It is an obscure but not insignificant fact that when I went to see Nick Schreiber in

the winter of our senior year to propose that Ann Arbor High inaugurate a fencing

team and enter the state championships, our principal immediately named

Howard Patthoff as coach. A couple of months later, Ann Arbor beat out the big

money Detroit prep schools to win the team championship that had been theirs

for decades, and I was lucky enough to become the state foil champion because

I was lucky enough to attend Ann Arbor High.

That same day, my Dad drove me to the Monroe Track Relays, an annual

gathering of 30 Class A schools, and I ran the first leg of the mile relay, handing

off the baton in first place and our ace Scott Hunter brought it home. I owe that to

Tim Ryan, Don McEwen and John Nordlinger. I have never met better coaches,

by which I mean people who could pull talent out of regular guys and make them

believe in themselves. Thanks to them, I know I was not the only guy from AAHS

who would later fear that he was getting out of shape during Army training.

At the University of Wisconsin, I was a walk-on for both the track and fencing

teams. I chose fencing, then still a Big Ten sport, and served as lead saber

fencer when we won the Big Ten in 1967. I kept up my running by training with

the guy who was indoor and outdoor Big Ten champion in the quarter mile for

two consecutive years.

It was the spring of 1968 that the war came to many us. On June 3, 1968, we

classmates at AAHS met in the bus station and were transported to Fort Wayne

to be inducted.

Combat was a bewildering and intense experience in 1969. We took more

causalities than any other year of the war but hit back with unbelievable

firepower. We had the North Vietnamese on the ropes, ready to quit, when to

their astonishment Nixon began to plead for an honorable withdrawal.

If you could type you might be named company clerk. I could write, thanks again

to AAHS, and when the Army discovered this they pulled me from night ambush

patrol, with our nightly 20 percent casualty rates, and decreed that I was an Army

News Correspondent. The night before my transfer, my unit had been caught on

open ground in a three-way ambush. I channeled Messers Ryan, McEwen and

Nordlinger, while carrying the bulky radio and long antenna, and outran their

machine guns to the ditch from which we made our stand. My subsequent news

dispatches were published around the world, and I got to walk the major media

through the Mekong Delta. I discovered there were three stories in Vietnam: 1)

what the Army said was happening; 2) what the media said was happening; and

3) what was happening.

Upon completion of my service, I ignored an invitation from the Wall Street

Journal and returned to Ann Arbor to become editor of a broken down weekly

shopper, the Huron Valley Advisor. Being editor meant that I had an absolutely

free hand at investigating county and city government, the schools, and a

number of companies that were dumping toxic substances into the Huron River

and surrounding lakes.

I moved on to become a proud business partner with our classmate and reunion

organizer Mary Lou Slater in a start up advertising agency. When I wrote an ad

one way, our client’s store filled with people the next day and we were paid.

When I wrote the ad another way, no one came to the store and we didn’t get

paid. I learned a lesson in advertising that I later found had eluded others.

I married a lovely woman Lynn Nybell who grew up first in Youngstown and then

Columbus, Ohio, so she was both tough and smart. Lynn became tenured at

Eastern Michigan University on her Master’s Degree and we had a girl and a boy.

Then Lynn aced the University of Michigan graduate record examination at the

age of 40 and won a Regent’s Scholarship, which funded her PhD in a combined

anthropology-social work program. I am in her debt, not only for all of the love

and sweetness she has given me and our children, but also for her unique ability

to help make me sound smarter at critical moments than I am.

Mad Men was in full swing when I arrived at the big agencies, with their billion

dollar billings, and I never saw an agency without an open bar. I was painfully

aware that many of our fathers smoked and drank too much. AAHS coach Tim

Ryan was the first man I ever saw who was truly fit well into his 60s. (Today, that

would be our classmate Ted Fraumann.) Inspired, I ran eight miles and swam a

mile on alternate days. Pretty soon, many of the staff across the agency were

running and swimming with me.

At Campbell-Ewald, we did the original Heartbeat of America campaign for

Chevrolet cars, while my colleagues had the good sense to recruit our classmate

Bob Seger to perform Like A Rock in an ad campaign for Chevrolet trucks.

Heartbeat became the most award-winning ad campaign in history, but I always

thought that Seger made the truck campaign better than ours.

I launched my consulting career in 1989, becoming one of the first of a wave of

professionals working out of home offices, enabled by MAC computers, fax

machines and modems. In 1991, I opened my sunroof while driving east on M-14

at eighty, held my brick-sized cell phone in the wind stream and sent a fax from

my laptop. We had become, each of us, James Bond in real life technology. Look

at us now, shooting video and stills and posting, texting and tweeting from our

smart phones.

I retired in 2002 as my daughter was graduating from Grinnell College, ready I

thought for the peaceful life. I took those trips I had been looking forward to and

wrote a 100,000-word novel. I didn’t like the opening 40 pages, tried to fix them

and got too close to be effective. Needing a distraction, I called a meeting and

found myself starting a consulting firm that specializes in turning around failing

companies without letting people go. That was ten years ago. I love the work.

The novel remains incomplete and unpublished.

Meanwhile, my son has graduated from Wayne State as a jazz keyboardist. He

teaches piano to the children of Rochester and Grosse Pointe and has just

written, directed and produced a mix tape of Detroit’s leading Rappers. My

daughter has a PhD in water resource management from the University of

Minnesota, a terrific husband and a daughter of her own. My wife is the Director

of the School of Social Work at Eastern Michigan University. Me? I hope to keep

working for a while.

I have remained in touch with so many of my classmates, not the least of whom

are Peter Dodge, Jim Benton, Russ DeJong, Trish Shirley, John Shoemaker, and

Mary Lou (Slater) Covert. I want to thank Rick Weid and the reunion committee

for bringing us all together once again. I can say with all sincerity that I would not

have enjoyed life as much had I not gone to Ann Arbor High and benefited from

all of the wonderful people who were there. Nor would I have been able, during

those future moments when it would be most important, to run like the wind.

Vietnam 1969 and the Alaska Highway in 2009