Michael Walter Finkbeiner – 50th Reunion Essay

Michael Walter Finkbeiner

50 Harbor View Ln – B

Belleair Bluffs, FL 33770

mwfinkbeiner@gmail.com

203-561-3293

Spouse(s): Joan Mathews Planchart (1970)

Child(ren): Elizabeth (1971), Sarah (1974), Jean (1976) and Daniel (1981)

Grandchild(ren): Andrew (1994), Hannah (1996), Sarah (1997) and Julia (1999)

Education: Yale Forest School MFS 1971

Career: Consulting Forester 20 years, Land Surveyor 30 years, Minister 41 years

Avocations: Lux et Veritas (the real ones)

College: Morse

Yale changed me—for better. A formative event to define what I wanted and did not want from Yale came in June 1967, while working as a bartender at Silliman College for the 25th Reunion of the Class of 1942.

During these same days, the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War was playing out in my ear through a transistor radio, and I was very conscious that while that class sat at my bar, exactly 1,900 years after the Roman Armies had surrounded Jerusalem to destroy it, a militarized Jewish people were retaking the city. As Kingman Brewster and members of that class celebrated their lives since graduation, I resolved to make my Yale degree a less important part of my life’s work and purpose, not losing sight of the bigger events around me.

The economics department provided exposure to some great minds, including Joe Stiglitz, my advisor, who opened up for me the wonders of the Yale Computer Center and the magic of aggregate, or as we now call it, Big Data. He instilled in me the hard lesson that “correlation is not causation,” and that if we fail to comprehend “the way things work,” we easily delude ourselves. A sign on the wall at Yale’s Cowles Foundation reminded us of the wisdom of Ecclesiastes 9:11–12, “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong… nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all.”

A team of foresters from British Columbia were working next to me there at YCC, using the geometry of the axial buds of various conifers to simulate the growth of the complete forest sector of the BC province, from planting to harvest. This “coolness” of approach to computing and simulation, the environmental movement in general and my #1 draft lottery ticket to Vietnam in particular led me to a master of forest science degree from the Yale Forest School, a path later taken by our classmates Ralph Schmidt and Mike Harlow, whose classes there I had the privilege of teaching subjects I had come to love: surveying, mapping and photogrammetry.

I married Joan Planchart (MA Yale ’68) in January 1970, and we produced four remarkable children. My stepdaughter, Marisol Planchart, graduated in the Yale Class of 1984 (Berkeley). Joan and I spent our honeymoon summer of 1970 managing the Yale Forest in Keene, New Hampshire. After graduation I chose a career as a consulting forester, and spent a decade working for the Rockefeller family and other clients. Since 1986 I have had a surveying, mapping and land use consulting business based in Greenwich Connecticut. Our children have lived in France, Guatemala, and Peru. They now live in Greenwich as well as Oregon, Germany, Bolivia and Florida, giving us many happy memories and future adventures to pursue until the end of our days, staying true to our belief that in the words of Jesus: “the truth will set you free.” John 8:32.