Jan/Feb 2013

Tom McNamee has just published The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance. With a listerv nudge from Dave Howorth, your scribe also found this: “Tom McNamee’s essays, poems, reporting, and reviews have appeared in Audubon, the New Yorker, Natural History, and the New York Times. He wrote the PBS documentary Alexander Calder, which won a Peabody Award and an Emmy. His books include The Grizzly Bear, A Story of Deep Delight, The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone (named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best nature books ever written), and Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. He lives in San Francisco.”

Cleveland Morris was selected as one of the 50 most influential residents of Delaware of the last 50 years by Delaware Today magazine. Cleveland was recognized for his work as artistic director of the Delaware Theatre Company for many years, and for his second career as a still-life painter, with his works often exhibited at the Carspecken Scott Gallery.

Art Segal reports: “Scott Nelson, Silliman ’69, with the help of Alan Boles,organized and coordinated a delightful three-day mini-reunion in Boulder July 12–15 for 15 classmates and their companions. Activities included an exhilarating morning birding in the Colorado foothills, visits to the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado Fiske Planetarium, an evening of Treasure Island by the Colorado Shakespeare Theater, and several superb educational presentations on climate change, global warming, and ozone depletion. We wined and dined, toured, and laughed a lot. Our hosts made it a weekend to savor and remember.” Attendees: Mike and Ruth Baum, Alan Boles and Susan Osborne, Ken Brown and Ann Gillespie, Brad Gascoigne and occasionally his stepdaughter Heidi Arnold, Macon Cowles and occasionally his wife Regina, Phil and Tricia Gans, Tom and Mary Anne Jorde, Terry and HollyLight, Scott and Jean Nelson, Tom Reed, Michael and Susan Schonbrun, Art and Angela Segal, Rob and Mara Shlachter, Ted Snow and occasionally his wife Connie, and John and Dina Weber.

Your scribe must also report another death: Eric Muirhead passed away peacefully on August 13, 2012 in Houston. He is survived by his wife, Susan (whom he met during Coed Week), two sons, and a grandson. His Saybrook roommates Jerry Rosenbaum, Andy Vorkink, and Rickard Arnold plan to make a memorial gift in his honor and welcome contributions from classmates. Here is a memorial written by Susan: “His first novel, Cab Tales, was recently republished by Ink Brush Press. Rindu, A Novel of Expatriate Life Overseas will be coming out on Kindle and his third novel, Eden’s Abyss, will be out soon. This is his legacy. What can I say about an intellect as broad as profound and sensitive as Eric’s? His industry knew no boundaries whether it was sailing across the Pacific on a 53-foot gaff-rigged schooner we built on the beach in Labuan, Malaysia, or line-editing his novel for the fourth time. His love of music and knowledge of literature, which he shared with students at San Jacinto College for 19 years, and of course his innate perfectionism, drove his life. He had to write, and he did write every day that was his. On his website, EricMuirhead.net, you will find his voyage across the Pacific and his poems already published, as well as articles he wrote from Borneo.

“I met Eric and his roommates, Jerry Rosenbaum, Andy Vorkink, and Rick Arnoldon February 1, 1969, at a Saybrook mixer. Yale was a special place for me. Commuting from Vassar to Yale became a weekly enterprise. Though Vassar did not accept the invitation to join Yale in New Haven, I accepted Eric’s invitation to marry him. Leaving medical school in Houston, Eric got a master’s degree in English and we headed off to Labuan, a 7-by-10-mile island off the coast of Borneo where he ran the school for the children of expatriates. We then started sailing and built Rindu on the beach. He hired back on with Brown & Root as quality control supervisor negotiating with Shell Oil. His knowledge of Malay and friendship with the Ibans working the fabrication yard was a boon. His voyage across the Pacific from Labuan to Hawaii took four months, navigating with only a sextant. Teaching at Chadwick School, California, Eric began writing Rindu. Rindumeans lovesick or homesick in Malay. The four roommates and their wives reconvened in Maine a few years ago, swapping stories of lives well led. I have just retired from teaching high school for 21 years. Elliot is now an auto technician and Philip is an astronomer at Cal Tech, having reclassified three planets surrounding a red dwarf star, KOI 961. A devoted father to his two sons, a lover and beautiful husband to me, a teacher always inspirational and always challenging to his students, Eric remains an exceptional person who lived an exceptional life.”

“Kindness can change the lives of people.”—Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Prize lecture, 2012.