Pete Dodge

Gentle and tactful encouragement from Rick Weid having failed to persuade me to write a personal profile, Rick invoked the nuclear option and invited my wife of forty-one years to write it for (i.e., about) me. She would have, he said, “more insight” on the subject; absolutely true, which is exactly the problem.... So, I will now offer the following censored, redacted, tightly “spun” synopsis of my life since that sweltering night in Hill Auditorium when all 715 of us were launched into the ozone of the rest of our lives.

Ann Arbor itself, my twin brother Mike (’63), sister Jennifer (’68), our parents, and the entire Pioneer experience—including enduring friends, particularly classmate Lawry Dolph—have given definition to all that I have experienced. After four years earning a hard-won and treasured degree in English (I planned to be a writer), the tenor of the times led me first to a year of service as a VISTA Volunteer. I became an enlistee in the federal War on Poverty, living in an isolated Appalachian community, on a foggy mountain ridge in East Tennessee, trying to organize a potato growing cooperative for subsistence farmers while raising hogs as a demonstration project. I lived among families who had the benefit of none of the advantages I’d known all my life. Accordingly, while I was draft-exempt as a federal employee, their sons were being drafted and shipped out to Viet Nam. Not wanting to have any of them drafted in my place (nor anyone in Ann Arbor), I followed the example of my brother, Mike, our father, and grandfathers, and enlisted for three years in the US Army when my VISTA tour was completed. I trained as a medic. A few weeks before I left for basic training, I met a fellow VISTA Volunteer, an Ohio State University nursing school grad named Julie who was beautiful, smart, and plain speaking. She was hugely puzzled and skeptical of me, as I spoke to her with feverish enthusiasm about Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway while rhapsodizing about potatoes and about the pigs grazing and thriving in the yard below my cabin. Nevertheless, she agreed that I could write to her. She wrote back, and twenty months later we married after I finished my tour as a non-combatant in SE Asia. Julie and I had our first conventional date three days before the ceremony.

We made our life together in Ann Arbor. I completed law school, and Julie finished graduate school at the UM School of Nursing. Ann Arbor was perfect for us professionally and, more to the point, for our two children, Matthew (Pioneer ’89) and Meredith (Pioneer ’91). In important ways, Ann Arbor and Pioneer made our kids who they are — open, informed, passionate, loving, and brave. They, too, made and maintain great Pioneer friends. Matt is a trial attorney in Atlanta representing (among other defendants) Guantanamo detainees; Meredith is a neuropsychologist for the VA Medical Center in St. Louis, caring for wounded Iraq/Afghanistan and (even now) Viet Nam returnees. “My vets,” she calls them.

We moved to southern Illinois in 2009 to live near six of our eight young grandchildren. We are happy here, but Ann Arbor is truly our home.