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sportsmanship, respect, courtesy and the like.Based in Rocky Hill, the organization workswith 47,000 kids in the state. It’s a rewardingcareer at this stage of my life and I’m havinga very good time.”Polkie lives in West Hartford with his wife,Rennie, and lives one mile from his granddaughter,Lucy Jane Polk, 6 months old. Hisoldest son, Tyler, works in financial services inHartford, as does his daughter-in-law. “We aretruly blessed. Our second son, Benjamin, issingle, lives in NYC, and comes home often.”“Incidentally,” he adds, “I terribly enjoyed our40th Reunion catching up and reconnecting.More fun than I anticipated.” He was picturedon the inside back cover of the last NoblesBulletin, sitting on the bench (with crutches)with baseball coaches David Horton andDick Flood Jr. some 40 odd years ago.Peter Litman is living in Wellesley with hiswife, Deborah. “My son Henry is a junior atPenn. I practice law and run a developmentstage medical device company.Generally speaking, I am feeling pretty good.I am, however, concerned about climate changeand even more concerned about the inclinationof humans to ignore facts that require realchange and/or do not fit with their ideologies.In this regard, Jared Diamond’s book Collapsewas an eye-opener for me. I hope that it isrequired reading at Nobles. I have decided notto travel to Mumbai as an advance man forStew Young’s campaign but was flatteredthat he asked me. Kudos to Leigh Seddonfor leading the way on alternative energy.”Toby Burr checked in from Marion and sayshe and his wife, Barbie, recently moved ontothe same street as Jeff and Craig Lawrence.“We are only about 50 yards away and delightedto be neighbors.” Toby’s son Tucker is workingat Burr Brothers Boats and his daughter Alaskais working in Boston. Toby noted, “This maybe the first news I have ever sent to Class Notes.”(Class Correspondent’s note: Not often enough!)Farther up the New England coast in Portsmouth,N.H., J.T. Clark is “fighting age with immaturity,occasional smart eating and mostly riding mybicycle to work as often as I can—15 mileseach way along almost all of New Hampshire’scoastline. After 60 round trips in 2010, I amlooking forward to starting the 2011 ‘Tour deFoss’ soon. My best to all of my classmates.”Not too far away, Chip Harding is living inSouth Berwick, Maine, with his wife, Madeleine.“We’ve raised three sons, all of whom are nowout making their way in the world. We’ve beenin southern Maine since 1986. I’ve been aworking musician pretty much forever…and havebeen teaching music at Berwick Academy formore than 15 years. The headmaster at BAis another (much younger) Nobles graduate,Greg Schneider ’92, who is simply one ofthe most amazing people I’ve ever met. I spenda lot of my time working with teenagers andtheir music—running open mics, summer festivalsand coffee houses. I have many privatestudents, at school and in my home studio, andlove learning new tunes together, recordingwith them and just getting to know who theyare. I also teach guitar classes to middle schoolkids, do sound for major events on campus andhelp coordinate the applied music program.I spent most of my 20s and 30s performingmy own music around the Northeast withvarious bands. In the late ’70s/early ’80s I hada contract with RSO Records, who also had theBee Gees and Eric Clapton at the time. Theyreleased several singles that got a lot of airplaynationwide, but didn’t sell much. After my secondson was born, I decided to start playing weddingsand doing music more as a business toraise my young family. I also started recordingmy original music on my own label, doing sostrictly as a creative outlet while I worked withmy band. In 2001, CBC Radio in Canada gothold of a song I wrote about John MorrisRankin—a legendary Cape Breton fiddler whodied a year earlier in a tragic accident—andended up playing it a lot in the Maritimesand then nationwide on the first anniversaryof his death. Most of the creative work I do nowis in supporting young songwriters in the processof making their songs, and in the studio.I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to havethem share their ideas with me.Lately I’ve been performing and recording witha trio called La Madeleine (www.lamadeleine.info), which features my wife, Madeleine,singing classic songs from her native Quebecas well as tunes from Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel,Charles Aznavour and other French artists. Weare joined by an amazing young fiddler namedMelissa Waterhouse. Melissa and I balancethe romantic French ballads with a varietyof really fun Celtic instrumentals.”Peter Gates was just back from a weekendof club ski racing in New Hampshire when weconnected. I didn’t get his results, but he wastouting the first place finishes of his son Sam’98 and daughter Callie ’01. Sam is in hissecond year at Suffolk University Law Schooland Callie is studying for a master’s degree ineducation at Harvard. Peter remains busy tryingto stir up deals in the health care private equitybusiness. His wife, Debbie, is active with GorePlace, a historic house in Waltham, where sheis president of the board of governors.Wes Wellington stopped his world travelslong enough to write. “Although I still considerNew England my spiritual home, I uprooted thewife and two boys in early 1995 and headedwest to take a job with a somewhat obscureLos Angeles money management firm witha quirky but compelling investment strategy.Our friends and family were perplexed that wehad chosen to leave a lovely Victorian homein Needham and move to the smog capital ofthe country without knowing a soul there. Wetold them we were on the five-year plan andwould move back if things didn’t work out.Sixteen years later we’re alive and well andliving in Pacific Palisades, an easy bike ride tothe office in Santa Monica on Ocean Avenue.Yes, it overlooks the beach—somebody hasto live here.Working at a firm with Nobel laureatesroaming the halls has been a great learningexperience and it’s now somewhat less obscure,having grown to become the ninth-largest mutualfund firm in the U.S. I spend a lot of time on theroad making presentations to professionalfinancial advisors as well as their individualinvestor clients. The pitch is straightforward:most of us are wasting our time and moneywhen we hire so-called experts to identifyappealing investment opportunities for us. Oddsare we’ll do better just holding a simple diversifiedportfolio (and we do mean diversified—12,000 stocks!). Needless to say, this viewpointraises a few hackles among conventional moneymanagers, and the intellectual combat thatcomes with the job is part of the appeal.There are many clichés about the SouthernCalifornia lifestyle and I can report that thereis some substance to almost all of them. Butwith several million neighbors you can alwaysfind some kindred spirits if you search longenough. When I’m off duty, I can usually befound in the garage tinkering with one of severalHarley-Davidsons or making a little too muchnoise on the Pacific Coast Highway.Spring 2011 l the NobLES Bulletin l 45