final letter by your liaison.
Years that had classmates pass and the college was notified are also documented in that class year.Years that do not have any class news submissions are grey.

1946
Deceased
June Hedges Current ‘46, Burlington, Iowa, February 13, 2017

Ruth Anne Fish’46, Denver, Colorado, January 21,2017

Marjorie Barkman Scott’46, Naples, Florida, November 29, 2016
1947
Deceased
S. Lewis Blight ’47, Anchorage, Alaska, July 7, 2015

Norene Anderson Elliott ’47, Rochester, Minnesota, November 14, 2016
1948
Deceased
Robert C. LeBeau’48, Bloomington, Indiana, January 4, 2017

Bette Cole Rega’48, Charlotte, North Carolina, January 15, 2017

Burton E. Smith ’48, Shelby Township, Michigan, October 22, 2016

Ralph V. Souders ’48, Cedar Falls, Iowa, November 23, 2016

Joan Crosley Goller’48, Lombard, Illinois, October 3, 2016
1949
Deceased
Betty Swan Brown ’49, Rockford, Illinois, January 28, 2017

Louise E. Rogers Souders ’49, Cedar Falls, Iowa, June 30, 2005
Albert Boysen
Betty and I have stopped our travels by personal motor-coach this year. 66 years of marriage have taken us to the lower 48 states and Alaska, and all provinces of Canada. 6 of the 7 continents by land, air and sea. (Missed Antarctica)

1950
Deceased
Martha Anderson ’50, Athens, Georgia, February 3, 2017

Jean HuxsolSebern’50, Charles City, Iowa, February 29, 2017

Virginia Soper Block ’50, Watertown, Wisconsin, December 10, 2016

June Kennedy Fellows’50, Kettering, Ohio, December 14, 2016
1951
Deceased
Richard ‘Dick’ Davidson ’51, Punta Gorda, Florida, March 25, 2015

Williard F. Hohensee ’51, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, January 24, 2017

Elmer A. Havens ’51, Green Bay, Wisconsin, November 22, 2016

Marjory Crosley Herder ’51, Huntsville, Alabama, January 4, 2017
1952
1953
Deceased
Lawrence Sanderson’53, Manchester, Iowa January 21, 2017

Ver Jean Chaffin ’53, Pebble Beach, California, November 14, 2016

1954
Deceased
Abbas E. Kitabchi ’54, Memphis, Tennessee, July 18, 2016

William V. Williams ’54, Estes Park, Colorado, January 23, 2017

Carol Moore Rich ’54, Fort Collins, Colorado, December 31, 2016

Harold E. Eklund ’54, Urbandale, Iowa, October 23, 2016
Donald Penn
I obtained a graduate degree in physics from Iowa State University, got a job teaching physics at Hibbing Community College in Minnesota, partly to be living in the north woods and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Went back to ISU for seven summer to teach physics there, and taught a session of mathematics at Cornell while on sabbatical leave from the regular job at Hibbing. As an avocation, I became a commercial pilot and flight instructor, spent a summer as a bush pilot, taught scads of people to fly and flew air ambulance out of Hibbing. I gave up flight instructing last year (couldn’t pass the physical exam due to cancer), but still do pleasure flying; two also-old guys and I bought an also-old airplane. Does this remind you of a movie? We have no intention of flying it into a barn, however.

1955
George Youtzy
I am a retired Clergy - Class of '55. We are 94 and 93 years young. We belong to a Service Club and are active in our church. We serve communion once a month and I am a leader of our men's study group and call on residents of Good Samaritan home where we live in a cottage.

Richard ‘Dick’ McKeen
I am going to indulge you with my recent experience on the Honor Flight for Veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam sponsored by the Gazette and The Eastern Iowa Honor Flight organization. A group of 85 veterans, plus guardians for each and staff totaling 175 flew from Cedar Rapids to Washington, D.C. to view all the war memorials. It was an awesome experience and a day I will always hold as extra special. We had a send-off with a large group of well-wishers, received at Reagan International by many greeters and a Hawaiian Band welcoming us. It was my 83rd birthday and the band sang Happy Birthday to me in English and Hawaiian. We began the tour of Memorials at the WWII Memorial where my best college friend and lifetime buddy Colonel James K. Miller ‘54, Ret’d U.S. Marines, living in Virginia, joined me and toured the next three Memorials. You can’t beat old Cornell friends. I was honored with his presence. I was honored to be selected as one of four members to place the wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Overwhelming!! We returned to the Eastern Iowa Airport after one of the most amazing days of my life to a welcome home group of over 500 cheering our return. It was an amazing awesome 83rd birthday. I was emotionally spent.

1956
Deceased
James L. Elliott ’56, Sycamore, Illinois, August 10, 2016

Elda M. Ewoldt ’56, Davenport, Iowa, January 23, 2017

Joan BrossBuchele ’56, Ypsilanti, Michigan, December 1, 2016

E. Dale Rathjen ’56, Crystal Lake, Illinois, June 14, 2006

Elaine Harris Rathjen ’56, Dundee, Illinois, November 27, 2016

Frederick Zimmerman III ’56, Cortland, New York, June 5, 2016
1957
Deceased
Jean Berglund Gustafson ’57, Carol Stream, Illinois, February 21, 2017
Richard A. Fleener ’57, Kingwood, Texas, January 29, 2017
Ronald Ball
I am about to retire from eight years of singing with a hospice cure group in this Aususta, Maine area.

1958
Deceased
Ralph L. Bredehoft’58,Flagler, Colorado, October 12, 2013
Jane Mess Pfefferkorn
Jane Mess Pfefferkorn described her experiences at the summer program in Chautauqua New York.
Bill’s grandfather was a concert pianist and we knew he had played at Chautauqua at the turn of the last century, so we thought we’d stop in and see if anything was still going. Well, we found a whole world.
A professor accurately said, “There is no way to tell someone about Chautauqua who has never been there.” After working up from a long week end to three weeks to five weeks to seven weeks, we now stay the entire nine-week season. We begin every day with an exercise class which is usually followed by another class like poetry. There are classes in anything you might be interested in starting as early as 7:00 a.m. and ending around 5:30 except everything stops at 10:45 for the big morning lecture by someone important on some timely topic related to the week’s theme. There are more lectures in the afternoon usually at 2:00 and 4:00 on top of classes. I forgot to mention that there is also a religious service every morning at 8:45. Then, at night there is always a major performance in the AMP. The Chautauqua Symphony plays three times a week. The Charlotte Ballet is in residence all summer and performs regularly, popular entertainment like Steve Martin, Carol Burnett, The Village People, etc. are on Friday nights. Sometimes big names like Ken Burns also present at night as well as in the morning. All of that has to be juggled against the opera, theatre, chamber music, student performances –the list goes on. The New York Times called it a place of “Plain living and high thinking.”
I evaluate the morning lectures so rarely miss one. I also take a writing class every week and usually one of Kaye Lindauer’s classes on such diverse subjects as Gilgamesh, Emily Dickinson, Renaissance art or Sufi poetry. Sometimes I even take a third class in visual art or something that catches my fancy, but that does wear me out. We begin our day before 8:00 and often are still going at 11:00 at night. We come home and need a rest. It feeds us all year. In addition to everything else, we have an entire group of Chautauqua friends that we look forward to being with. I just can’t tell you what a rich environment it is. I will tell you that one of my poems won an honorable mention in the end-of-season contest and I’ve just had another published in a local magazine.

Daniel Kellams
He recently published his second book, Mistaken for a King: Sketches of a Small-Town Boyhood in which he recounts incidents from his boyhood in Marion, Iowa. Paul Ingram, one of the most respected booksellers in the country, called it “A beautifully written memoir. It reads like something out of one of the big New York publishers. Dan’s book is the best home front memoir I have ever read.”
Recently, Dan spoke at Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City, a three-story massive writers’ shrine that often features nationally renowned authors and poets. Dan said he was awe struck to be invited. He described his book this way. “Many—maybe most—childhood memoirs are written by people who had unhappy childhoods. Mine is the opposite.”
Dan led a nomadic writer’s life that ultimately landed him in New York. Dan admitted he “put far more value on editing the Cornellian and Royal Purple and being in plays than I did in getting good grades.” However, Dan received a fellowship to Columbia University “which got me to New York—a place I had been drawn to for years. Columbia and New York City were huge culture shocks. Most of the Columbia professors were old newspaper or wire guys, and, in my view, incompetent teachers.” Dan tells that one professor said Dan was the best writer in his class, but in his final class report on Dan’s work, “He said he had no impression of me whatsoever.” Dan quickly learned how inconsequential he was in the Big Apple.
Dan’s career, largely as a freelance writer in the New York literary maelstrom, is a revelation for classmates who settled into comfortable and stable surroundings without the need to scramble for survival. After grad school, he served in the military as an army clerk because “I was able to type at fifty words a minute.” He was reassigned to West Point where he wrote promotional articles. “One article I published was in the Army Times about Ron Zinn, a cadet who had gone to Cornell for a year or two before entering the academy. He trained himself to be a race walker and made it to the Olympics. He was killed in Vietnam.”
After his military duty, Dan turned down a job with the Wall Street Journal, borrowed money and headed to Europe. Dan’s work there ranged from writing articles for the Cedar Rapids Gazette for $5.00 per article to editing for Radio Free Europe. He survived with borrowed typewriters that did not have a qwerty keyboard. He returned from Europe on a freighter with a pregnant wife, and lived at a New York YMCA “where rooms were cheap and they had a typewriter that required you to insert dimes to operate. This gave you perhaps an hour’s typing.”
“All but penniless and needing a job immediately,” Dan took a job with S&H Green Stamps, which led him “away from journalism forever. Public relations paid better than newspapering, and I had a family to support. End of discussion.” Over 18 years with S&H (“about eight years too long”) Dan held several executive jobs in public relations as the company expanded. “I did not have a strong corporate spirit, but was kept around for my creative talent. By the time I was let go in a massive downsizing in 1980, I hated the place.”
After some freelancing Dan, joined a small firm that promoted a series of outdoor expeditions and outdoor events sponsored by Camel cigarettes. Dan indicates he met some legendary mountain climbers and speed skiers including the first American to hang-glide off Mount Everest. His best friend was an “all-around adventurer who was killed by a shotgun blast during a botched holdup, as he and his wife camped in the mountains of Pakistan.”
Dan next joined some former associates in New Mexico. He opened a New York office for them where he did work for E. F. Hutton, which was involved in a huge scandal. “I went to Hutton almost every day to help deal with the crisis. I was writing explanations, rebuttals, denials, and corrections like mad. This led to many other writing assignments at Hutton.” Dan wrote that he enjoyed his time in New Mexico, but his friends’ business was failing, so he returned to New York.
Dan, then well into middle age, told me, “I was barely making enough to cover my expenses and was drawing down my credit cards. I couldn’t scare up much business. I walked in a cloud of worry. Then one day it lifted.” An old client asked for “writing help.” Dan’s career quickly moved forward. He wrote for the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association “which had a ton of research on sports participation that was not being properly promoted or shared with member companies. At this time, Dan “created and then edited a global newspaper for Reebok.”
These projects and work for Price Waterhouse “kept me busy—and nearly overwhelmed—for about twenty years” when Dan took time off to write his first book, A Coaches Life: Les Hipple and the Marion Indians in 2007. Dan gradually reduced his freelance work, and is now retired and living in Arizona.

Dorothy Ashbacher Lincoln-Smith
Dorothy Lincoln-Smith '58 received the Spirit of Philanthropy Award from the Association of Fundraising Professionals National Philanthropy Day in Scottsdale, Arizona.

1959
Deceased
Roger E. Schield’59, Aguanga, California, January 5, 2017
1960
Deceased
Ronald D. Campbell’60, Skokie, Illinois, May 19, 2016
1961
1962
Deceased
Charles M. Albright ’62, Pickerington, Ohio, March 3, 2017

1963
Dennis Zuber
Elaine and I have been concentrating on our Bucket List these past years. Small trips like Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick/Nova Scotia with it's 30 foot tides (we saw two from California surf up the Chocolate River as the tidal bore came in) to an exciting trip to New Zealand last February. For those of you who might not have New Zealand on your Bucket List you need to add it. It's the most spectacular country we have ever visited by far....and yes we'd go back in a heartbeat. For years we have been using a tour company that limits size to no more than 16. We've used it for many tours with the McDermands, Schnacks and friends to Turkey, Thailand, Peru, South Africa, etc. Our group, comprising 10-14 people, it's almost like a personal tour.
If there is any Cornell classmate interest please contact me. Don't know where or when or why, but we will put you on our 'travel companion list' and let you know. You can then decide if it's good for you. On our New Zealand tour I was able to fill all 16 slots which gave us all a very substantial discount.
In February 2017 we are planning a trip to Antarctica. Not necessarily on our BL but we are joining friends and it's a continent we haven't been to.
Here at home we work on our small acreage some call it farming, volunteer (this summer raising Monarch Butterflys. another story) still restore old cars and tractors and enjoying our grandchildren the latest 6 months old.

Ernest Norris
What we are looking forward to in the next few months:
Ann and I are planning to visit friends in Phoenix for Thanksgiving.
I am looking forward to another downhill skiing season at Purgatory Resort.
In April we will be attending Ann’s cousin’s reunion in Chocowinity, NC. We are still in the planning stages for that trip and don’t know if we will fly or drive. If we drive we may stop for a few days in Ashville, NC, to check out the city as a possible relocation spot when/if the winters in Durango are no longer enjoyable.
Ann is looking forward to having the braces on her teeth removed in 2017. Having braces at 70+ years of age says a lot about her positive outlook for the future. What a gal!
Each day is precious and we plan to do our best to enjoy each one to the best of our ability.

Thomas Adams
I am writing this just after returning from a Cornell visit. Last weekend, Nancy and I were at Cornell for a combined Board meeting and Homecoming. And quite a weekend it was. The weather was spectacular, the Hilltop looked wonderful with all the fall colors and lots of Homecoming activities. For the first time this year, the Homecoming dinner was held in The Commons (previously they had the dinner in the Small Mulit-Sport Center). This gave the event a more intimate feeling and, importantly, allowed people to participate in post dinner activities around the Commons. Among other items they had dueling pianos on the Orange Carpet and off in a side room a “few” people watched the Cubs clinch a World Series berth. Very nice!
One final update. Our 1963 Fireplace continues to burn brightly and our Endowed Scholarship continues to grow and provide funding to a student each year. And at least one of our classmates has added some funding to the base amount each year. Perhaps we should consider doing that. Doesn’t have to be a big number, just a little bit each year.

Karin BundesenBaltzell
My “looking forward” moment is moving from a condo to a house. It is rather like a reverse migration for someone in my age range, but I am so excited about the change and the new life awaiting me having a house and yard and space around me again. Jim and I are packing like crazy and finding joy in getting rid of lots of material items that will have no place in our “future” life.

1964
Deceased
Patricia MungerSokolis’64, Wheaton, Illinois, November 2, 2016
1965
Deceased
Janice Rohde Adamson ’65, Green Valley, Arizona, September 23, 2016
Ralph Allen
After 45 years on the faculty of the University of Virginia (Charlottesville,VA) I retired on Oct. 1, 2015. Since my graduation from Cornell in 1965 as a Chemistry Major and a member of the Men’s Honor Residence, I have been married to my High School Sweetheart (Karen) for 51 years. I attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), graduated with a PhD and developed the procedures and did the analysis of the first samples of moon rocks (I continued these studies while at the University of Virginia). I spent the 1977-78 academic year as a Fellow of the Royal Norwegian Council for Scientific and Industrial
Research at the Institute for Atomic Energy in Norway (and later as a Marshall Foundation Fellow) studying the impact of atmospheric pollution. I spent 37 years as consultant to the FBI National Academy and to the FBI Laboratory (including 10 months on inter agency loan to the FBI Laboratory Director).
I served as a tour speaker for the American Chemical Society (speaking at Cornell on one
occasion) from 1984-2007 and on the faculty for the Institute for Facilities Management
(a program for the Association of Physical Plant Administrator of Universities and Colleges) from 1984 –2012. During the fall semester of 2015, I was on the faculty for the Semester at Sea program (visiting 16 countries with this seagoing classroom). In addition to being a Professor of Chemistry (as well as Prof. of Environmental Sciences and Prof. of Public Health), I served as Associate Vice President of Research. As Professor Emeritus I continue writing a textbook for Forensic Scientists.(Photo)