Publisher’s Letter

Lifelong friends, especially those that love hanging out together, are one of life’s true treasures. Some of my life-long friendships were made at Duke University at the Phi Kappa Psi, North Carolina Alpha chapter fraternity. This is the story about the On The Rocks group or the “OTR.”

The OTR often hung out in my junior and senior rooms in my fraternity section, which I shared with fellow OTR member John Tyson or “Tyce.” (Duke has sections, not houses, in continuous interconnected gothic buildings whose boundaries are defined by the fire doors). People hung out in our room a lot, just not for study group sessions (let’s just leave it at that). We also had a special place in Duke Forest where we would party together. These were the cliffs where we sat about three stories high overlooking New Hope Creek. So OTR is really a triple entendre. It means sitting on the cliffs, but we also like our adult beverages on the rocks, and from time to time, one of the members has something in their life that is on the rocks that we share amongst the group.

Following our graduations, some of us kept up, and others drifted out of touch. When we all started coming to the Duke class reunions when most of us were still single, we reconnected and went back to the cliffs. This slowly morphed into the official OTR group. A few years later, we started seeing each other at members’ weddings. In recent years, we have been going to OTR members’ kids’ weddings, most recently a spectacular one in Oaxaca, Mexico (more about Oaxaca and Dean & Ceci’s wedding later on in this issue).

As technology evolved over time, a never-ending text chain that’s been going on for years was born. We share pictures of family and pets, vacations, cheer on Duke Athletics, etc. We wish each other happy birthday, convey condolences, announce new jobs and promotions, and now applaud retirements. During Covid, we started doing OTR Zoom calls every few months and still do them, usually during cocktail hour.

As OTR has matured, we started to have official OTR “Board Meetings” at different locations. OTR member Alan Talpalar had a luxurious beachfront 8-bedroom home in a gated community in Bethany Beach, Delaware, where OTR has convened several times. During Covid, Alan scraped it and built another beach house (I can’t wait to see it because it’s difficult for me to fathom anything better than what he had before!). Recently, I hosted some of the OTR in Nashville in September of last year. It was a skeleton crew because of concerns by some of the members about the Omicron variant spike, but it was still something I relished hosting and sharing my wonderful city with some of my best friends. Tyce just bought a lovely summer home on the back bay in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, where the next OTR Board Meeting will be in September of this year—I can’t wait!

I feel so blessed to have a group of friends like the OTR; it’s a big part of my life and a club that I truly value my membership.

Dave Mahanes, Publisher dave@slmag.net