Hendrix Bodden is CEO of a cybersecurity technology company. He lives in Chicago with his wife (a hospital emergency room nurse) and four children. This summer he plans to visit Colby for the first time since our graduation to attend the Class of 1975 reunion. * Denise Martell Martin is very involved with family, especially two young grandchildren (and she has two more on the way). In her free time she engages in entrepreneurship, having started a couple of new businesses recently. She looks forward to her 40th wedding anniversary later this year, with a celebratory full-family vacation planned. All in all, she says, “2015 looks to be a banner year on several fronts.” * Sandy Pardee reports a significant life event: he was married in April 2014 to a wonderful woman, Catherine, from Quebec City. He will be moving there as soon as his visa is approved (which he hopes will happen in 2015—the process can be long). Sandy notes, “We had so much fun at the wedding that we had a second one in August at my sister’s home in Rhode Island. That was attended by Colby grads John Stivers ’81, Sara Frolio O’Leary ’79, and Everett Briggs ’80.” Sandy vacationed with R. P. Higgins in Florida last October. Their Colby band, Pearl, will play at this year’s Colby reunion. * Susan Harvey spent a week in Provence with Vicki Johnson last September. They “saw a lot of Roman ruins, soaked up the local art and countryside, drank a lot of rosé, and enjoyed the food.” Vicki then departed, and Susan continued on to Segovia, Spain, where she visited old friends from her junior year abroad 35 years ago. “The decades just melted away, and it was just like old times. How’s that for a college reunion?” * Ken Colton reminisced about Jan Plans. He remembers his first, which ended with him being grilled by the Government Department for his final paper (“Felt more like the Star Chamber than a discussion. I’ve never forgotten it!”). On a more positive note, Ken also remembers chemistry professor Wayne Smith taking time and effort one Jan Plan to arrange for Ken to use analytic equipment at other institutions so Ken could (I’ll just quote here) “get data from which to estimate how linear was the polyethyline versus the branching from the main polymer chain.” * As for me, I remember one Jan Plan when I learned navigation from physics chair Dennison Bancroft, who was an expert on navigation. For example, he owned a yacht that he sometimes used to teach physics majors about how ocean waves are really springs and can be manipulated, using the application of intelligently directed forces (like pilot Bancroft’s finely honed steering techniques), into throwing a smallish boat sailing Penobscot Bay into wildly complex fore-and-aft bobbing and deep port-to-starboard tilting oscillations—just as the laws of physics predict! While instigating this, he’d calmly cast glances at our faces, just to make sure no one was about to … lose faith.
Spring 2015