In fact the plane had not even left San Francisco yet-still standing on the tarmac with a “mechanical.” A disgruntled cell phone call to Murph revealed that tc would not be arriving Logan on the redeye at 0700 next morning, but would actually be departing SFO at about that time. That’s when the friendly skies threw their practiced monkey wrench into the works, providing no aircraft at the Maui airport for tc’s first leg to San Francisco. Then, having first grown up in Swampscott, MA, Mike reserved lodging at one of the nicer B&Bs in old Marblehead-where tc and Oscar Arslanian first lived with new training brides after graduation in 1961-and arrived a day or so before tc could fly in from Maui. Mike & Helene departed Florida more than a week before the Class Officers business in Hanover, planning to make several strategic stops en route, including his 50th high school reunion in West Orange, NJ. But share this esoteric vocation they did, as well as the zeal to pry into the personal histories of two of their favorite Dartmouth-connected writers, Robert Lee Frost (class of 1896) and James Hitchcock “Corey” Ford, Jr.
Michael Murphy, at the pinnacle of his industry, would be a five-star General tc, who worked college summers at the Union Oil terminal in Iwilei (Honolulu’s red light district during WWII) washing used oil barrels in preparation for the annual barge shipment of fuel to the leper colony at Kalaupapa, would amount to no more than a draftee grunt.
Drum reconditioners, of course, in common parlance are known as “barrel washers.” Now, if this intrepid duo were in a military organization of barrel washers, J. And so it came to pass, in the time of October, the days between Class Officers Weekend and Homecoming ‘07, that the only two trained steel drum reconditioners in the class of ‘61 set off across northern New England in search of the holy grail of wordsmithy.
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