After leaving Princeton, I graduated from Villanova University with a degree in accounting, a field which I quickly found to be too confining and uninteresting to me. After learning to fly as a hobby, I decided that a flying career would be more suitable to my temperament. I flew as captain for a small airline called Altair, until it closed its doors in 1982. I then led an unsuccessful employee reorganization attempt, which left me with the dubious honor of being the last president of the company. I began flying for Piedmont Airlines in 1984 and had to retire early from flying in 1992 due to a small but disqualifying medical problem. Not being the type to endure inactivity for very long, I started land surveying, eventually becoming licensed as a Professional Land Surveyor and now work for myself with the able help of my second wife, Irene, who certainly makes being self-employed a lot easier. Irene and I have been together for 27 years, and she is a wonderful life mate.


   I have two sons who are nearing 45, a fact of time that is hard for me to comprehend, as it seems like only yesterday that they were born. I also have three granddaughters.


   I must say that, even though I left Princeton over four decades ago, I really never left. I believe it to have been possibly the greatest place to grow up in the world and we also grew up in the best of times. I have friends that I have acquired along life’s road, but none greater than those I made in Princeton. I have maintained regular contact with my immediate group of friends, some since Mrs. Sutton’s kindergarten, a fact which amazes everyone I have met outside our home town. I feel a mutual closeness to everyone whom I see at our reunions, even though we have been apart for so many years. This closeness is unparalleled anywhere else I go. I returned to Princeton for the 15^th reunion, my first reunion, expecting no one to remember me and was gratified that everyone knew me, even though I had left Princeton two years before graduation.


   I would like to add that the teachers I had in Mercer School and PHS were better than almost any I encountered after I left. I believe they had a better understanding of what it was that we would really need in order to meet life’s challenges successfully, and I found later that the basic education and common sense thinking ability they gave us was vastly superior to that given to others who had been through the supposedly "better" or "advanced" schools outside our home state. I thank them very much.


   I wish everyone in our class all the best in the future and hope we can all maintain contact for many years. Thank you all for being my friends.