Class Notes

From Frank Aronson: “I retired from law practice in mid-2019. I now do a lot of serious road bike riding, and tutor a fourth-grader in reading. Paula and I are coming up on wedding anniversary #55, and now have six grandchildren.”

Richard Seltzer reports he has just published three (!) novels:  Shakespeare’s Twin Sister, The Bulatovich Saga: The Name Hero, and  Let the Women Have Their Say. Your scribe, who like many classmates, has produced in his lifetime, three fewer than this, can only marvel at this level of productivity.

From David Katz: “You may remember me as the guy who brought Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to Woolsey Hall in our sophomore year. I’ve practiced transcendental meditation ever since then and still love doing it. The transformations it’s brought about in my life are profound.

Lives well-lived: Tom Stanko, who was in our class right up until final exams senior year, died April 7, 2025, from an extremely rare set of cancers. His son reports that he stayed active until the end, skiing with his sons in March, 2025.

Although Tom did not keep in touch with 1969 classmates (he actually graduated with, and was affiliated with, the class of 1970) a number of us did know him during our undergraduate years, especially wrestlers. From John Weber:

“He was in TD and frequently played bridge with Dave Bannard, another TD undergrad.  His drinking exploits were unparalleled – when he and I (and others) pledged Beta, Tom won the martini drinking contest at somewhere between 22 and 26 …

Two more deaths to report – George Priest and Subrata Chakravarthy. See details in their In Memoriam posts — George Priest and Subrata Chakravarthy.]

George was a long-time professor at Yale Law School. Included below are tributes from YLS Dean Heather K. Gerken and a remembrance from Alan Boles.

Also, see more about Subrata from Walker Knight, and some “happier news” from Tom Carey and Bob Horvitz.

Editor’s Note: Class Notes contain a tribute to Victor Norman from James Fishkin. Also, there is some obituary information about Don Lewis and Paul Lozier. Then we move on to “happier news” from our fearless Correspondent Secretary, Dan Seiver, seiverda@miamioh.edu.

In happier news: The Class of 1969 Scholarship Fund has a market value of $845,450 as of June 30, 2024. Annual Spending Distribution for 2024–2025: $39,651.

Our latest scholarship recipient is David Yun, ’28, [shown above] who is just starting out at Yale. He was a soccer star in a Fort Worth high school, and he is a first-generation American.  He chose Yale ​“because I would like to learn from the best professors in the world and I wanted to meet people from various parts of the world.” David is at david.yun@yale.edu.

A long-overdue update on Paul Severtson: “I became interested in music because “my mother was quite an accomplished cellist in her youth. She made sure that all five of her kids learned an instrument. Somehow she managed our musical training in such a way that she got a string quartet out of the first four. The youngest rebelled. He took up the oboe.” Paul majored in music theory and composition at Yale, and then received…

From Ted Snow: “There are a few benefits of having a stroke, which I did several years ago – like good parking spaces and getting special treatment at the airport – but I don’t recommend it. But a few good things came out of it: Time to copy and organize a lifetime’s worth of photos, and writing a book: The Sixth Element: How Carbon Shapes Our World. Before my poor health forced retirement, I was…

Sadly, I have three deaths to report. In each case, a full memorial with pictures is available online at the class website: yale1969.org. From Legacy.com: “William Streicker passed away on March 1, 2024.  He attended medical school at NYU and completed his residency at the Medical College of Virginia. He was head of the Emergency Department of Johnston-Willis Hospital for ten years and then established PromptCare, an urgent care medical practice which he ran in…

Another successful reunion organized by Bill Newman and Derry Allen! We were headquartered in Timothy Dwight, and coddled with excellent food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with our Class Dinner, served under the tent in the courtyard, as the pièce de resistance. Our overfull schedule of lectures, tours and discussions began on Thursday afternoon with a private guided tour of the remodeled Peabody Museum, with the requisite dinosaurs, (including us?) but most notably the David…

Bruce Bolnick passed away on November 19, 2023. Edited excerpts from his obituary: “Bruce was a high school champion gymnast before Yale. At Yale, he obtained his PhD in economics only 3 years after his B.A. The Yale experiences that Bruce most loved to recount included his role in pressuring the administration to open Yale to women, his captaining the gymnastics team, and captaining the Yale Cheer team. Most importantly, while at Yale he met…

Ken Brown submitted this obituary for his college roommate Richard L. Farren, who died suddenly at his home on December 3, 2023: “Richard matriculated with the Yale Class of 1969 but graduated in three years with the Class of 1968.  He attended most of the Class of 1969 reunions but could not resist going to the White House upon the invitation from George W. Bush, Yale ‘68.  He graduated from the Harvard Law School in…

Dick Williams sends this news about Mark Klugheit which he gleaned from the Yale Law Report: “Mark Klugheit continues his second (third?) career as director for Next Stage Theatre Southwest in Tucson, AZ, with very successful 2022 productions of David Ives’s Venus in Fur and Halley Feiffer’s  A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City.

Lee Mundell died on June 26, 2023, after a brief illness.  From Legacy.com: His wife and children were with him. He served in the United States Air Force where he was a pilot and flew in Vietnam. He then graduated from Golden Gate University (MBA 1974), and the University of Georgia School of Law (1977). While in law school, he was a teaching assistant in the university’s Terry School of Business, became a Notes Editor…

From online sources: “James Vincent Minor III of Wilton, CT died unexpectedly on April 1, 2023 in Norwalk Hospital at the age of 75. Jim was born to Betty and Dr. James Vincent Minor II in Norwalk, CT. He is survived by his wife Andrea Byrne Minor, his three children, James Vincent Minor IV, Sister Mary Hannah (Emily), Andrew Minor, and his beloved granddaughters Zoe and Holly. An accomplished academic, he studied at Portsmouth Abbey,…

Bill Sacco writes: My book, Caribbean Coral Reefs: A Record of an Ecosystem Under Threat, was just released in April by Taylor and Francis Group, Routledge Press. [See Caribbean Coral Reef Book Published.] I spent the summers of 1968 and 1969 as a field assistant to a marine biologist working in Curaçao and Columbia, learned to photograph underwater, and spent all of my vacation time for the next eight years visiting marine scientists in the Caribbean and…

From the Erie (PA) Times-News: “The Rev. John Randolph Elliott (“Randy”) was an extraordinary, ordinary man. Randy will be long remembered as a man of prayer with deep faith, warm spirit, unwavering integrity, rigorous self-discipline, large intellect, and contagious laughter most often heard with a big family that he loved and gave him great joy—a family eternally grateful for his presence in their lives. Indeed, he lived with eternity in his heart, and entered his…

David Click died on May 18, 2021. An edited report from nolo.com: “After Yale he received a J.D. from Yale Law in 1973, and a Master’s in Economics from Yale in 1974. David taught at the law schools of Western New England, Indiana University, and the University of Maryland, including property, trusts and estates, law and economics, constitutional law, jurisprudence, legal research and writing, and appellate advocacy. He returned home to Florida in 1984 with…