Class of 1971

Larry Alquist
lalquist@emh.org
Greetings from the Saudi Arabia of Wind. This is in reference to a talk I heard recently by an engineer at the University of Maine (Habib Dagher). Evidently there’s a bunch of wind off the Maine coastline in winter (heat our homes by wind+electricity+heat pumps).

Two of our three kids are in graduate school; Greta in urban planning at the Humphrey Institute (an intern in a St. Paul planning office optimizing bus and bicycle routes), Erik in Miami University physics department working as a TA. Ingrid is the sole college kid; a junior math major at Bowdoin and is spending next semester in Granada, Spain. My wife Patti graduates in December in resource economics and will be well equipped to have a positive impact in many areas (perhaps 3rd world assistance). I still enjoy working in radiation therapy physics at the hospital by the Penobscot. Patti and I relish precious Maine summer days at our cabin by the lake and would welcome any Carls who happen to find themselves in the Bangor area.

Class of 1972

Ken Bowen
kbowen314@earthlink.net
411 North Lombard Avenue
Oak Park, IL 60302
(708) 524-9095
Ken Bowen continues to gleefully mash art and science as a teacher, designer, and gofer at Latin School of Chicago: He recently designed and built a foot-bridge supported only by it’s handrail and regularly references his physics training when teaching CAD drafting, theatre lighting and color theory. He studied petroleum psyco-politics in a scenic design for “Madwoman of Chaillot.” He continued his anti-war activism in that production as well as in “Antigone,” “Catch 22, and Thurber’s “Jabberwock”, and branched into deeper psychological terrain for Hellman’s “Children’s Hour” and the Ratigan play “Separate Tables.” Inspired by the Large Hadron collider, Ken recently began studies in non-Euclidean particle interactions: he bought a used pool table that isn’t flat. Optics, audio, rigging tackle, and deep, dramatic character study: it all boils
down to impedance matching :-)

Bob Bruce
bobbruce1@verizon.net
19900 Southwest Gassner Road
Beaverton, OR 97007-6004
(503) 642-7643
Hello everyone, its been a number of years since I have sent any news. I have been doing some very interesting work (it’s about time) fairly late in my career. After leaving Tektronix, I was with a computer graphics company for over 2 decades where we eventually got involved in air traffic control systems and medical imaging. The latter was the closest I came to using my PhD in Biomedical Engineering.

Several years ago I joined a startup company developing a continuous glucose monitor for diabetics.This has been a fantastic opportunity to expand out of my traditional electronic instrumentation slot and use my chemistry and physics background from Carleton. We will be bringing some rather innovative medical devices to market based on mechanics that I learned way back in Bob Reitz’s and Bruce Thomas’s classes.

Carol and I celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary in August and all the kids (son and 3 step-sons) are more-or-less “grown” and “semi-independent”. I have rekindled my interest in music with a vengeance and play French horn and oboe in several community orchestras as well as trumpet in a brass band, where we occasionally play polkas and oldies at retirement homes.

Class of 1973

Michael Lauterbach
michael.lauterbach@lecroy.com
313 Blake Circle
Hamden, CT 06517
(203) 777-7780
Holiday Greetings !
It is turning cold in Connecticut and feels like the right time to write a holiday newsletter contribution. My wife, Margaret, and I took a cruise to Alaska this year to visit my sister Terri (class of 1975). It was our first cruise and a very nice experience. A few weeks ago in Washington DC Margaret received a rare award (only given once previously) as Nurse Researcher of Year. She is in her fourth year as Dean of the Yale Nursing School. I continue to work for LeCroy Corporation with primary duties to teach seminars, broadcast net seminars and write papers concerning methods for testing high-speed electronic devices. My longest trip this year was to Penang (Malaysia), Manilla, Hong Kong and four cities in India. I was sorry to miss the reunion this year but it was at the same time as the cruise so I am hoping to see everyone five years from now. We are spending two weeks at our vacation home in Vermont over Christmas and New Year’s where I expect to see plenty of snow.

Class of 1974

Dayton Jones
djones@jpl.nasa.gov
224 Starlight Crest Drive
La Cañada, CA 91011
Greetings. This past year we had a great time at the Carleton reunion along with our daughters Alice (16) and Ellen (14). We expect to attend reunion next year as well. Our big news this year is Debra’s success in selling two novels to Simon & Schuster. The first one, Daughter of Kura, will be out on August 2 - and is already listed on Amazon. Debra’s pen name is Debra Austin. Dayton’s work at JPL continues to involve large arrays of radio telescopes, both for astronomy and for spacecraft tracking. The science and engineering part is fun; the management and lobbying less so. Our kids have made it half way through their teenage years without felony records or obvious psychoses, an unexpected feat for which we can take no credit. May your families, jobs, and holidays be excellent in every way.

Class of 1975

Timothy Brunner
brunner@snet.net
(203) 431-3011
Big news is that Sally and I are GRANDPARENTS. My daughter Emily had baby Cora roughly 8 months ago. After much testing and intense scrutiny, we have determined that Cora is indeed the cutest baby in the world. We will continue the experiments. Meanwhile our oldest son Max is finishing up his MBA at UC Irvine, and has found time for taking advantage of the excellent surfing and mountain biking the area offers. His younger brother Theo has figured out how to turn his volleyball skills into a job, and will be spending the next year in Thessaloniki Greece as a middle hitter for the local professional team. Lydia will graduate in May, meaning our very last tuition payment (though the equity loans will live on and on ). We have really enjoyed being close enough to her school to see some of her work in theatre.

Regards to our friends, and if you find yourself in NYC area, consider a visit.

Kathleen Krafft
kkrafft@sciencenter.org
10 Snyder Hill Court
Ithaca, NY 14850
607-272-0600 x25
It’s been another busy, crazy year managing even more traveling exhibitions all over the country, plus in-house projects. I have 50’ of wall space now in my office with 2’ deep shelving up to 14’ high, all loaded with spare parts for the six exhibitions we’ve developed and the six that other museums have asked us to tour for them. Everything from purple sand to computers to video projectors to light fixtures to power supplies to yellow foam balls to etch-a-sketches. Never in my wildest dreams, when I volunteered to build one exhibit in 1991, did I imagine that I’d be emailing people about taking care of leeches and mosquitoes -- for a traveling exhibition called “Attack of the Bloodsuckers” that we’ll host here this winter, and get ready for a national tour.

http://www.sciencenter.org/exhibits/travelingexhibit.asp

All three daughters are doing very well. Youngest is a junior at Carleton majoring in Japanese and linguistics, but on a program in Japan this fall- living with a host family, taking classes, and exploring the country. It’s been a fabulous experience.

Sally (Fairman) Mills
sfmills@sbcglobal.net
Now that my children are off living their own lives and I can find a better job and move, both the job market and the real estate market evaporate! So I am glad that I am employed, still at Schaum Publications, and I am both fixing up my house to sell and improving my job skills by taking accounting classes. When opportunity knocks, I plan to be ready.

My daughter, Leslie, is working at the Discovery Center science museum in Rockford, IL where many of the staff have worked with Kathy Krafft and the Sciencenter in Ithaca! Leslie takes educational presentations on the road, doing planetarium shows, liquid nitrogen demonstrations and shooting off potatoes, among other things. Pretty good for a creative writing major and museum studies minor! Kelly is doing really well in her 2nd year at Syracuse University studying psychology. Kyle is a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin in Madison having switched from vocal performance to landscape architecture - so who knows what he’ll finally choose? He was too invested in the party crowd last year, but seems to be doing better this year.

I had the pleasure of seeing Dayton Jones, Debra Grubb and their lovely daughters at the Carleton Reunion this past summer. We agreed we need to organize another reunion of at least the Physics classes of “74 & ‘75 and maybe more. Let me know what you think - Reunion 2010 or 2009 (in about 6 months)?

Lawrence Sparks
lawrence.sparks@jpl.nasa.gov
2848 Orange Avenue
La Crescenta, CA 91214
I believe it has been awhile since I have managed to contribute to the Christmas newsletter, so I will try briefly to bring you all up-to-date. This year marks my 20th year at JPL. For the last eight years I have been employed in support of the FAA’s Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS), the relatively new airline navigation system based upon GPS. I continue to work on ensuring that the ionosphere does not cause undetected delays in GPS signals that could adversely affect flight safety. WAAS was commissioned in 2003, and my current work deals with improving system availability and anticipating the effects of the next solar maximum on the ionosphere on various system upgrades.

A highlight of the year in April was hiking the Greenstone and Routeburn Tracks in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. Dayton Jones and Debra Grubb invited us to accompany their family on this vacation, and my elder daughter Kathryne and I surprised them by accepting. It was a grand experience - highly recommended. Kathryne and I remained afterwards another week touring southern New Zealand. We particularly enjoyed an overnight boat trip on the Doubtful Sound on the west coast of Fiordland and a visit to Curio Bay, near the southern-most point in South New Zealand - two places that definitely felt like the ends of the earth. No question about getting away from it all.

My other significant news concerns a temporary promotion in my second life as a girls’ basketball coach. After eight seasons of coaching 11-13 girls in the community basketball league (four championships in eight years), I was asked by the high school staff to coach our local travel team, consisting of the all-stars in this age group who are being groomed for the local high school team. Unfortunately, most of the teams that have comprised our league in past seasons failed to field teams this year, causing the league to collapse. I was left to scour for games, nearly all of which were with club teams, most of whom were very, very good. (Those of you involved with youth sports will appreciate the challenge of having a local school team play club teams that recruit the best players from many schools.) It was a brutal season; the girls’ play improved dramatically, but the string of losses was a burden. This year, I have relinquished the head coaching position to a friend whose daughter is one of the team captains - I will be assisting. Our prospects are much better this year - the team has more talent and our schedule will include many school teams. Also I am looking forward to just coaching and not having to deal with the bureaucracy of setting up games and planning practices.

My elder daughter Kathryne started at Penn State in a PhD program in physics this fall. (I tried hard to get her interested in English literature, but physics must be in the genes - at least she has a strong familiarity with Shakespeare.) My younger daughter Athena transferred to Occidental College this fall. She plans to major in math and minor in Greek (of all things). As you probably know, Oxy is in the news a lot these days since Obama spent two years there. One faculty member explained to me that the election was a win-win situation for Oxy - if Obama won, it would be because he attended Oxy; if he lost, it would be because he didn’t graduate there.

Patti is busy grading papers, tending equipment and quilting. She characterizes her life as “middle age and middle class”. Being senior faculty at Harvey Mudd she is mastering the litany of “the administration doesn’t know what it is doing and the students aren’t as good as they used to be”. At least the quilting and research provide creative outlets. Best wishes for the new year.

Class of 1976

Marilyn Johnson
john2053@umn.edu
5226 11th Ave. So.
Minneapolis, MN 55417
This year I completed an M.S. in Soil Science. It was interesting being an older grad student - didn’t have to deal with the angst of being in my twenties, or the compelling search for a life mate, but juggling parenting, homemaking, occasional paid work and school was a learning experience. I haven’t really worked in Soils yet, but this fall I’ve had one job identifying and sampling prairie plants, and another extracting DNA from mycorrhizal plant roots. Field work was great when the weather was nice, and now I’m glad I’m indoors. Dave is still doing well at the library, and Andrew is taking driver’s ed!

Thomas Moore
tmoore@pomona.edu
www.physics.pomona.edu/sixideas/
This has been a difficult year for Joyce and I. The good news is that our daughters are doing well: Brittany is practicing law in Chicago and Allison is in an archeology Ph.D. program at Berkeley. However, during the summer I received a diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a cancer of the plasma blood cells. Since then, I have been undergoing chemotherapy and preparation for a self-bone-marrow transplant at City of Hope, currently scheduled for December 19. This will put me in LA’s City of Hope hospital for 2-3 weeks, and will involve a 3-month recovery period at home afterward, but promises to put the cancer into near-permanent remission. Joyce has been wonderfully supportive (the best spouse ever!) and my employer, Pomona College, has also been very understanding: I taught half time this fall (teaching upper-level QM) and am on paid medical leave this spring. I am looking forward very much to teaching full-time next fall. Please keep me in your thoughts and prayers during the next few months.

Class of 1977

Roger Johnston
rogerj(AT)anl.gov
Argonne National Laboratory
9700 S. Cass Ave, Building 206
Argonne, IL 60439-4840
This completed the first year at Argonne National Laboratory for me and the Vulnerability Assessment Team after 2 decades at Los Alamos National Laboratory. We’re working on R&D projects involving product anti-counterfeiting, cargo security, drug testing security, and nuclear safeguards. Janie and I agree that it is refreshing to now work for organizations that aren’t sleazy, belligerent, and incompetent.

Janie is now teaching earth science at Waubonsie Community College. She’s much appreciated, and having a great time, though she weirded out her students by teaching in a chicken costume at Hallowen. As is traditional in Illinois, the college is named after Chief Waubonsie (1765-1848) of the Pottowatomie Tribe, in honor of him being such a great sport about treaty violations, genocide, and such.

Janie’s daughter graduated from St. Andrews University in June, so we went to Scotland for commencement and to witness some of the University’s 600 years of bizarre traditions, like wapping the graduate on the head with a supposed piece of John Knox’s trousers. She’s now doing graduate work at Cambridge in modern history, and has shifted to a dialect of English we can better understand.

Our dog developed a fear of Japanese Beetles--which is strange since they neither bite nor show any interest in dogs. Fortunately there are rabbits, squirrels, turtles, frogs, cats, coyotes, chipmunks, gophers, possums, and horses on our property to provide distractions. Have a great 2009!

Duncan MacArthur
dmacarthur@lanl.gov
Nancy and I are still living in Los Alamos, NM. Recently I was made an acting program manager. This means that I get to see lots of interesting projects, but not work on any of them. Our big news is that our son Colin is now a member of the 2012 Carleton Class. Unfortunately, he shows no inclination towards physics.

Rick Snodgrass
rts@cs.arizona.edu
701 East Camino Alberca
Tucson, AZ 85718
(520) 742-0594
I dropped by Carleton last summer for a quick visit with my daughter Melanie on a fast college trip. It was neat seeing the place through her eyes. I’m still at the University of Arizona, now almost twenty years. One of my students has written code that ran on Mars in the Phoenix lander.

Bryan Suits
suits@mtu.edu
Still chugging along at Michigan Tech. This year I added a lab to my “physics behind music” course including a fun interference experiment using cheap ultrasonic transducers. I also got a second paper published on the theory behind the pendulum. The simple pendulum ain’t so simple.