Dear ones, I can’t overstate the pleasure that I am getting from the 50th Reunion Book that arrived at my doorstep today. To our publisher, Art Klebanoff, and to all of you who worked hard, designed well, wrote well and shared photographs: Thank you so very much. We are grateful beyond measure for this terrific…
Editor’s Note: A poem from our own Jamie Woolery.
Some kids and older wastrels hung around.
The least those utter darlings could’ve done
was wait quietly. For something. Rain will come, …
For many years, William Sacco, ’69, was a professional photographer working directly for Yale. He photographed all sorts of official and alumni events over the years.
These are some photos from his undergrad years. The Ingalls Rink meeting was the one where the future of ROTC was debated and voted upon (creating the famous tie vote.)
This is a quiet, thoughtful conversation about what’s happening to higher education. I was interviewed by Prof. Matthew Frye Jacobson, an historian who was the chair of Yale’s American Studies Department until recently and is the director of Historian’s Eye Project (historianseye.org). This interview was conducted at Yale well before the current bribery scandal at selective colleges, including Yale. It pretty much predicted the whole thing but put it in necessary perspective.
As we take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them, we also have to laugh occasionally at our current political scene. I’ve done this by publishing two satirical novels about contemporary politics, PRYME KNUMBER, and a sequel, BERNIE WEBER AND THE RIEMANN HYPOTHESIS. They are set in Washington, Milwaukee, and Yale. Some of our classmates appear as characters.
In both novels, Bernie Weber, a young, Milwaukee-based math genius of humble background, is chased by villains trying to force him to reveal his solutions to two unsolved problems in Mathematics, which could be used fo …
At the Harvard Class of 1937’s 50th reunion, E.J. Kahn, Jr., and Frank Goodhue met for the first time. They became the best of friends for the rest of their lives. David Howorth sees no reason why friendships like that can’t be formed at our 50th.
Editor’s Note: The author is a member of our Class and a lecturer in political science at Yale College.
In case you are interested, here’s a glimpse at what Yale undergrads are thinking about our political prospects today.
Now that we are about to move past the semicentennial of the Yale-Harvard game of 1968, maybe it is safe for me to emerge from the shadows and make a confession and pose a question. First, the confession. Like many of my classmates, I journeyed from New Haven to Cambridge on November 23, 1968. But…
I have been meaning to write this for some time. I read with interest the post about the class of 1968, and how their reunion seemed to be backwardly focused, with a major reunion event being a panel with George Bush. All eyes need to be forward looking now, as we have—not just Yale 1969…
In June of 1968, when students were leaving the Yale campus for summer vacation, about a dozen of us decided to stick around New Haven and keep WYBC-FM on the air 24×7 until our classmates returned in September.
This was the first time in WYBC’s history that the station would be on the air non-stop instead of signing off when the school year ended, as many college radio stations did.
If you weren’t part of WYBC or the radio biz, this might not seem like a big deal. But it was. Many forces were at work that affected us personally, culturally, politically, and artistically. These forces led us to do what we did at WYBC in the Summer of ’68 in a way that totally changed our lives and changed radio as we knew it.
Almost immediately upon arrival at Yale, in fall of my freshman year, it became a nightly ritual for the four rooms on my floor of Welch Hall to come together and play the nightly contest on WYBC’s “Stardust.”
The hope of winning a Naples pizza was part of it, as was the amazement over what radio could do if not bound by the FCC. The contests were often obscene, or at least the winning answers usually were, and WYBC-AM, “closed circuit to the Yale campus,” played some politically incorrect singles. That unrestrained radio and a little alcohol made for a dorm party almost every night.
It was in some ways a foregone conclusion that I would heel WYBC. My brother Walt (TD ’66) was the Program Director of the station when I was a freshman.
I was naturally blessed with the gift of gab, a resonant voice, and a love of radio. That deal was sealed the night in January 1966: The WYBC Freshman News Reading Contest!
I learned the next day that I had WON the free pizza. My brother took no end of grief about his younger brother acing the competition.
Just about everything good that’s happened in my adult life is a direct result of my experience at WYBC.
When I got to Yale, I had no clue as to what I wanted to do post-Yale. My plans or lack of them didn’t include going into radio. In fact, I had no idea that college radio even existed.
[… Then] I heard what sounded like a couple of people my age broadcasting play-by-play of a Yale football game. I was astounded. College kids on radio?
Like most of us of that time I think, commercial radio (rock and roll) was an important part of my life. I came from NYC (albeit its weird outlying borough, Staten Island) where we had WABC and WMCA and some other big-time AM “top 40″ radio stations to listen to. Transistor radios were ubiquitous. My mother had taught me to love classical music. Folk music was the tune my generation was marching to, and rock and roll was what made the blood pulse in your veins.
I was, among other things, a techie at WYBC. I also remained in New Haven during 1968 and did a little technical work at the station when it was required. In order to have money for school I needed a “real job”. So, I worked at WNHC-TV that summer as a broadcast engineer at the TV transmitter.
In 1968, being a techie at WYBC had its amusing moments. One morning at about 2 AM …
While so much of what was exciting and revolutionary about WYBC had to do with its focus on progressive rock and roll, there was also, for most of our time at Yale, a classical music side to WYBC FM. That is how I got interested and involved in heeling the station.
I remember having an afternoon classical show, “Front Row Center,” …
