It was a year without the “excitement” of evacuation due to wildfire :), but a year not without moment. Perhaps most noteworthy was the 50th anniversary of our graduation from Boston College. I’m a Golden Eagle!
While our class reunion was at the beginning of June, I had spent the previous 10 months or so working on a blog about our years in college and those tumultuous days. In doing ProudRefrain.org, I renewed friendships with some classmates and made new ones. I had a great time at the reunion and enjoyed so many wonderful moments with friends, old and new.
It was also the occasion for another personal appearance on Twitter (my first is shown a little later in the post). BC used me and my BC bowtie in a tweet about reunion.
As part of our Golden Eagle year, I made three trips to campus during the year, instead of the usual single annual sojourn. First was a “Winter Weekend,” when I joined the Sutherland Road gang (close classmates) for four BC men’s and women’s basketball and hockey games, all on the same weekend.
During that weekend, we squeezed in a brief meeting with new BC athletic director Martin Jarmond, who liked my retro Eagles jacket and tweeted a photo of us and it.
After the June reunion, the Andersons (Meredith, Winter, Adeline, and Alice) picked me up and we journeyed down to Martha’s Vineyard to visit sister/aunty Ann and Gordon. After too brief a visit, the Andersons brought me to West Yarmouth on the Cape, where I joined the gang of classmates for several days in a wonderful seaside “cottage.”
My final “East Coast” fling was in October, to watch the Eagles beat Miami and visit friends and family, including Julia and Sam in their new home.
Because of the truncated note last year, I wasn’t able to give the attention I would have liked to the December 1, 2017, marriage of Julia and Sam and their honeymoon later that month in Paris and Berlin. This summer, they moved from Athens, Ohio, to Columbus, where Julia works at Defense Finance and Accounting Services, the people who send me my Navy retirement check!
Meredith and Winter and the grandgirls came out at the end of February for a week or so. Did Disneyland/California Adventure again. Adeline turns 7 in January and is in first grade. Alice is 3 1/2. This is a very recent pic.
Dillon also changed jobs, moving from event coordinator for Deepak Chopra to grants administrator at Scripps Research Institute. He works right across the street from Torrey Pines Golf Course, where I marshal at the Farmers Insurance Open. At the 2018 tournament, I was captain at a new hole — the 9th on the South Course. 601 yards. I definitely pile up the steps over those five days. I’ll be there again in January.
This year was also special for a very unusual reason. My parents married in Berlin in November 1945 and were billeted in the former home of Wilhelm Canaris, Navy admiral and head of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence operation. They came home with personal photo albums of Canaris and other personal items. After my mother died in 2001 and I came into possession of these materials, I tried to find out how they might be returned to where and whom they belonged. I kept hitting dead ends. Then Julia, who had been sleuthing online, recently sent me an item about a German woman seeking information about her great-great-uncle, Wilhelm Canaris.
Long story short, I was able to contact Isabel Traenckner-Probst. She has been working with a German professor who is preparing a book and documentary about Canaris, particularly his efforts opposing Hitler. The photo below shows me holding one of the albums, with Patricia Highfill, another great-great-niece of Canaris, who lives in Palm Desert, Calif. (Convenient!) Patricia will convey the materials to Isabel early next year. And Julia and I will be traveling to Berlin next June to participate in ceremonies tied to the historical projects and celebrating the return of these materials. We also plan a side-trip to our ancestral land (in addition to Ireland) — Lithuania.
Finally, I’m doing another blog. (But of course!) BlueandGold1968-71.org is about my 1,035 days on active duty in the Navy 50 years ago. I’ve reached out to fellow members of my platoon at Naval Officer Candidate School and we have found and contacted more than half of them so far. Next year, the blog will focus on the ship on which I served, USS Biddle (DLG-34), and our deployment to the Western Pacific, i.e., the Gulf of Tonkin.
Wishing you a very merry Christmas and that your twenty-nineteen is pristine.