Harry H. Wise III – 50th Reunion Essay

Harry H. Wise III

34 Birchwood Lane

Hartsdale, NY 10530

hwiselaw@aol.com

(914) 413-2382

Partner: Peggy Twohig

Education: Boston College Law School, JD 1975

Career: journalist, local paper and AP, 1970–1972, lawyer, 1975-present

Avocations: trumpet, squash, tennis, golf

College: Davenport

In general, my fondest recollection of Yale is of the guys in Davenport whom I knew. A few are still friends, and a couple still good friends. Recollections of academic things are vaguer. My declared potential major was math and philosophy (perhaps I wanted to be the next Bertrand Russell), but that lasted a semester. I think I thereafter may have set the record for the most introductory courses taken. Thankfully there was the American Studies major to tie it all up at the end.

Of course, I remember fondly the great teachers like Vincent Scully and JP Trinkaus. I also remember the eminent scholars whose lectures could empty a room (and, Yale students being what they were, that could happen). I believe I was at the lecture by Margaret Mead that prompted her to say she would never teach at Yale again.

I do remember fondly Yale’s great selection of extracurricular activities. After a freshman-year flirtation with the Dramat, I got into playing trumpet in all the available groups, studying for a while with the great Robert Nagle and then with one of his students. I put the horn away at graduation, but, 25 years later, when our beloved high-school band director retired, and alumni were given six months to get in shape to play a final concert for him, I bought a used cornet, got back into it, and have been playing since. There are a lot of amateur and semiprofessional (mixed) groups to play in in New York, and I have had the privilege of playing first-chair trumpet with a lot of them, including both the Lawyers Orchestra and the Doctors Orchestra, and with Tony Amato’s beloved Amato Opera and its successor, Amore Opera.

The basics of my post-Yale trajectory are: three years in the trenches as a journalist, two with a local paper in Westchester, New York, and a year with the AP in its Los Angeles bureau. I then went, like many others, to law school, in my case Boston College. For three or four years I had fun as an associate at a firm called Townley Updike Carter and Rodgers that represented the Daily News and other media clients. Ownership changes at the News ended that gig, and I then went to a startup New York office for a Boston firm, Gadsby & Hannah. That office closed in the mid-’90s and I have had a solo practice since. Along the way I picked up a second foreign language, Spanish, to add to my French. Lately I’ve been working on Arabic but I fear my powers of memorization have faded.

Squash had a blip of popularity in New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and I got into it, despite not having taken it up at Yale. There were club leagues and a law-firm league, and I played for the Yale Club C and B teams and a Townley team as well. At some point in the mid-’80s I managed a national ranking, although it was only about 50th in the B category.

I never married, a complicated story that will not be gone into here, but for the past 16 years I have been together with a wonderful woman, Peggy Twohig. Peggy is a lawyer who has had a great career in Washington, moving from Arnold and Porter into the Federal Trade Commission, and playing an important role in the Dodd-Frank creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, of which she is an assistant director.

It is quite possible that I will eventually set the record for the last member of the class to marry for the first time.