Dave Henderson, Yale 1943, was Becoming an Embarrassment
At coffee this morning, I was talking with a friend about the broad variety of personal essays presented in our 50th Reunion Class Book. Each one of them is unique, coming from 360 degrees of the compass. Our classmates are wonderfully expressive writers — thank you, liberal arts education!
Regardless of how good these essays are, the funny bones in my hands start twitching, eager to start writing a parody of a typical essay in such a book, sort of like Mike Folz did last week in Looking Back.
When I mentioned this to my Peets Coffee drinking buddy, a Dartmouth grad who has a terrific sense of humor, he mentioned an article in Smithsonian Magazine about a secretly invented Yale grad from the class of 1943 whose exploits were published in the YAM 1943 Class Notes. He sent me the article and the obit of the perpetrator of the faux exploits … which I paste below for your reading pleasure.
(Be patient: The article takes about 20 seconds to load, depending on your internet speed. The file is 8 megabytes. Also, some browsers may not display the document below, but you can download it directly from here.)
From the March 1991 issue of Smithsonian Magazine:
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Great story!