“Our Thanksgiving dinner companions fell out of mind until September 1999. Right after my 25th reunion someone mentioned to me there was going to be a convocation and Gaudino was going to be honored and remembered. So I drove back up and after the convocation they had a picnic table and a reception for everyone there for the Gaudino event and I was talking to Jeff Thaler and for some reason I started talking about Thanksgiving, 1974, which I hadn’t done in a very long time. A couple of weeks later Jeff contacted me and he said an article ran in the Boston Globe about this Gaudino event and this man George Johnston had read the article and either through the school or something he had contacted Jeff. And so Jeff contacted me and thus began a very lovely year-long pen pal relationship between George Johnston and myself. He brought the two of us together.
He was living down in Tavernier, in the Florida Keys, and he decided to make one last trip north. And we arranged to meet. We had a lovely day. I was working in Stanford (Conn.) at the time, we went out for lunch and he was just a loving generous man who cared a great deal about Gaudino and still had not gotten over the loss of his very deep friend. George was always a liberal and when he took a job with General Foods, Gaudino called him a “Mayonnaise Democrat.”