Friendships Formed Through Yale, Not At Yale

Diaries and collections of letters make up much of my reading-in-bed material, because there’s always a natural stopping-place at most two pages away. Sometime in the early ’90s, I was reading the diaries of E.J. Kahn, Jr., the well-known staff writer at The New Yorker. As occasionally happens when I’m reading nonfiction written by someone I don’t know, I encountered someone in Kahn’s diaries that I did know.

Kahn tells of going to his 50th Harvard reunion and meeting a classmate he had never known, Frank Goodhue. Frank was one of my law partners in New York, which is why I still recall this story 20-odd years after reading it.

Kahn and his wife hit it off Frank and Frank’s wife, Mary. (Some of you in Westchester County may recall Mary (“Didi”) Goodhue as your representative in the New York State Assembly until she was defeated in a 1992 primary by an up-and-coming Republican named George Pataki.)

As a result of this reunion encounter, the Kahns and the Goodhues formed a lasting friendship, even vacationing together, once in Tanzania. I did recall Frank’s accounts of his trip to Tanzania—probably because he always stressed that “Tanzania” rhymes with “diarrhea,” with its accent on the penult, not the antepenult—but I didn’t learn that he was there with the Kahns until years later when I read Kahn’s account of the trip.

With our 50th approaching, I keep thinking of that Kahn-Goodhue friendship, formed by strangers at a 50th reunion. Through a series of accidents (“missteps” may be a more appropriate word), I’ve become involved in working on the reunion. In the course of that, I’ve met a number of classmates I didn’t know at all at Yale. What a great bunch of guys they are! I wish I’d known them 50 years ago.

Of course, the main reason for coming to the reunion is to reunite with old friends. That’s been my main focus at reunions—and I’ve been to every one of them. I have always hung out with the same people I hung out with 50 years ago. But this year I am resolved to form new friendships, new friendships that I hope will last a lifetime.