Class Notes, Sep-Oct, 2026

From Tom Carey:

I recently joined the intellectual property law firm Merchant & Gould in an of counsel role.  This ambiguous position allows me to play golf in a Wednesday afternoon league, where I sport the highest handicap of any player.  I greatly enjoy the camaraderie and energy of the board members of the Yale Club of Boston and have agreed to serve a third 3-year term as chair.

I’m on no medication, have no artificial body components, and feel only the slightest amount of arthritis. I remain married to Ivis Carey. I am occasionally in touch with Jerry Rosenbaum, who seems to be as active as anyone of our generation can be.  I look forward to our 60th reunion and hope to see many of you there.  If that seems too long to wait, look me up.  I’m easy to find. (tomcareyjr@yahoo.com)” 

Jamie Woolery died peacefully at home on June 13, 2026, surrounded by his wife, Anina, and his sons. After Yale, he veered from molecular biology and biophysics to medicine, where he settled down.

After a psychiatry residency at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, where he was a student of Robert Stoller, and a year as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, Dr. Woolery eventually made his way to Kaiser Permanente in 1990. In the summer of 2005 he was appointed Chief of Psychiatry.  He retired in 2014.

Dr. Woolery published a small book of poems, By Parked Cars, which was praised by John Ashbery, one of America’s most esteemed poets. Under the pseudonym Jamie Irons (Irons is his mother’s family name), other poems have appeared in various literary magazines, including the Carquinez Poetry Review, and the Zyzzyva.

With his wife Nina Schwartz, who is also a retired psychiatrist, Dr. Woolery raised four sons, all of whom work in technology. Woolery filled his days with watching birds, learning mathematics, botanizing, fly fishing, and raising an orchard of six varieties of olive trees from Tuscany. He was also an active supporter of The Land Trust of Napa County.

In his semi-retirement, Jamie tutored mathematics up through calculus and linear algebra to local high school and junior college students (he did it for free in an effort to give something back to his community). He also taught himself higher math, including real and complex analysis, abstract algebra, and analytic number theory, believing, as Richard Feynman told Herman Wouk, that math “is the language God talks.”

This obituary was sent to your scribe by Ken Bernstein, (dr.kenbernstein@gmail.com) who was Jamie’s roommate for all four years at Yale, along with Karl Ameriks, Andy Armbrust, and Hughes Norton, in sophomore year.  Ken writes:

“Eternally curious, Jamie wanted to know and learn about everything. He was an autodidact who taught himself Greek and higher mathematicsand many other subjects. When he wanted to learn about something, he dedicated himself wholeheartedly to the subject. He had thousands of books. His interests were varied, from football, especially Yale football and the 49ers, to poetry, bird-watching, religions, and hiking. He had a great sense of humor and loved to laugh. He was especially proud of all his sons’ accomplishments. Although we lived on different coasts, we kept in close touch over 60 years. He never missed a birthday. He was a force of nature, and he will be missed.”

Bruce Volpe writes:

“During a time of real winters in New Haven—among the emerging remnants of the Sheff, above Grove and up Prospect—I met Jamie Woolery on the way to the new Kline Tower. We were pals in a new major, molecular biology and biophysics, and Jamie was a wonder. I had never met such a skeptical, questioning person, so committed to learning everything there was to learn. Thinking about him I am reminded of one of the two stellar faculty heads of that new department: the inimitable Harold Morowitz, whose application of thermodynamics to the origin of life was as startling as anything in the seminars by Sewall or Giamatti or Sculley. The other chair was Fred Richards, who had just solved the crystal structure of ribonuclease—something that slipped by me but probably not Jamie.

It was the search for a new course that kept Jamie and me together and on the lookout—and we found what we were looking for in Clem Markert. Professor Markert, another remarkable faculty star (who had served in the Lincoln Brigade), had written a piece for one of the Yale magazines about genetic manipulation for the ethical management of the world’s food supply to withstand climate pressure. We persuaded him to teach us in a tutorial style about these and other subjects. I can’t remember what course listing we proposed but Jamie and I had an extraordinary semester learning about these emerging arenas before their time and, for me, beginning to learn how to think…I lost track of him except for an occasional phone call, enough to know that he had kept up a friendship with Professor Markert (a feat I envied and admired), that he had bicycled across the country, and that he had left experimental science and become a psychiatrist and a poet, and, not surprisingly, gained success and acclaim in both new pursuits, and likely in everything else he touched. I wish I had kept up with him. He was a terrific guy.”

Pictures and more information are available on the Class Website: yale1969.org.