Class Notes – Mar/April 2021

Tom Walsh died on September 22, 2020 of pancreatic cancer.  A full obituary, with pictures and a memorial by Tom Hine, appears online on the class website, yale1969.org. Here is an excerpt from that memorial:

“When he called one day last summer, his voice was as always, soft and even. ‘It looks as if you will be the last of us left,’ he said. I knew he was referring to the four of us who arrived as freshmen to 1088 Bingham Hall in September 1965. Two, Eric Prosnitz and Dick McKay, had already died, and Tom was calling, to tell me in his usual indirect though earnest way, that he had received a fatal diagnosis. ‘There really isn’t anything that can be done,’ he told me of his disease. He sounded to me no different than he had as a green youth half a century ago. He sounded quietly confident that he lived the life he should have lived. He had raised a family to be proud of and had worked to make things a little better.”

Dave Howorth reported that Ed Mitchell died on December 21, 2020. Charlie Sheldon wrote to say:

“Ed was my roommate freshman year with Marc Klein; they were childhood friends from California, and Ed and I stayed in touch after college. I visited with him a few times in San Francisco in recent years, and had the good fortune to talk with him this fall twice before he passed away. Ed had a shock of bright red hair, a great booming laugh, a terrific sense of humor, and a great love of singing and opera. When I last spoke with him, he sounded exactly the same, as if he were 19 again, despite being really ill.”

From Harry Wise:

“Ed Mitchell, who began his Yale career with our class, died at his home in San Francisco, after a long battle with liver cancer, breaking the hearts, it seems, of every person who ever knew him.

Ed was someone everyone wanted as a friend—among other reasons, because he could be hysterically funny.  His gift for mimicry was amazing—he was great at repeating Firesign Theater routines, but my personal favorite was Ed doing Dame Edith Evans playing Lady Bracknell, stretching out the line “Found?? In a Handbag??” with quivering indignation.

Ed dropped out and joined Vista.  Assigned to an Indian reservation, he spent a year in a cabin in Cannonball, North Dakota, returning to Yale in our class’s senior year.

After graduation, working for the Fund for the City of New York, he had a stroke of luck.  His girlfriend was working at an ad agency, and they were unhappy with the voiceover tagline for some commercials, thinking it sounded too New Yorky.  The girlfriend decided Ed might have the perfect not-from-anywhere-in-particular accent, and suggested he audition.  Ed got the gig, and recorded his one line. As luck would have it, the line was “Paid for by the Committee to Re-elect President Gerald R. Ford,” and it was used on every radio and TV ad across the country during the campaign. Ed said the residuals paid for his law-school education.

Ed later attended Boston College Law School, graduating in 1980. He began his law practice at a firm in Santa Fe.  After a few years there, he returned to San Francisco, and established a successful civil-litigation practice, first with a firm, and then on his own.  Meanwhile, he added his baritone voice to the chorus of the San Francisco Symphony.

A year ago, Eliot Norman and I went to San Francisco to spend a few days with Ed. Although it was clear that he was struggling physically, he had not lost his capacity for mirth.

Near the end, one of Ed’s high-school buddies, among a group of his friends exchanging daily texts, texted this: ‘It’s been a beautiful and entertaining adventure to have Ed in my life.  He has ever so gently made me a better person.’  Another longtime friend responded: ‘My quiet and warm congratulations to all of us for having the good fortune to have Eddie in our lives.’” (There is more on Ed on our class website.)

On a slightly happier note, Nick Heller writes, in his first ever contribution to this column:

“It is with great sadness and an ever-growing sense of my own mortality to see more and more ‘69 grads leaving this mortal plain. All the familiar clichés apply, how time flies etc. so I will not attempt to add my own feeble additions.

My own life since 1969 is a vivid testament to arguably the most well-known quote in literature “to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. I entered Yale with a severe handicap, enduring the loss of both of my parents two months before entering Yale, and the death of my twin sister.

Understandably I was a mental basket case and almost flunked out freshman year. A letter from my draft board in October 1966 yanked me back to reality, a reality that didn’t  care about my problems and to use another quote from the bard “We trouble deaf heaven with our bootless cries”. I finally found a hook to hang onto and appeared in several theatrical productions in Davenport and the Dramat.

After graduation I ended up in the Real Estate/Construction business in Colorado and did very well until a combination of circumstances, both self-inflicted and beyond my control led to a financial meltdown. I have never really recovered, partly my fault and partly circumstances, but here I am in my mid-seventies still relatively healthy, hoping the other shoe doesn’t fall too quickly, saddened by our thinning ranks but realizing we are all in the same boat. I would welcome any wandering Yalie travelling through CO, where I still live with my wife. I can be reached at nfh1945@aol.com or at 303-503-1831.”