First Name Tom

Last Name Meacham

Spouse s Name Jane

Address 9500 Prospect Drive

City Anchorage

State AK

Zip Code 99507

Hm Phone 907-346-2981

Fax 907-346-1028

Business Ph 907-346-1077

Email tmeacham@gci.net

I DO authorize sharing all of this information on the Class of 1961 Web Site.

Personal narrative 2011:

It is hard to believe that 50 years have come and gone since we all were classmates in the Class of 1961 at LHS. Lots and lots of memories -- some joyful, some bittersweet, some best forgotten. But that's true for everyone, I'm sure, because that is just how life is. And as Churchill said, life at any age isn't really that bad, when one considers the alternative.

After graduation from LHS, I attended college at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, graduating in 1965 with a degree in Government. Dartmouth was all-male at the time, and being on a scholarship, I was forbidden from having a car on campus. So I led a fairly monastic and study-oriented life there, and one that I regretted and resented for some time afterward. (Thankfully, the College has been co-ed for several decades now, and our older son Scott graduated from Dartmouth in 1995, much more well-adjusted and pleased with his alma mater than I felt after being there).

Jim Houston and I got together once in New York City while I was at college (he was at Alfred U. in New York State), but aside from summers in Colorado (when I poisoned prairie dogs for the U. S. Fish & Wildlife in eastern Colorado during the week, and hung around Estes Park on the weekends), I didn't have much contact with my old LHS classmates during those four long years of college.

I graduated with an Army ROTC commitment, but decided to go to law school at the University of Colorado. During that school year, Jim Huston and Buddy Kurtz and I roomed together in an apartment in Boulder, and later Jim and I rented a house on Table Mesa in Boulder. After one year, the Vietnam-era G. I. Bill was passed, and I decided to do my military service and have it count toward law school tuition. Before the Army could take me, I spent a summer working in Estes Park, washing dishes at Coulter's Waffle Shop seven days a week. Jim and Charly Bullock and I rented an old house on the edge of Estes for the summer; I remember that my room was insulated with cardboard.

Just before going into the Army (Military Police Corps, Ft. Gordon, Georgia) in January of 1967, I happened to be at the Rathskeller bar in Denver one Saturday evening, where a lot of Denver University grad students tended to hang out. There I met my future wife Jane Camden, a school librarian from Oklahoma. We had only a few dates (including meeting her parents) before I shipped out with the Army, first to Ft. Gordon, then to Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, then to Ft. Richardson, Alaska. After I had served another year in Alaska, we were married in August of 1968, Jane landed a school teaching position at Ft. Richardson, and we spent the last year of my Army service together in Anchorage. Jim and Ann Huston visited us during our last weeks in Alaska, and we made a memorable trip to Denali National Park.

By the fall of 1969 Jane and I had returned to Colorado. We lived in Longmont, where Jane taught. I began my second year of law school at CU, and graduated in 1971. Then it was back to Anchorage, Alaska right away, where we have lived ever since. In our 42+ years here, Alaska has changed quite a lot, and has grown more similar to the rest of the states, but we still like it best of all. I have concentrated on natural resources law almost exclusively, since I first passed the bar in 1971. If "natural resources" are your thing, Alaska is the place to be, that's for certain.

I have been in both law-firm practice and public practice as an assistant attorney general for the State of Alaska, and since 1995 I have had a solo law practice with a home office. I have frequently thought of retiring, but Jane has beaten me to it (she retired as a full-time school librarian in 1998, and as a part-time librarian in 2007), and I do still enjoy what I am doing, and the hobbies, etc. that it makes possible. So I'll probably stay actively practicing law for a few years more.

In her retirement, Jane has divided her time between volunteer work at the local hospital cancer center, quilting, gardening, genealogy, travel with friends, and visiting the granddaughters on both coasts.

Our life in Alaska has certain predictability about it (we have lived in the same house since 1981, because we would not trade the billion-dollar view from our front windows for anything!). I have variously done a fair bit of mountain-climbing (Denali attempt in 1981, summit in 1987) and wilderness exploration in relatively remote and unmapped areas of Alaska. I have been a recreational runner since 1968, and still enjoy shorter races and mountain running, though I'm getting disappointingly slower. For non-physical hobbies, I have enjoyed music, and collecting books on mountain-climbing, and on military and western history. We are running out of bookshelf space.

I had played my trumpet through college, and then put it away until the boys started playing in elementary school (trumpet, of course). I joined the local community band, and then graduated to the University of Alaska Wind Ensemble, where I have played in the trumpet section almost every year since 1985; it is stimulating, and it is a very good musical group. I also play trumpet and flugelhorn in the local German Band, a 50-year-old Anchorage institution. Oktoberfest gigs and the annual charter ski trains on the Alaska Railroad are our specialties.

As a sideline, I became very interested in vintage and historic brass instruments, (mostly trumpets and cornets in various keys) about 15 years ago. The rise of eBay has certainly enabled my addiction, and we now have a basement filled with about 700 brass instruments of various designs, vintages, and histories. Some are restored and fully playable, while many are not. But they all have stories to tell, in context with the time when they were built, used, and then forgotten in someone's attic for a century or more.

I am still somewhat of the car nut I was in high school (though I couldn't afford my first car until after college). Volvos were my first love, but I have moved on to Porsche and Audi, with an occasional exotic (Ford Escort Cosworth 4X4, Caterham Super 7) thrown in for variety. The thing is, once I acquire a car, I almost never let it go because I've never finished tinkering with or restoring it. So my garage and yard are full of really odd rolling stock, including a Mercedes Unimog 4X4 truck, a Volvo 6X6 pickup truck, and a British MWG Esarco 8X8 truck, all ex-military vehicles.

Our sons Scott and Brian came along in 1972 and 1975, respectively. They enjoyed all of the things Anchorage and Alaska had to offer during elementary and high school, and then both went east to college and graduate school. Scott is presently practicing law in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is married to a university history professor; they have one daughter, Camden, our first grandchild, who is four years old. Our younger son Brian and his wife Aimee live in Santa Monica, and are being kept very busy with our granddaughter Grace, who is one year old. Aimee is a former elementary school teacher and now a full-time mom, while Brian is a film archivist and historian with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. Of course, living in Alaska means that Jane and I do not see our grandchildren nearly often enough to suit us.

Jane and I have enjoyed some foreign travel together in recent years (Scotland, Norway), but her retirement means that she has had a lot more freedom to just take off. That is certainly an inducement for me to consider retirement somewhat more seriously. I guess I'll have to think about it.