Sunday, November 23, 2008

Cass Squire

To the Great Class of 1969:

Cass contacted me in 2005 after I featured him in a class trivia quiz, and he stayed in touch periodically. I heard from Cass for the last time in January 2008, six months before his own death, when he learned of Mr. Lambert’s passing. At the time, Cass synthesized what a number thought when he wrote, “Bryce may have been one of the more eccentric teachers I ever had (remember his "very" cutter?). He was one of the toughest. He was absolutely the best. Despite all the schools I went to all over the world, and a marvelous college in NH, he is the one teacher who has popped into my head on numerous occasions over the years. I still can't bring myself to ever put the word "very" on paper. The world has lost a great educator.” One site on the internet I found described Cass as “a Distinguished Engineer in IBM's Global Business Services, specializing in BI and data integration architecture. He has more than 25 years of management and staff experience and has been involved in all facets of requirements analysis, data modeling, and database and applications systems design. A specialist in information systems architecture and all facets of data administration and metadata, Mr. Squire began using information engineering techniques for data-oriented design of large-scale systems in 1981.” When I located what I thought was an abstruse presentation he had made a few years earlier at a conference on information resource management, Cass downplayed it and told me he had made many others over the years that he thought were more significant. Who would have thought that Mr. Lambert’s influence would have extended to metadata management in the information age?

The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine reported that Cass was survived by his wife, a son and three daughters and that he died of melanoma. Although Cass lived in San Mateo, CA, his wife wrote that his ashes were spread on Mount Monadnock, NH. Mount Monadnock is about an hour and a half northeast of Deerfield and is the most prominent mountain peak in southern New Hampshire.