<p><br /><em>Dennis Charles “Dennie” McKelvey</em> was born in Berlin, NH, the son of Loretta Algie White and Harold James McKelvey. Raised on the forested slopes of the White Mountains, Dennie was the town’s pride in 1965. He was the high school senior class president and its valedictorian, its National Honor Society president, a baseball and basketball letterman, a baritone in the Glee Club and an “enthusiastic and comic” actor in the junior class play. When Congressman James C. Cleveland of New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District appointed him in 1965, Dennie was only the second student in Berlin’s history to be appointed to West Point. After the owner of the most prominent company in town heard the news of his appointment, he promptly asked Dennie to escort his daughter to the high school prom, a duty he was pleased to accept. When the Berlin Reporter interviewed him after the announcement, Dennis replied modestly: “I’m surprised and pleased.” This was his short, sweet, and only reaction to the news. “He was never one to toot his own horn,” a close childhood friend recalled. “He’d rather party with his friends, letting them be the center of attention but keeping them honest with his sarcastic humor.” “Dennis was just an exceptional guy,” another remembered.<br />Life as a cadet was marked with Dennie’s regular placement on the dean’s and commandant’s lists, and his not infrequent hours walking the Area. He was active in the Portuguese Club and on the staff of the Pointer, and a loyal and honest friend to his companymates in B-4. Academically talented, especially in the hard sciences, he was generous and quick with his help to others less gifted. Invariably self-effacing, Dennie had an earthy, dark, and often outrageous sense of humor, and he typically made himself the object of the joke. We knew, however, that this manner camouflaged the remarkable philosophical depth he brought to many serious late-night conversations.<br />In July 1969, during graduation leave, Dennie and a group of B-4 classmates caravanned—with him leading the way in his green Dodge Charger—from New England to Minnesota for Howie and Barb Hellerstedt’s wedding, stopping overnight with Terry O’Boyle and his parents in Terre Haute, IN on the journey. Following the great Minnesota celebration, the trip home found some of them huddled around the television in a non-descript Ohio motel, marveling over Neil Armstrong’s step onto the moon’s surface and the technology allowing us to be part of that history. For those classmates, Neil Armstrong and Dennis McKelvey will be forever linked. <br />Inspired by Lieutenant General Tom Reinzi’s charisma during our First Class Trip and the scientific and technical aspects of communications, Dennis branched into the Signal Corps. After the Signal Officer Basic Course, Airborne and Ranger training, and 16 weeks of radio systems training at Fort Monmouth, NJ, he reported to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, NC. During the three-week airborne course, he and a group of classmates rented a house they affectionately called “The Hovel,” with our Dennie in the “entrepreneurial CIC” role. “It was to him that we paid our rent and tribute,” one classmate remembers. That classmate’s memory of Dennis’s “confident, easy-going, engaging and accommodating” manner over those three weeks endures all these years later. <br />Following his time at Fort Bragg, Dennie served in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Purple Heart. Following his Vietnam service, he returned to Fort Bragg. In 1974, however, worries about his father’s declining health and the lure of the New Hampshire north brought him back home to Berlin. He first joined his younger brother Tom’s trucking company, driving dump trucks and maintaining the difficult road leading up to the Mount Washington Observatory, “home of the world’s worst weather.” He also threw himself back into his Berlin community, serving as a deacon in St. Kieran’s Catholic Church and contributing active membership in the local Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion posts. In 1977, he began full-time graduate studies at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and was awarded a master’s degree with honors in electrical engineering in 1979. An engineering position with the Public Service Company of New Hampshire, a new apartment and exciting new opportunities quickly followed. <br />Tragically, Dennie died in a single car accident in Shelburne, NH on June 7, 1979, the day before he was to begin this promising new career. He is buried in Mount Calvary Cemetery in Berlin, and almost four decades after his passing his New England cousins, friends and pallbearers still remember admiringly the shining light of that Berlin star. “He was so down-to-earth,” his second cousin and pallbearer observed. “He didn’t flaunt his intelligence. You wouldn’t know if he was an admired West Point officer or a union carpenter.”<br />A New Hampshire man through and through, Dennis McKelvey was to his classmates in B-4 a loyal, generous, taciturn and modest New Englander with an incredible capacity to see humor in whatever events were taking place. The roommate-author of his inscription in the <em>Howitzer</em> captured his essence beautifully: “Family first, friends next, self last—that’s Den’s motto. We who have known him have only the highest regard for him, a man too big to be bound up in himself.”<br />Sadly, there was so much more to Dennie than the world ever got to appreciate. We miss you, Dennie. Be Thou at Peace.<br /><em>— Classmates</em></p>