Anita Hamilton left our class along with her friend Priscilla Bowden after the sophomore year but many remember her as a smart girl whose father was Thomas Hamilton, a correspondent for the New York Times.  I have seen her twice since then and each time has been a reminder that despite our general unconsciousness of caste and class, events sometimes brought out the lines very distinctly.

Late in our junior year Nik Epanchin and I received invitations to attend a coming out or deb debut at the Piping Rock Country Club, our invitors being Anita and Priscilla.  On the appointed evening Nik and I dressed in our best Buddy Hollye era Sears Roebuck or Filene's charcoal gray suits with pink shirts.  We motored to one of LI's most exclusive clubs in his parents' '51 Plymouth, one of those cars that looked something like a motorized machine gun pill box.  We showed our engraved invitations and the door opened.  We found ourselves surrounded by the sounds of Lester Lanin's Band of Reknown and a sea of prep school kids, the mail portion all wearing dinner jackets, bow ties and cumber buns.  The rest I don't remember.

In 1999 a Duke classmate who was on Clinton's National Security Council invited me to attend a wedding reception with her at DC's stodgy, fabled, and exclusive Cosmo Club.  Her friend, a lawyer with the CIA, was getting married or remarried.  We found our name tags for the dinner and in the boy-girl-boy-girl seating to my right sat a woman with a Polish name and a face that somehow said, "Horsey set."  (Not that such faces always know which end of a horse is forward.)  We talked. She was a reporter for the Hartford Courant, usually covering education, but here because the bride was an old school or college chum.  I mentioned having published an article in the Courant.  The follow up revealed that she was once Anita Hamilton.  Like father, like daughter, perhaps.