Let's Hear It from the Class of '77

'Tis the season when college and university commencement speakers exhort the capped and gowned to go forth and confront the world. A sampling of what 14 of the best, the brightest and the most beautiful in the class of 77 see ahead for themselves:

A TOP STUDENT AT M.I.T. David Bryan, 22, an expert in cryobiology, has specialized in freezing rats' hearts and achieved a 4.9 grade average out of a possible 5 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, famed incubator of top scientists. Now he wants to go to Harvard Medical School in the fall. Says Bryan: "I've made a decision about what I want to do for the rest of my life. I like to be with people more than just being in a lab all day." The tall, lanky graduate does not smoke--either cigarettes or marijuana--seldom drinks beer, is largely apolitical, and spends his spare hours waltzing and tangoing with other members of M.I.T.'s ballroom dancing club. A neat dresser, with every short blond hair in place, he admits: "I'm probably more conservative than most, more traditional."

THE DROPOUT WHO RETURNED.

When U.S. planes bombed Cambodia in 1970, Mary Walsh angrily stalked out of the University of Texas at Austin and worked at a string of odd jobs. Now 25 and the retiring editor of the Daily Texan, she speaks of her radical past as of a different era. "I've really calmed down and seen the logic of the middle ground," she says. "I'm just not ready to shout rhetoric any more at the cue of a red or black flag." Walsh is flying to Italy in August for a ten-month internship with the Rome Daily American. There her salary will be $80 a week, but she adds: "It sounds a lot better in lire --250,000 a month."

THE TRADITIONALIST.

While many University of Arkansas graduates are looking forward to a few weeks of post-exam rest, Judy King, 21, has already plunged into her next big project: her June 25 wedding to fellow student Kent Hirsch. The two met while taking a freshman placement exam at Methodist Hendrix College, which King attended for two years while completing the prerequisites for the University of Arkansas School of Dental Hygiene. After the wedding, King will work for a group of four dentists in order to help her husband through law school. "You have to devote full time to law school, and I would rather that Kent be able to study full time than have to work too," she says. "Right now, I'm looking forward to getting adjusted to work, getting married, and maybe learning to cook."

THE FOOTBALL STAR. The star halfback this year for the University of Michigan Wolverines, Rob Lytle, 22, did not need to look far for a job. He had offers from alumni who wanted him as a sales representative--"someone with a name to sell their product," he says--but he chose instead to join the Denver Broncos professional football team. Lytle, who just married his high school sweetheart last Friday, reports to camp this week in Fort Collins, Colo., to train as a running back. An education major who took lots of business courses on the side, Lytle is looking beyond football to a second career. He hopes eventually to go into partnership with his father in the family business, a men's clothing store in his native Freemont, Ohio, named--appropriately enough--Lytle's. Says he: "I'd be the fifth generation when I get into the store."

THE RHODES SCHOLAR. It took the British Parliament to break Cecil Rhodes's will, but this year, for the first time, 13 of the 32 American Rhodes scholars are women, and one of them is Catherine Burke, 22, a Middle Eastern specialist at the University of Virginia. She wrote her prize-winning 157-page senior thesis on the Lebanese civil war. On the 'side, she co-founded a model United Nations at U.Va. and captained the women's fencing team. She hand-letters medieval-style manuscripts for "relaxation" and this summer plans to take a course in Arabic at Georgetown University (because "it's absolutely gorgeous calligraphy") before sailing on the Queen Elizabeth II to England. Burke is modest about her scholastic feats. "I may be one of the first women Rhodes scholars to go to Oxford," she says, "but I could also be the first one sent home."

THE IRREPRESSIBLE ACTIVIST. Protest has gone out of style in recent years, but when Stanford students staged a sit-in last month to protest the university's stock holdings in corporations operating in South Africa, Bill Tyndall, 22, was one of 270 arrested. A self-described "pragmatic radical," he represents the new breed of campus activist. Says he: "I'm not certain that any type of economic or political system would change the way people behave toward one another." Tyndall is planning to go to law school and specialize in environmental law or some other area in which he can "help people and causes that are powerless to gain power."

THE DREAMER. Will Cady Perkins, 22, of the Pratt Institute in New York City, is a misfit in the modern world. . "If I had my way, the glamour of kings and queens would come back," he says wistfully. "Life today can be pretty dull. People should run around in period costumes." Last month the blond, bearded graduate created a still-life puppet show, with twelve porcelain-headed puppets in full Victorian dress, in a gallery of the main building at Pratt. Perkins changed the puppets' positions each day and used cards to explain what was happening in his mini-Forsyte Saga. Perkins would like to tour the country in a gypsy wagon with his own Punch and Judy show. But at the moment he is looking for a job creating commercial displays. Says he: "I believe if you try hard enough you can do and be anything."

THE WORKING PARTNERS. Barbara Moss, 29, of Howard University, was taking a calculus course seven years ago at Cleveland's Case Western Reserve. Then she met her future husband, Reginald, and through him discovered his new-found interest: black literature. Says she: "I had taken white studies all my life and didn't feel that I knew my own "history. I wanted more than the Tarzan stuff." The Mosses, who got married in 1971, transferred to Howard as juniors and ended up first (Barbara) and third (Reginald) among liberal arts graduates.

Barbara--whose parents never went beyond third grade--will begin graduate work in African history this fall at Northwestern, where she has won a two-year fellowship. Reginald, meanwhile, will continue with his architecture program at Howard until he can transfer to Chicago. They are unhappy about the separation. "We're partners, working partners," says Barbara.

THE VIET NAM VETERAN. While college students in the early '70s were militantly protesting U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, Ron Ridgeway, 27, of Houston's University of St. Thomas, was in a Viet Nam prisoner-of-war camp. The legacy of those war years is a stiff left shoulder, wounded when he was captured. Ridgeway began college as a history major but soon switched to economics and business as a more practical field. Even so, he is finding the job picture bleak. Ridgeway, who married more than three years ago and has a young son to support, is looking for work with a large oil or utility company. "Every company asks me if I have any experience, and I have to say no," he observes. "Five years in a P.O.W. camp doesn't give you experience for many jobs."

THE BEAUTY QUEEN. Nancy White, 22, of the University of Mississippi, a public-administration major, planned to go to law school. Then she won a string of beauty titles, including Miss University at Ole Miss and first alternate to Miss Mississippi, so she began eyeing a more glamorous career in television. This summer she is entering graduate school at Ole Miss with a radio/TV fellowship. She has landed her first journalistic job--as studio manager of the university's closed circuit cable television station. "It's an exposure-conscious field and there are a lot of attractive women who will enter it," says she. "You've got to be pretty and perky and you've got to be capable."

THE SOPRANO. Her mother is a pianist and a soprano; her father is a tenor and plays the trumpet. Ann Denbow, 21, of the New England Conservatory of Music, grew up in Ashley, Ohio, playing the piano, singing and dancing. Now, after besting 50 other voice students to be the conservatory's commencement soloist this year (with an aria from Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio), Denbow has her heart set on an operatic career--but she is realistic about her chances. "Sopranos are a dime a dozen," she says. "You just hope that you stick with it long enough that the others will have given up." Having won a graduate fellowship to the conservatory, she adds: "As long as the voice matures so late, I might as well use school as a haven and not face the cold, cruel world."

THE WOULD-BE BANKER. "I find business fascinating, and I think it's a way to improve communication," says Bonnie Williams, 22, a banking major who is graduating from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. She has already lined up a job as a commercial bank management trainee at Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. There, she says, she hopes to develop her interest in communication between Asians and Westerners. Daughter of two United Church of Christ missionaries, Williams grew up in Japan and hopes eventually to be posted to Morgan's Tokyo office. A self-styled "liberal, Democratic type," Williams sees herself as part of a "socially concerned" generation. Says she: "The Establishment has a lot going for it, and it can be changed from within."

THE A-BOMB REINVENTOR. John Aristotle Phillips. 21, of Princeton University, became one of the most famous members of the U.S. class of '77 by reinventing the atomic bomb on his own, partly to demonstrate how easy it would be for terrorists to do so. (Two foreign governments tried to acquire his paper, and the FBI advised him not to cooperate.) He has long since graduated from his campus concerns--which included a term as Princeton's tiger mascot at football games and a stint as co-manager of a student pizzeria--to numerous TV talk shows. Described by one friend as an "inventor-entrepreneur-sensualist," Phillips is currently collaborating on his autobiography with pizza agency partner David Michaelis. He is also negotiating with Universal and other movie studios about the story of his celebrated nuclear project. But Phillips is not actually graduating this June. He switched majors this year from physics to aerospace and mechanical sciences and now has a fifth year to go at Princeton. Why the change? Phillips has already applied to NASA'S training program so that he can become an astronaut.

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