An alumni extravaganza: CLF was 36 years young in October. Join us for a memory tour.

• Author: Paul, Katherine J.
• Position: Conservation Law Foundation of New England

After one day as a CLF volunteer, ALEXANDRA DAWSON knew what she wanted to do with the rest of her life--answer the phone. That was in 1966. In the early 1970s, she became one of CLF's first paid staffers--four days a week for little pay, mainly answering phone calls from people with questions about environmental laws. "I had to step down from my job with a law firm to work at CLF," she says. "[My ex-colleagues] thought I was mad as a hatter." But in the process of finding the answers, she says she learned "quantities of law."

Dawson left CLF in the late `70s to work for the Boston Metropolitan Area Planning Council. She later ran the Resource Management program for Antioch University in Keene, N.H. She currently dispenses legal advice as a volunteer hotline operator for the Massachusetts Association of Conservation Commissions. The job requires that she keep up to date with environmental laws that are constantly changing. She's been there before.

KELLY McCLINTOCK had practiced law for less than two years when he decided that lawyering wasn't for him. "I wanted to be an environmentalist," he says. "All of my life I had loved the outdoors, and I wanted to spend as much time as I could working on the protection of [natural] resources."

McClintock came to CLF during its early, volunteer-only days. It was 1972 when he became unpaid executive director, and during his tenure CLF was involved in three lawsuits. All of them were successful, but McClintock was disappointed. "We spent a lot of time and money to win," he says, "but we got no lasting precedent." But then Doug Foy came on staff, and McClintock says, "Hiring Doug was the best thing I ever did. He refocused the institution toward litigation."

McClintock left CLF in 1977 to become executive director of the Massachusetts Forest & Park Association, now the Environmental Lobby of Massachusetts. Now retired, he's president of the Charles River Watershed Association, and vice president of East Coast Greenway Alliance, a group working on an urban Appalachian trail.

Whether it's her hairstyle or her job, MARIE "FREE" WRIGHT (CLF -`88-`98) is easily bored with the status quo. "We couldn't predict from one day to the next what her hair was going to look like," says Doug Foy. She says that to keep her occupied--and out of trouble--her bosses piled on new responsibilities. Hired as a receptionist, she went on to work in membership and development, and became network coordinator, network administrator and, eventually, manager of information systems.

"Marie exceeded everyone's expectations," says Alice Denison...