This is a tale of two fellows, a college student and his math professor. The kid in our story graduated from Dartmouth back in 1969 and still lives nearby with his wife. He’s 77 now — an older “kid” — and continues to toil in a home studio and out back at his forge. He is, in his seniority, an artist of considerable renown, a sculptor who for decades has specialized in heavy-metal fine art installations and smaller pieces. His work has graced private households and public spaces from Opryland to Oz.

The math professor, a bona fide American genius, became president of Dartmouth in 1970 and oversaw — in fact, engineered and then enforced — the school’s transition from a tradition-bound, all-male institution into a modern, coeducational school ready to grow ever stronger in whatever remained of America after the social upheaval of that time — civil rights, equal rights, Vietnam, Kent State, Nixon, Watergate. The prof-prexy was Dartmouth’s George Washington, its essential man, during the school’s Revolutionary Wars of that time.

The genius and the kid knew one another back in the late 1960s. They shared the classroom, of course, and both were regulars at Dulac’s hardware, where they would sometimes bump into each other and shoot the breeze.

They are being reunited, spiritually, this spring through the auspices of Dartmouth’s Class of 1975, which, as part of its 50th reunion in June, has commissioned a commemorative artwork of the leader who shepherded them through the storms of the ’70s. The art is being created right now by the erstwhile kid. At reunion, the finished piece will be presented as a gift to the college, then to hang on a prominent wall of a prominent building in perpetuity.

Most of you in the Upper Valley know of John G. Kemeny, who throughout the 1970s led — often pushed — our local institute of higher learning through a time of near-constant controversy, leading to existential transformation. He dealt with figurative fistfights over everything from the death of Dartmouth’s Indian symbol to the birth of The Dartmouth Review to, most crucially, the admittance of women beginning in 1972. Earlier, the extraordinary Kemeny had found time to co-invent, with colleague math professor Tom Kurtz, the BASIC computer language. They then basically gave it away free to the world, greatly goosing the rise of home computing. And, yes, earlier still, Kemeny had been mentored at Princeton by Einstein.

So, you do know about Kemeny, who died in 1992 in Lebanon at the age of 66.

But you probably know less about your neighbor the kid: artist Dimitri Gerakaris.

I’ve recently gotten to know him a bit. He’s lives with his wife of many decades, Mary, with whom he’s just celebrated the birth of a first grandchild. Among several impressive things, Dimitri is, I’ve found, extremely eloquent. So I’ll let him tell his own story and that of his association with Kemeny. I’ll offer one interruption and one interruptive question to re-set context or brag on him when he demurs.

“I was recruited from a small town in Illinois by Dartmouth football and attracted by the school’s setting and approach, so I attended this college I’d never heard of,” he says. “At Dartmouth, I held the college sit-up record and probably also the record for changing majors — Econ, Psych, the Philosophy department. I wanted a combined major of Philosophy with Studio Art. I’d always drawn and constructed things incessantly, but a high school counselor had not allowed me to ‘waste my time’ on art. Now I heard, ‘No! The College Handbook says it must be between related disciplines.’

“ ‘Truth and Beauty!’ I said.

“ ‘No!’ they cried.”

“I finally got a major approved by combining Art and German, arguing both were non-English modes of communication. Dartmouth realized it best let me graduate and leave, and ever since I’ve made a living with creativity and thinking out of the box.

“After graduating, I stayed in the area, except for two years to play for the Chicago Lions Rugby-plus tour of the UK on an all-star team. I was snowshoeing in the Canaan Woods with a buddy one day in 1973 and we came on a lovely clearing with southern exposure, ancient apple trees, and an abandoned cellar hole. I bought some of the land and upon closing the seller laughed uncontrollably: ‘Only a sucker would pay $500 an acre!’ It was on the original Appalachian Trail. It was a great place to build a home and forge, raise a family, grow a huge garden and travel back roads minutes to the Skiway, where I ski-patrolled for years.”

I have a question. I ask, “Build a home and a forge?”

Dimitri answers, “I’d done well on the law boards but speaking with lawyers had dissuaded me. Reading about ‘the Artist-Blacksmith’ through the ages, I realized that was me. It’s been my sole source of support for 54 years. It’s perfect for a creative autodidact, as you’re constantly problem-solving with both hemispheres of the brain. I love it more than ever. It’s hard to say what I’ve loved producing most down the years. I love work that will become a family heirloom. And I love doing public art tens of thousands of people can enjoy every day. And I enjoy mending a broken chain. It’s constant problem-solving, and no two days are the same.”

(Interruption: Yes, there are hundreds of treasured heirlooms and fixed chains in a hundreds of households, each fashioned by Dimitri during his long career. There are also larger pieces in a host of galleries and public spaces on Dartmouth’s campus, from the entryway sculpture at the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy to a relief sculpture in the Corey Ford Rugby Clubhouse. Way beyond this, there are large installations in urban spaces around the globe. Since 1987, his soaring Boylston Place Gateway has welcomed Boston visitors to the Theater District. Since 1989, his Cascades Atrium Gateway in Nashville has been part of the Opryland Hotel complex. And since 1996, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London has featured his “Taming of the Shrew” element. There are Gerakaris renderings of Granite State iconography in Concord and Australian motifs in Sydney. Whether you know of him or not, you might know his work.)

Dimitri resumes: “The Class of ’75 approached me to fashion a bronze bust of Kemeny to commemorate its influential president during its 50th reunion. But the college shot that down. So, we bumped up the idea of a wall relief sculpture to highlight Kemeny’s many contributions to Dartmouth — co-education, computerization, the year-round plan, his evoking the charter mission to educate Native Americans and students of all backgrounds, his emphasis on the teacher/scholar — and that got approved.

“It was for me to see that my visual art speaks to the sensibilities of our time and for generations. This is a very durable art form — interweaving in hand-forged metal concepts in flowing, organic form, in a style straddling realism and impressionism. The wall relief was something very much in my wheelhouse, it’s what I’ve been developing for decades.

“But I’ll tell you this ... I was now being commissioned to make a Kemeny tribute! My old professor!

“I’d had John G. Kemeny for his ‘Introduction to Finite Mathematics’ course when I was a student. He was brilliant and made math crystal clear and fun. And then there was the man himself! He and I often bumped into each other at Dulac’s in Leb, where we would chat about many things. He was an incredible guy.

“I will say, I hope my piece eventually works on many levels — initial visual gratification and then for layer upon layer of meaning revealed to those who care to study it, and him. That way the observer is involved. If I have to spell it out or dumb it down, I have failed.”

He has not failed. I’ve seen the sketches and the work-in-progress. The finished piece will be installed soon enough in the entryway of the math department’s Kemeny Hall, where the public will be able to view it anytime.

The Class of ’75 has added to its reunion schedule a special dedication ceremony to follow a talk about Kemeny’s life and influence. The Dartmouth guys who matriculated in 1971, and the women classmates who, thanks in large part to Kemeny, joined them along the road to graduation, will attend and applaud.

Dimitri, too, will be celebrated that day, but he is already on to other, even more personally resonant projects. “Mary and I, having enormously enjoyed parenting, have just now been blessed with our first grandchild,” he says. “Talk about wonders of nature from which to learn and be delighted! As Keats says ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know’.”

Robert Sullivan, a 1975 graduate of Dartmouth College, had a long career at Sports Illustrated, Time and LIFE magazines, and was editor in chief of LIFE books from 2001 to 2017. He lives in Westchester County, N.Y.