By now most of our classmates know Jan and I moved to Gambier about 6 years ago. It is a supportive community and we will be pleased to talk with classmates who are considering retirement locations. But, I digress.
In June of 1962 I enrolled at the University of Michigan and got a second bachelor’s degree, this one in chemical engineering. My Kenyon education on tapping beer kegs opened up a job as a bartender at the local watering hole, the Pretzel Bell, for the duration of my stay in Ann Arbor. The P Bell job was second in campus status to only the captain of the football team, great fun after the all-male Kenyon experience. Kenyon roommate Peter Glaubitz was working for P&G and visited me in Ann Arbor to savor the experience.
In the fall of 1963 I was employed by the US government as a patent examiner and enrolled in George Washington School of Law for four years of night classes. My apartment at 18th and F was headquarters for my friends as we watched the developments following the JFK assassination on TV and then ran to the White House, the Capitol, etc. to take in the events live. I don’t know if it was a dislike for LBJ or residual feelings from seeing Barry Goldwater in Ross Hall but I ended up as an advance man during the 1964 presidential campaign. I traveled all over the country, had my first trip to Alaska, rode on the 727 down the Grand Canyon with Barry as pilot, and was at the Goldwater house in Phoenix the night the election was lost. I then worked a year for Ray Bliss from Ohio at the Republican National Committee headquarters in DC, followed by a year as legislative assistant to Senator Norris Cotton of New Hampshire. By then I knew I did not want a career in politics and went back to the patent field with DuPont in DC until I got my law degree and then moved toheadquarters in Wilmington Delaware.
While in DC, John Oliver and I crashed a boat house party where I met my first wife. We married and had our first son in Wilmington on the day Bobby Kennedy was shot, June 6, 1968. That fall I joined an international intellectual property firm in their Paris office and in 1971 moved to their Chicago Office. We had a second son in 1972 (who was accepted at Kenyon but went to Colby). I remember my first meeting with Bill Russell and Pete Travis in our backyard in Kenilworth when they convinced me to become an officer of the Chicago Kenyon alumni group. That was the initiation to my many enjoyable years of participation in Kenyon alumni affairs which in turn led to the decision to retire to Gambier.
Along the way I became unmarried and met Jan. Our second date was to Gambier for an alumni council meeting, staying in the old Alumni House. We married in 1978 and returned to Kenyon many times, often staying upstairs at the Dean Edward’s house next to the Kenyon Inn. We also spent time in Europe as I became the part time head of the Paris Office of the firm.
I spent my career as an IP lawyer specializing in the international protection of trademarks. I left the large firm in 1984 and started my own firm in Chicago. I was fortunate enough to have enough clients follow me, such as McDonalds, S C Johnson, Del Monte, Beatrice Foods and Amoco, so that I could fulfill my first experience with a payroll. My first employee was a member of the first class of ladies to graduate from Kenyon. The firm grew and I was able to painfully send tuition checks to Colby rather than Kenyon.
The international trademark practice allowed us to travel all over the world as friends of local lawyers rather than as tourists. Many great experiences: a raid on a counterfeit food factory in China, mugged on the beach in Rio, elephants shaking the tent in Botswana, our rented house surrounded by student protestors in Guatemala.
From my mother I got the teaching gene and starting in 1972 I served as an adjunct professor teaching trademark law at several law schools. From Kenyon I got the “do not fear to fail” gene and started a software company selling a database management program to fellow trademark attorneys. One of our salesmen was a Kenyon graduate. I sold the company to a group from Belgium and as able to pay back the angel investors but that was all. For a number of years I had three jobs, head of my law firm, director of the IP program at John Marshall Law School and president of the software company. Looking back . . . wow!
Jan and I decided to reinvent ourselves and looked around the country before relocating to Seattle in 1995. I started teaching at the University of Washington Law School and continued as the rainmaker for the Chicago firm. We bought a boat to cruise the BC coast in the summer and a townhouse in Whistler BC to ski in the winter. After five years I turned the law firm over to my partner and became of counsel to a Seattle firm that eventually merged into what is one of the largest firms in the world, DLA Piper. That was a great experience since I got to give trademark advice to startups, which were all the rage at that time. Most of them are no longer around.
In 2006 we started considering retirement and moving back to the Midwestto be closer to family in Boston and Chicago,which ledus to Gambier. With a lead from Doug Givens we bought 12 acres across the street from John Knepper on Quarry Chapel Road. On two acres we built a small house that many of you visited at the 45th reunion and then built a Graham Gund designed home on ten acres where we hope to entertain you Friday night of the 50th Reunion.
I still do trademark work on a pro bono basis for friends such as Jim Carr’s wife Eileen, the college, Kenyon students, Gambier locals and Washington State wineries. We recently sold the boat after six years on the market. We spend November to March skiing in Whistler but our townhouse is on the market. We look forward to returning to international travel.
Volunteer activities have always been very satisfying and rewarding. Being interested in conservation led me to the Board of the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo Wisconsin. For ICF I led crane viewing trips to Siberia and Cuba, the latter reconnecting me with Steve Chaplin at the State Department. My latest crane endeavor was an attempt to prevent the endangered population of Ohio sandhill cranes from being shot during a proposed Kentucky crane hunting season. The effort was unsuccessful and the KY crane hunting season commenced December 16, 2011.
Jan and I both were volunteers during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Whistler. I was a gate judge and thus on the mountain for all the ski races.
Jan and I have joined several of our classmates and others in forming and supporting scholarship funds at the college in the names of Tom Edwards and Jim Steen. Tom, Jim and we are most proud of the assistance these funds provide to worthy students and we make an effort to get to know the recipients while they attend Kenyon and to follow their careers after graduation, one of the many rewards of living in Gambier.