Class Notes – Sep/Oct 2019

Edward Jay Ferraro died on January 3, 2019. Terence Lenahan writes:

Ed was my oldest friend. We met in the summer of 1962 at the end of ninth grade. We went the same way, so we often walked home together talking though his trip was much longer, all the way to Yankee Stadium, about four miles or more.

After that we were debate teammates for three years and traveled all over the country together competing. I visited him half a dozen times during the years he was at Yale. When we met I already knew who he was because I had heard him speak in a freshman oratory contest where he delivered a hair raising rendition of Jonathan Edward’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Not a good choice of material to say the least and he didn’t finish in the money.

Ed was one of a kind and I never knew anyone like him. Though he didn’t win that ninth grade contest, in a bygone world Ed would have been heralded as a great orator. I have listened to many speeches but have never known anyone who could approach Ed’s mixture of Demosthenes, Cicero, Mark Antony, Yale, and a bit of Bronx, with unique perspective and insight. I will remember him as the salt of the earth. It is a great sadness to lose him. I can’t imagine never hearing his voice again.

Your scribe had final responsibility for the more than 130 obituaries prepared for the 50^th Reunion Classbook. In the case of William Weinraub, I failed to replace a working draft with the final and correct obituary. written by his widow Anita and daughter Steffi. I have published the correct obituary below in its entirety, and deeply regret my error.

“After graduation, Bill took a job as an apprentice blacksmith at Mystic Seaport (it was the sixties after all). An MME at U Mass Amherst followed, then a 3-year stint with Bell Labs in Atlanta doing fiber optic cable research. Unhappy with being a minuscule cog in a huge corporate machine, Bill (and I) struck out on our own and became real estate investors (read: landlords) with many single family homes. At the same time, he pursued a long-standing interest in photography, ultimately specializing in textile photography and completing the photography for two of my books on the history of quilting in Georgia. The week after his 49 th  birthday, Bill suffered a fatal heart attack and our daughter’s (then just six years old) and my lives changed forever.

I think Bill would agree that his greatest accomplishment/legacy is our daughter Stephanie. From the minute she was born he was a devoted, loving and completely involved dad. More than anything, my heart breaks that she was not able to grow up with him, and every life event is wrenchingly bittersweet because of his absence. How proud he would have been to see her thrive at Yale (ES ’12), involving herself in a cappella and oh so much else as Yalies are wont to (over)do. A year as a costumed interpreter at Coggeshall Farm in Bristol, RI followed graduation (sensing a generational pattern?), then off to Scotland on a Fulbright. Earning two master’s degrees there, his little Steffi now has a job in her field (architectural conservation) with Historic Scotland and is newly married. How proud, indeed, he would be, and how greatly missed he is. His daughter Steffi writes: “The memories I have of my dad are happy, but they’re also two-dimensional, the fondness of a very small child for an indulgent and fun parent. But as I grow up I realize how I miss knowing him as one adult to another. I find I have to glimpse him sideways, through other people’s lenses – their recollections, no matter how trivial, add to my collection of details that I hoard like treasures, tiny pieces of a much larger jigsaw. I look at photographs of him and try and figure out what’s going on behind his eyes. Frustratingly, he is frequently wearing sunglasses, or looking away. In every home movie, he is the camera man, always out of sight. Besides scientific publications, the only words I have of his are the annual Christmas letters he used to write, which show the wicked wit of a man who could casually and unpretentiously quote Chaucer in a paragraph about home refurb. Aspects of my personality go chasing after his. He loved Tolkien, and The Hobbit was the first novel I ever read – at five, with his help – and so I too am a passionate LOTR buff. I’ve tried learning to play his Gibson guitar, but my fingers will always be just a little too small. Now I proudly shoot on a Nikon, just like him. After Yale he ran off to Mystic to work as a costumed living history interpreter, and after Yale I ran just a little further – to Rhode Island – to do the same. After doing my Yale degree in Medieval Lit, and then moving to Scotland to pursue medieval history, I found an article about him from the 70s that mentions medieval craft skills as one of his main interests – I’d never even known.

These details are tantalizing glimpses, but they’re also infuriatingly trivial and don’t come close to making up the picture of a man; it’s tempting to extrapolate too much from such data. But the picture I build is of someone who could truly call himself a Yale man – whether he would have described himself thus or not – a passionate, insightful person with manifold and diverse interests that he pursued to proficiency. And, like all Yalies, just a touch of the good type of madness.”

Martin Hoffmeister died in 2018. Details will appear in the next issue.

Carlos Arturo Hernandez, formerly Yale 1971, has joined our class. Exciting to add rather than subtract!