Class of 1987 reunion 2007

Class Secretary: James Kircaldie, 64 Vineyard Rd., North Haven CT 06473

Class President: Paula Colahan, 14 Bayberry Ln., Beverly MA 01915, pmcolahan@attbi.com

Chris Hobler, who has ALS, continues to bring passion and hope to the organization he founded, ALS Hope, www.alshope.org. Recently, ALS Hope and Washington Univ. announced an important collaboration called The Hope Center. The center will involve the university’s neurology department and will be funded by ALS Hope. The goal is to have scientists in different fields working side-by-side to research the common threads between motor-neuron diseases (ALS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s) and, hopefully, find a cure. Over the summer, ALS Hope received some $3,000 in donations from Girls Kick ALS!, a group founded by Darcy Wakefield ’92 (see ’92 notes)…. Liz Lavigne has completed her doctorate in biology and medicine at Brown Univ…. Following Mariel Zagunis’s gold medal in fencing, Boston Globe reporter Mark Shanahan wrote a piece about fencing in the Boston area and included a personal anecdote: “It’s not an easy sport to get the hang of,” Mark wrote. “As a student at Bates College, I tried fencing, primarily to satisfy a physical-education requirement. But I also thought that for what my parents were paying in tuition, I should not only read about Rob Roy but learn to swashbuckle like the Highlands hero. Forget it. After a couple of semesters, I still could not master the fancy footwork or memorize the glossary of terms. (‘Displacement’ is a dodge, but what’s a ‘deception?’) If Errol Flynn was the archetype, I was Touché Turtle.”… Nadia White used a column in the Casper (Wyo.) Star Tribune to praise the teaching methods used by Bates Professor Dennis Grafflin. She said, in part, that he gave her “an important confidence in my own ideas and ability to use new information to build novel ideas.”