As I think back fifty years since our graduation from Yale, I’m fortunate to have one significant artifact to help jog my memory. That artifact is a thin, worn, paperback volume on my bookshelf entitled Black Studies in the University: A Symposium edited by my fellow students, Armstead L. Robinson, Craig C. Foster, and Donald H. Ogilvie, published fifty years ago by the Yale University Press. Sadly, Armstead and Don of the Yale Class of…
Editor’s Note: Lee Bachman submitted photos from the Creativity Lab at the Becton Engineering center. Also some general pictures from the reunion.
The Creativity Lab in the Becton Engineering Building is open to any Yale student …
I climbed the 150 or so steps to Harkness Tower’s bell chamber for a reunion weekend recital. I’m a member of the Guild of Carillonneurs advisory board so I’ve gotten to play the bells often over the years, but this time it was special: I played a Bach duet with the Guild’s outgoing chair, Joy Chiu ’19. Fifty years may separate our classes, but at that moment we were both a tempo. Then, I…
I’m gonna pre-empt sharing Tom Reed’s reunion photos to share a video I shot of his name tag, It’s an “ambigram” — his name, but watch what happens in this 10 second video!
Editor’s Note: The “Invited Essays” in the ClassBook were released in a blizzard 3 days before the reunion and many people missed them. So, I’m gonna re-release them, one at a time. This one addresses a silent reality of our years .. what it was like to be gay at a pre-Stonewall Yale.
The reunion is over, but this website will go on. What does that mean for you? For the Class? For this website? Answer: The website will morph from a “magazine format” with occasional contributions from classmates to a “community website” with occasional articles of general interest. At inception, your class leaders asked for a website with a dual purpose: to coordinate all aspects of the Reunion (survey, ClassBook, reunion attendance, etc.), and to enable and build…
When I graduated from Yale with a BS in Physics, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do after that. Period. Grad school in physics? Not likely, wasn’t smart enough, didn’t want to teach, not a good job market, etc. So, I got a job as an engineer programming a computer to design acoustic lenses using ray tracing. It was not a bad job: congenial co-workers, definite applications to oceanography, and I could easily make use of computer programming …
Editor’s Note: Bill Newman was one of the reunion co-chairs. For so many classmates who attended our reunion, the event was a beginning for us and even more so a celebration of that beginning. We collectively kicked off a new phase for the Class, one where there are new friends, and we rekindled old relationships. It was an opportunity to catch up with people we may have seen relatively recently, say, over the past 25…
The 1969 Class Survey included the following question: “If you could write a note to your 1969 self, what would it say? (50 words or less, please)” Herewith is a small sampling of your advice to your 1969 selves… For a small-town boy from the Texas Panhandle, you did all right, in large part because you married over your head. Leave Yale and find a college more suited to you. Yale is little more than…
Time and change shall naught avail To break the friendships formed at Yale. We learned a lot in class, for sure, and in the books we read—both those we were assigned and those we found on our own. In our research, a discovery narrowly sought led us down dim corridors toward unimagined illuminations. We learned that learning is a labyrinth, and our teachers taught us, offering themselves in example, the exhilaration of exploring it. That…
How Yale enabled a confident naif to game “success.” Above descriptions proposed as applying to me were suggested to merit a class essay of broader scope. This being somewhat a soapbox—irresistible to a Yalie, no?—, here goes. If nothing else, material to guide one into the precious (love mine!) late afternoon nap. First, from perspective of one who’s thus far fended off two episodes of the Big C, if reading this, you’re successful! You probably…
When we graduated in 1969: We had spent four years with assigned reading from books available only in printed form. We probably bought those books at the Yale Co-op, an independent store owned by the University. New Haven had few other bookstores we would frequent and no chain bookstores. The immense resources of Sterling Library meant that we could do pretty much any research we could imagine on campus. We could not research or access…
(with all due deference to Poe’s The Raven) Ah distinctly I recall, 50 years ago this fall, just when we thought we’d won it all, in the Game that turned to lore. All the years have not erased, not removed, not effaced the memories of what took place: that outcome and that score! Yale was winning, charging, leading, Crimson was retreating, bleeding. The Yale side cheers were overheating, building to a deafening roar. It seemed…
Class surveys have been a regular feature of 50th reunions for years, and—as we have with so many traditions—Yale ‘69ers might well wonder what purposes this elaborate group ritual might serve. The reunion committee had several purposes clearly in mind: to gather information that would inform several invited essays planned for this volume; to activate interest in class affairs as a prelude to the reunion itself; and to take the measure of where we stand…
excerpts with commentary Although freshman year could have been justifiably regarded as an oasis of calm, our subsequent undergraduate years (along with 1970) probably constituted the most tumultuous period at Yale (and many other American college campuses) since World War II. The controversial and escalating Vietnam War, the prospect of compulsory service in it following our college careers, the fervent political activity to “dump Johnson” and end the War, the black (and to some extent)…
I practiced medicine for forty years before retiring in the spring of 2017. I had flourished in my work, enjoying the challenges even in the most demanding moments. I loved virtually every phase of my career and felt privileged to have the opportunity to care for patients. Beyond the long hours and perpetual sleeplessness, and despite the insatiable demands of the healthcare bureaucracy, I found an inner sense of purposefulness, honor, and responsibility in having…
