If the Class of 1960 is any indication, a Dartmouth education can prepare graduates for a variety of careers. From campaign finance to comedic novels, Bob Farmer '60, Bruce Ducker '60 and Duncan Mathewson '60 represent the many paths that the College's alumni have pursued since their time at Dartmouth.
Bruce Ducker
Though Ducker started started his career as a lawyer, he abandoned his legal vocation in 1974 to follow his passion for writing.
"The people who write don't do it for money," he said. "It's like having an itch that you can't cure with calamine lotion. There is no other good reason to do it other than you can't help yourself."
Ducker started his education in literature at the College, where he graduated with a combined philosophy and comparative literature major. He received both a law degree and a master's degree in comparative literature both from Columbia University, then moved to Denver in 1964 where he practiced corporate law and worked in the venture capital community.
His career in business and law never interfered with his dedication to writing, however, which he said began when he was six.
"I would take time off from my corporate law practice, usually for four to six weeks during the summer, and get a new book going," he said.
After an early retirement from the business world, Ducker decided to adopt "Yogi Bear's attitude," which he described as "taking the fork in the road," and wrote his first novel in 1974.
His 1994 novel "Marital Assets" was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Ducker starts each book in a different way, he said. He was inspired to write "Lead Us Not Into Penn Station," which won the Colorado Book award in 1995, because he wanted to express an emotion that he experienced from an incident with one of his children.
For other books, Ducker might have a character or plot twist in mind as inspiration.
Ducker's nine books are very different and have no unifying theme, he said. He describes this as an "anathema to publishers, who want [you] to write the same book you just wrote."
"My most recent novel ["Dizzying Heights"] is a satire of Aspen, a very difficult place to satirize," he said. "A week after the book came out, a group of people I was talking to asked me why I was satirizing Aspen and I told them that they did it themselves."
"Dizzying Heights" was a finalist for the James Thurber Award, which is given to the best humorous book of the year. Ducker began to publish comedic works during his time at Dartmouth when he wrote for and edited the Jack-O-Lantern.
"I'm almost a full-time writer except when I have nothing to write and then I'm a full-time fisherman," Ducker said. "A good deal of it is due to the indolence I practiced at Dartmouth."
Bob Farmer
Farmer graduated from the College with "no idea of what I was going to do," he said. A government major at Dartmouth, Farmer attended Harvard Business School for a year before transferring to Harvard Law School.
Though Farmer initially entered the publishing business, in 1980 he made a contribution to the campaign of presidential candidate John Anderson, a move that entered Farmer into the world of politics as he became "very active in [Anderson's] campaign," he said.
Originally a Republican, Farmer's politics leaned further to the left as his involvement in various presidential campaigns progressed. He began to take a more active role in campaigning, hoping to contribute to a successful election and invoke political change, he said.
In 1984 Farmer served as the national treasurer for the presidential campaign of John Glenn, as well as for the presidential campaigns of Mike Dukakis in 1988, Bill Clinton in 1992 and Sen. John Kerry in 2004, Farmer said.
In his campaign financing, Farmer strove to "create relationships" with donors, he said.
"The candidate changes his first name to Mr. President," he said, "And [donors] expect you to return the phone calls."
Farmer had the opportunity to get to know the candidates that he supported by spending time on their private jets back an option no longer available due to security restrictions.
"[During flights,] Mike Dukakis was always reading public policy documents, Kerry was always on the phone," Farmer said. "Bill Clinton was always telling a story, and John Glenn was flying the plane."
As the national treasurer for each campaign, Farmer recruited people to serve on the finance committee and sought out campaign donations of up to $25,000 from individuals. Each presidential campaign required Farmer to attend around 2,000 to 2,500 meetings with wealthy campaign donors.
"One time, I asked Mike Dukakis why do you think people give?'" he said.
Though Dukakis responded that donors choose to contribute because of the candidate, Farmer said he disagreed.
"Then I said, It's very simple, they don't want to say no to the person who asks them,'" Farmer said.
Farmer also served as the treasurer of the Democratic Governor's Association from 1984 to 1991, president of the Massachusetts Electoral College from 1988 to 1989 and treasurer of the Democratic National Committee from 1989 to 1991.
"I flunked retirement six times," Farmer said of his frequent re-entries into the work force.
Farmer said his work with Bill Clinton did not end after he won the 1992 election. Clinton appointed Farmer as the United States Consul General to Bermuda for five years.
"I was essentially the Chief of Mission," Farmer said. "I lived there for five years and worked to keep us out of war with Bermuda."
He presently serves as finance chairman for Senator John Kerry.
Duncan Mathewson
Mathewson developed his interest in archeology and geology at Dartmouth, where he was a "rocks major." While there was no anthropology program at the College during Mathewson's time as an undergraduate, he said that he and a few friends began to take independent research courses which eventually developed into the anthropology department.
While at the University of London working on a degree in environmental archaeology, Mathewson studied the West African Iron Age, a period when powerful kingdoms ruled the area extending from the Sahara and the Savannah into the tropical rainforests in present-day Ghana.
"I lived in Ghana for six years, living in the bush, doing excavations and experiencing a whole new world out there," he said. "This was where the slave trade began and there was a thriving gold trade in West Africa."
After living in West Africa, Mathewson developed an interest in marine archeology and moved to Key West Florida where he worked with treasure hunter Mel Fisher. Fisher was famous for his discovery of the "Nuestra Senora De Atocha," a Spanish treasure galleon that sank off the coast of Key West in 1622.
Mathewson helped to locate the ship by using various archeological techniques to map all of the finds on the bottom of the ocean floor. Not only did he have to figure out how the ship separated after it sank, but he also had to scientifically prove how the artifacts came to be distributed on the seabed.
"Although I wasn't a treasure hunter, I was working closely with them to recover the history and archeology of the treasure as we extracted it," Mathewson said. "We started in 1973 and continued until 1986 because we found the main part of the treasure in 1985."
After his work in archeology and excavation, Mathewson became involved with charter schools and eventually established his own charter school, creating the curriculum himself.
"I became very involved with public school education because I was concerned that we needed to change the school culture in the Keys," he said.
In 2004, Mathewson was elected to the School Board of Monroe County, FL and was recently re-elected in 2008. He is currently focused on instituting "real cultural change and school reform" for education processes in middle school and high school while he is on the school board.
