Dave Raynolds
DAVID RAYNOLDS ROTARY BIO
A grandmother’s dad was a charter member of Rotary Club 37 in Omaha, NE back in 1911. His son-in-law was a member in New Mexico, and my father a member in Newtown, CT. I became a Rotarian in 1976, sponsored by Harold DelMonte, who was a charter member of the Lander Club.
Born in New York City, my parents escaped to Connecticut, settling in Newtown in 1932. The high school there was small, most kids quitting at the legal age of 16. My high school years were spent at a boarding school in Putney VT which was started and run by a cousin. From there I went to Dartmouth, graduating in 1949 just as the draft ended.
My first job was with a PR firm in Newtown, which I left at the start of the Korean War. I was drafted out of a navy flight training program, re-enlisted in the Regular Army to join the Counter Intelligence Corps, and took a troopship to Japan. My wife, working for the family export-import firm, joined me there as a Treaty Trader. We had two children in Tokyo, and returned on a troop ship at the end of 1953. I dropped a reserve commission because I believed that with Eisenhower as president there was no future for the professional military.
The GI bill beckoned, so I applied for graduate school at Wesleyan, and spent that first summer in Lander, based in the DelMonte’s Noble Hotel. We’d picked Lander to revisit sites covered by my great-great uncle William Raynolds while he led an army expedition (1859-60) to find Yellowstone, guided by Jim Bridger. He named Union Pass, but never got into the Park.
After Wesleyan I started work on a PhD at the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies in Washington D.C. I’d passed the entry tests for the Foreign Service, and just before they changed the entry rules I jumped in.
My service included stints in Washington and foreign assignments in El Salvador, Paris with NATO during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Haiti and Karachi, Pakistan. My last domestic assignments were at the National War College and two years as an inspector. Secretary of State Kissinger didn’t like the inspectors. I didn’t care for his policies, so I quit.
We’d bought a ranch at the head of Hillcrest Road in 1965, but no place for buffalo due to the airplanes. Got our present ranch in 1976, where it’s more dangerous for planes to haze a herd. We have one of the few pure-blood herds, sourced a century ago from Yellowstone Park under suspicious circumstances. The buffalo you ate on the 4th of July were all born on the ranch.
Delighted to have May as an Honorary Member of the club.