St Johns School - Rebel Yearbook (Houston, TX)

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?????--- ' February 12, 1961 DEAR CLASSMATE: Since our ten-year reunion is coming up in only a few months, Class Secretary Bill Symonds thought it would be a good idea for me to do some checking up beforehand, and mail this letter out to all of you fellow-grads of our old Alma Mater. Naturally, I felt unworthy of such a task, but you will all understand how hard it was to refuse that day up in his ofiice, with all four secretaries helping him to cajole me. So here is all of the news I could look up about our old chums, and we hope to see all of them next june. Of course, Bill has been keeping in touch with almost all of us, but for the benefit ofthe rest he is keeping pretty busy between New York and Houston, as well as holding positions on several Washington boards, in spite of his natural aversion to working for the Democrats. Bruce Harrington and Claude Fuqua both have offices in the new Cotton and Petroleum Building, and they are often seen playing golf together on Saturday afternoons, but their families keep them pretty well tied down on Sundays. Those of you who made the trip to Bruce's new ranch a few weeks back will remember how cute the twins were trying to ride horseback. Always a good host, Bruce has promised us some good deer hunting next season, and Pete Bowers expects to get away from his wife and come down from Canada, where he has been for almost a year engineering a new fish pipeline. It looks like Sue Dearborn won't be able to make it to the reunion by June, for she plans to stay on the Riviera through the summer with her husband, automobile racer and sportsman, Count Ivan Alexis. You probably all saw their picture in Life as she congratulated him at the finish line of the Paris-Marseille Grand Prix. She was planning to come back in time for the reunion on their eighty-nine foot sailing schooner, in which the couple has won several trans-atlantic cups, until the change in plans occurred. Most of the rest of the girls will be here, for as you know, Joan Wilson has been living on a luxurious ranch just outside Dallas and since her husband was called to Lake Maracaibo by some drilling problems, she has been flying to New York regularly to shop and visit with Marie de Menil, who has settled there for a little while to do some promotional work with the Metropolitan Opera. Neither of them should have much trouble getting away, and Betty Ann West writes from Paris that she is cutting short her annual trip in order to get back in time, though she is having to leave her husband in France. just last year. Joe Shimek was appointed to the post of Chief Strategic Coordinator by Presi- dent Truman. This keeps him very busy both in Washington and on inspection trips, for he is working on direct orders from the President to reduce efiiciency as much as possible not just in this country but all over the world. It is quite an honor to have one of our classmates become the first eight-star general in history. . Incidentally, Joe Slotnick has stayed relatively close to home since the publication of his paper on some discrepancies he found in the application of Planckls constant in the Unified Field formulas. In spite of the repercussions his work has caused in every Held from astronomy to nuclear physics, he has remained on the technical advisory board of the Houston-Amalgamated-United Geophysical Research Corporation, which has been working under some tremendous government contracts. Colonel del Valle has just been granted his retirement from the Marine Corps in view offthe revolutionary tactical methods he has helped to develop. As you know, he was one of the first induc- tees to be sent through college and graduate-school under plan V-13.14159, and his training seems to have really paid off in increasing the efficiency of the Marines from 11252 to l68W. Even in the short time he has been practicing, Dr. Jesse Dickson's name has spread far beyond the borders of our state. Not only has he been watching over our football team-undefeated now for seven years, or since the ninth grade we knew became seniors-but he has gained national pres- tige by his work with a variety of boy's organizations, including the Boy Scouts as well as several new and even more worthwhile bodies which he and a small group of public-spirited alumni helped to found. Among these, incidentally, is Jimmy Petersen, who has been very successful in his uprotection racket. Jimmy is still in Africa on his latest safari on which he hopes to bag some specimens of rare game which is said to abound in the country just north of the corner of Rhodes vw 28 44

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Head of Booster Club 1949-50, 1950-51g Honor Roll: Prefeet 19515 Review. Most Representative Senior Girl, . Biggest Party Girl, The Deb, wonderful parties, booster of the Booster Club. Ticket.v? Anybody want to buy some tickets? BETTY ANN WE.. Batty Betty' 0144-J JOAN ELIZABETH WILSON djoaniff' Dramaticsg Review, Yearbook 1951: 1950 History Career Girl. Ye olde grindef' 7: 44 f Award: Honor Roll: Prefect 1951 L Booster Club 1950-51. Most Likely to Suvveed, Most Typical Southern Girl,

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Avenue and 17th Street in Johannesburg. Jimmy writes us that he was surprised, on arrival, to find Pat Harkins, who has spent the last few years casting about the world. We have all read his two stories in the SatEvePost, as well as many articles in the Geographic, while his poetry seems to be enjoying a great vogue in California, where he and Robinson Jeffers plan someday to have adjoining towers. ' Incidentally, don't miss Cecil Carnes' latest book of collected Texiana. Written from his ranch out near Bill Voss,' it is made up of the cream of the anecdotes and history that have been exchanged around the big fireplace of an evening. Already the ranch is becoming known as a Mecca for those eager to talk over the old days of the Southwest, and Cecil himself has been hailed by critics as a most promising successor to such folklorists as Carl Sandburg and J. Frank Dobie. Bill Voss himself has entered the promising new field of rocket navigation, and it was he who helped engineer the automatic calculator that guided the Hrst unmanned experimental rocket to Mars last year. At least that's where it was supposed to go. Right at the moment he is forming an independent company with Bruce Laubach to build a ship, with Bruce as pilot, to capture the half- million dollar prize for the first American to stake a claim on the red planet. They explain that they need the money partly because Bruce's four children are trying to eat him out of house and home, and partly because of the inflated prices of model railroad parts. Noble Ginther and Fred Bessell are both in Hollywood at the moment, Fred staying with some friends he met in Cannes as an exchange student, and who adopted him as a sort of protege while he works at his screen career, while Noble has left his oil-exploration company in the hands of his junior partners to write some very successful movie scripts as well as an adaptation of his novel, Destry Rides Again and Again and Again, for the screen. The latest news from Broadway indicates that Frank Low and Fowler Osburn can count on an unlimited run for their hit adaptation of 'fHappy Will Tomorrow Be, and scouts from the Met are reputed to be after at least one of them. They will probably both be able to retire as a result of this success, for it seems to be potentially a bigger hit than South PaciHc, for which tickets are still unavailable. Mary Scott Daugherty and Jane Reynolds seem to be the only girls to make their homes in Houston, and they are both very active in civic affairs. Jane may well be elected president of the Junior League next year, and Mary Scott has had several starring roles in Little Theatre produc- tions, notably a revival of the old Ibsen drama, 6'Hedda Gablerf' Mary Scott's husband, by the way, is a high executive in the dashing new advertising firm of Dreyer and McGregor, Inc., which has already opened offices in Chicago and San Francisco, and was written up in the last three issues of Fortune as one of the best examples of American combative ability in business to be seen since the days of Morgan's midget. Billy Head has been very busy as chairman of several Dartmouth Alumni committees, in addi- tion to movie and radio commitments which keep him out of town a great deal. In fact, it was to prevent this that M.G.M. opened its Houston Studios to be used for all of his pictures, so now he is with us much more than formerly. He is probably best known for his portrayal of Tony in a new movie version of You Can't Take It With You, though he was chosen by a nation-wide poll in Quicker magazine as the official pin-up of the Woman's Army Corps. Tommy Moore is now retired, though he still spends time at the offices of his railroad and shipping line. His favorite project is the extension of his model railroad, which now covers four acres of River Oaks property and is hailed internationally as a masterpiece of HO-gauge crafts- manship. He expects that before long his four children will make a good construction gang and he will be able to sit on his twenty-foot control tower and direct their operations by loudspeaker. Mrs. Moore is getting needlessly annoyed with the railroad, to the extent that she is plotting with Bill Voss to build a model dive-bomber to blow it to bits, but I doubt if she will carry the plan through. As for myself, well you can probably understand that it has taken the whole six years since college just to write this letter. So I'll see you at the reunion. Yours for the Alma Mater, QEd. Note: From Roy's quarters at the Yale Club of New York comes word of his Yale appointment as Sterling Professor of Anasazi. His best-seller, Basketmaking Among the Pueblos, has recently been translated into Latvian and Arama1c.J an cc