To the Moon and Back

What do the first men on the moon, the Pacific University Athletic Hall of Fame, and secret military satellite launches during the Vietnam War have in common? Pacific alumnus Alexander “Sandy” Farquhar '65, of course.

Farquhar initially came to Pacific on an optometry scholarship, having won the Idaho Optometric Association award in high school for a scholarship to his choice of the top ten optometry schools in the country. Pacific was the closest, but after a year he decided that optometry just wasn't his calling, so he dropped out of the program to pursue math, “where I think I belonged,” he reminisces.

As sophomore class president and, as a senior, student body president, Farquhar certainly didn't waste a second of his time in college. He sang in choir as a freshman, minored in physics “by accident,” and played tennis all four years. In fact, his tennis team of '62-'64 was recently inducted into the Pacific University Athletic Hall of Fame, after some of his old teammates still heavily involved with the school “realized we'd won a heck of a lot more matches than we'd lost.”