Mar/Apr 2012

Greg Montes (greg2_2008@yahoo.com) writes for the first time in 42 years (he gets extra space): “I saw in the alumni magazine that Class of 1969 ‘missing’ members included Richard Griest. In the early 1990s I read a Los Angeles Times article about San Diego attorney William Lerach, whose former University of Pittsburgh roommate has been, since the mid-1970s, the attorney of some members of my family. The article mentioned that Richard Griest, then of Reno, Nevada, contacted Lerach about investment money he lost. In 2010 I talked to Lerach, who remembered Griest.

“Richard was a sophomore-year transfer from Cal Tech, but did not, as far as I know, graduate from Cal Tech or Yale College. I knew Griest in 1966–69 when he and I were in Morse College. In summer 1968, Griest stayed a night at my parent’s house in Omaha, Nebraska, while driving back to California. I was in New Haven then, doing research at Yale libraries on the history of some major Latin American cities, on a small grant from Phelps Trust Association which I did not learn until 1988 is the corporate entity of Wolf’s Head secret society.

“In early September 1972, about a week after I arrived in the Bay Area to look for work, after I earned my Yale MArch degree, I was walking along Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley, California, and I heard someone say, ‘Hey Greg!’ I turned around and it was Richard Griest. I forget now what kind of work, if any, that Richard did at that time. Some days later Richard showed me around San Francisco, as it was my first time there. That was the last time I saw Richard.

“In 1976 I had dinner with a friend in San Diego. Another dinner guest asked me if I knew Richard at Yale. I said I knew Griest fairly well as we lived on the same dorm floor for a year (Morse tower, 1967–68) and we often ate lunch or dinner together. The attorney told me that in the 1950s he lived next to the Griests in San Diego and he worked at the Convair aircraft plant, I think with Richard Griest’s father who, as I recall, was a US Navy veteran, possibly a Navy officer who may have served on a submarine.

“In San Francisco in 1972 I got work as a neighborhood planner with a nonprofit housing corporation. Later I worked as urban/regional planner, successively for three counties in northern and southern California. Now I am retired.

“In 2009 I gave my collection of antiquarian/scarce books, postcards, travel brochures, and related items on history and life of world and great cities and on travels in temperate/tropical regions worldwide, to Cornell Library Rare and Manuscript Collections (google Guide to the Gregory E. Montes Urban History and Travel Collection). I have thousands more books, postcards, travel brochures, and other items in storage I will send to Cornell, which accepts financial gifts from anyone to purchase more items for the collection and accepts items Cornell does not have which fit the collection topics/parameters.”

Scribe’s Note: Greg’s full communication has been posted on the class listserv.

Stephen J. Millner (sjmillner2000@gmail.com) writes: “I am a photographer, studied at Yale with John T. Hill and Walker Evans. I have a friend photographer, Zoe Strauss of Philadelphia, who has become very successful and is having a show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which opened January 14. The exhibition catalog Zoe Strauss: Ten Years will be published by the Yale University Press. Sixteen of my photographs, taken at Zoe Strauss’s installations, are included in this catalog.”

Apology: In a previous column, I mistakenly referred to our esteemed (esteamed?) classmateWill Bogaty as Bill. I stand corrected.

“One melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can’t make old friends.”—Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011)