Even former first ladies like to keep up with their college girlfriends.

“I am still old and still in love with the man I married 72 years ago,’’ Barbara Bush wrote in the March edition of the alumnae magazine for Smith College, a women’s school in Northampton.

Her dispatch leads the “Alumnae Lives Update’’ section for the class of 1947, and she is among 10 class members who provided updates for the Smith Alumnae Quarterly’s latest edition.

She dropped out of the college in 1944 and married George H.W. Bush two weeks later, according to a White House biography. Smith claims her as a member of the class of 1947, a school spokeswoman said.

A full-page photograph of Bush sitting in a garden in Kennebunkport, Maine, also appears in the publication, with a quote from the matriarch of the American political dynasty.

“I have had great medical care and more operations than you would believe. I’m not sure God will recognize me; I have so many new body parts! Also, George Bush has given me the world. He is the best — thoughtful and loving,’’ she says.

Her note says she is “very active’’ in the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. Her husband, the former president, keeps busy with his foundation, Points of Light, she writes.

“All of our children are working and serving others in their own way, along with my 17 grandchildren. I am very proud of them,’’ she writes.

Bush didn’t name any of her famous children or grandchildren or mention that her husband and son George W. Bush once occupied the White House.

Bush is among two first ladies to attend Smith. The other, Nancy Reagan, graduated in 1943.

Laura Crimaldi

Fire victim known for huge campaign fraud

A rascal ghost of politics past has passed — nearly unnoticed.

He was only identified as an 85-year-old man who burned himself up in his Andover apartment when he tried to smoke while using his oxygen machine. But he was much more than that in the rogues gallery of the Massachusetts political world.

In fact, he went to jail in the 1990s for what federal prosecutors said at the time was the “largest case of campaign fraud in the history of this country’’ — one that some have speculated may have dashed any hopes for then-Senator Paul Tsongas to keep his presidential campaign alive.

Nick Rizzo, whose fund-raising skills took him into the inner political circles around President Jimmy Carter, Vice President Walter Mondale, and top Democratic state and national leaders of the late 1970s and 1980s, died March 8.

His gruesome death caught the attention of the major media outlets, from the Globe to Boston’s leading television stations and even his hometown newspaper, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune.

But none of the brief stories mentioned his notorious career, his rise from a middle-class Lawrence neighborhood to the political backrooms of the State House and hallways of Capitol Hill, where he demonstrated an extraordinary skill as a campaign fund-raiser.

There are no references to his equally extraordinary crash in 1992, when federal authorities found out he had embezzled $1 million in campaign funds. He had faded from public view, nearly a quarter century since his release from prison and his return to his adopted town of Andover, where he could be seen bagging groceries at the local supermarket.

Hardest hit in the scam was Tsongas, whose political career — two-term congressman, US senator, and major presidential contender — was built in good part around his relationship with Rizzo.

It was seen as the most oddball alliance in Massachusetts politics — a strait-laced, serious-minded, and reserved Tsongas, whose reputation was built on his honesty and demands for clean government, tying himself closely to a fast-talking, slick money man who vacationed in Las Vegas casino hotels and loved to flash his money.

“It was oddball, but it worked,’’ said one leading Merrimack Valley Democrat, who marveled at the relationship’s years of success.

The scandal broke out just months after Tsongas, who died in 1997 after a long battle with cancer, had dropped out of the 1992 Democratic presidential campaign, a crowded race in which he emerged as Bill Clinton’s most serious obstacle to the party’s nomination.

A major drag on Tsongas’s campaign was his lack of funds. What he didn’t know: Rizzo was hitting up donors — nearly $1 million, according to prosecutors — to pay off gambling debts. He was also charged with obtaining, through his Tsongas connections, $2.8 million in fraudulent bank loans.

The scheme blocked Tsongas from not only using the money but also qualifying for matching federal funds for his campaign.

Rizzo was left with few if any political friends, and he alienated Tsongas when he feigned having liver cancer after he was confronted with the charges. He pleaded guilty in federal court and was sentenced in October 1993 to 52 months in federal jail.

Frank Phillips

House won’t release nondisclosure deals

Amid the fractious floor debate this month over its sexual harassment policies, the House of Representatives passed a measure waiving any previous nondisclosure agreements — effectively releasing former employees from their pacts with the chamber to keep silent.

That doesn’t mean the House itself is prepared to divulge details.

The top attorney for the chamber — which enjoys an exemption from public records law — is refusing a Globe request for copies of any of the 33 written agreements that House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo said have been signed since 2010.

DeLeo has repeatedly said the House has not executed any agreement to settle an allegation of sexual harassment in that time. And his office has said that the total number he’s disclosed includes 15 agreements the House signed with employees who were laid off more than eight years ago.

Details beyond that have been hazy. State Representative Diana DiZoglio has said, and DeLeo confirmed, that she signed one in 2011 when she was a departing aide. But the Methuen Democrat has charged that House attorneys have been “very careful in choosing not to document within the language of these agreements why certain employees have had to sign them.’’

She also described them “silencing tactics’’ used to “cover up misdeeds.’’

DeLeo has denied that. The Winthrop Democrat pointed specifically to language that he wrote, and that the House passed March 15, waiving all past nondisclosure agreements as evidence that the charge was “irresponsible speculation.’’

That brings us to the agreements themselves. DeLeo has called their use “part of doing business,’’ and he’s defended the House’s decision to not ban them outright, saying it gives victims an avenue of confidentiality.

In denying copies of the severance agreements and any accompanying nondisclosure clauses, House counsel James C. Kennedy pointed to the Legislature’s blanket records law exemption in a succinct e-mail to the Globe.

“Therefore,’’ he wrote in the two-sentence response, “your request is denied.’’

Matt Stout

Sean Spicer to raise funds for Diehl

State Representative Geoff Diehl cochaired President Trump’s campaign in Massachusetts and has been one of the White House’s most vocal supporters in the state.

Now, it’s Diehl’s turn to get help from Trump — or at least his former mouthpiece.

Sean Spicer, the short-lived and often-parodied former White House press secretary, will headline a $250-per-head fund-raiser downtown next month for Diehl’s US Senate campaign.

Holly Robichaud, a Diehl spokeswoman, said the campaign is hoping to draw 50 to 60 people to the April 12 event at the Union Oyster House, where Spicer is billed as a “special guest’’ speaker.

Spicer endured a tumultuous six-month stint as Trump’s first press secretary before leaving last year amid an internal dispute with newly named communications director Anthony Scaramucci, whose own 10-day tenure was famously shorter.

A Rhode Island native, Spicer resurfaced in New England last fall, serving as a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics.

But even that stint wasn’t without controversy: Spicer reportedly kept his events off the record, prompting student criticism that they were secretive — if not ironic, given his former gig. Harvard officials said Spicer wasn’t the only visiting fellow to have off-the-record talks.

That Diehl, a Whitman Republican, is enlisting Spicer’s help isn’t surprising. Diehl was cochairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign locally and attended Trump’s inauguration the following January.

Diehl is now a strong favorite to win next month’s Republican convention endorsement. He’s running in the GOP primary against Beth Lindstrom, a longtime activist in state Republican Party politics, and wealthy businessman John Kingston.

The winner will challenge incumbent Democrat Elizabeth Warren this fall.

Matt Stout