Two more deaths to report – George Priest and Subrata Chakravarthy. See details in their In Memoriam posts — George Priest and Subrata Chakravarthy.]
George was a long-time professor at Yale Law School. Included below are tributes from YLS Dean Heather K. Gerken and a remembrance from Alan Boles.
Also, see more about Subrata from Walker Knight, and some “happier news” from Tom Carey and Bob Horvitz.
As noted last month, we sought your input about our new Listserv. (See “We Need A New Listserv. Your Input Needed.”) Thanks for all the comments and inputs. After trying a few commercial packages, we made a choice. See below for the rollout plan.
We have also created a permanent “Listserv Summary” page that is linked in the masthead menu. It explains how and when to use the listserv. Please check that out for more detail, too.
Tom technically is affiliated with the Class of ’70, but he was in our class, in TD, until the spring semester of our senior year. He missed our graduation because while on spring break in Bermuda, he broke his leg when he crashed his motor bike into a stone wall. According to his son, Johnnie, Tom passed away peacefully at Johnnie’s home owing to complications of a constellation of cancers called BPDCN. Johnnie reported that…
I am helping Bess Chakravarty (Subrata’s widow) downsize from her condo in Fort Myers.
There were several pieces of Yale memorabilia that Subrata had collected and that she won’t be taking with her. I said I would try to help find a good home for them. See the post for pix and list of all items available.
If you are interested in any of these items, just make a bid and let me know at slwilkinson1113@gmail.com. I would coordinate everything from there.
Not much is known about Greg. He lived in a single in Ezra Stiles and had an irascible nature. He graduated but never participated in any alumni events and had no internet presence. We only recently learned about his death, which occurred in 2014. San Diego Union Tribune SAN DIEGO – A 66-year-old San Diego man who died when his car veered into a parked pickup Friday, was identified, the Medical Examiner’s Office said Monday….
Following his sci-fi novel Deep Past (2019), author Eugene Linden has picked up where he left off with Resurrecting Bart (2025). The idea for the former book, he told The Hudson Independent, grew out of a ponderance: “If natural selection could produce human scale intelligence in just several hundred thousand years – the blink of an eye on a geological scale – who’s to say other highly intelligent creatures haven’t come and gone over the past millions of years.”
Editor’s Note: Class Notes contain a tribute to Victor Norman from James Fishkin. Also, there is some obituary information about Don Lewis and Paul Lozier. Then we move on to “happier news” from our fearless Correspondent Secretary, Dan Seiver, seiverda@miamioh.edu.
In happier news: The Class of 1969 Scholarship Fund has a market value of $845,450 as of June 30, 2024. Annual Spending Distribution for 2024–2025: $39,651.
Our latest scholarship recipient is David Yun, ’28, [shown above] who is just starting out at Yale. He was a soccer star in a Fort Worth high school, and he is a first-generation American. He chose Yale “because I would like to learn from the best professors in the world and I wanted to meet people from various parts of the world.” David is at david.yun@yale.edu.
The Class Council wants your thoughts about an idea for an 80th birthday bash in 2027 for members of the class and their guests.
We had a great time at our reunion last spring. At our age, why wait five years for our next regular reunion? Two years from now, in 2027, most of us will turn 80, two years before our 2029 reunion. How about we get together then to celebrate our birthdays?
Leave comments below or contact the authors at …
Editor’s Note: Yale retired our old system. Which of the new offerings should we use? The old system was broken and fell into disuse. It’s time to resurrect it. This article briefly discusses what a Class listserv is, what it’s good for and how it would benefit you. We share a few of the design choices we face and solicit your input.
One of the lesser-known tools for communicating with other members of our class is the class listserv. It hasn’t been used very often over the past couple of years.
What is a listserv, you ask? Well, it’s just a piece of software that manages a mailing list of its members. Any member of the list can send an email to a single address, and that message will be forwarded to all the other members.
What do 69ers want from a listserv? Here are the design choices we are juggling. Your input would be helpful.
What actions should you consider upon learning that your grandfather was like Reuben Markham—a missionary, educator, journalist, intelligence officer, and a significant American figure who played a vital role in the social and political lives of pre-war Bulgaria? What steps should you take when research reveals a wealth of historically important actions and writings associated with his life?
Well, if you’re like Stuart (“Ted”) Van Dyke, you dust off your PhD in European History, ignite your research skills, and dive into the archives of the US State Department, the Christian Science Monitor, and several Bulgarian and other primary sources. You seek to uncover exactly what your grandfather did and how his contemporaries responded. And with a scholar’s dispassionate eye, you document that for history — maybe for a book, but for now in some academic journals.
Our prolific classmate, Jim Sleeper, has been publishing political commentary on the election in The Guardian, Salon and Commonweal magazine. Most of the essays use rich historical analyses comparing the current rightward movement in our politics to prior periods of American and world history, specifically ancient Rome and Weimar Germany.
Last week, on Presidents’ Day, Salon published an essay comparing the current Administration with the fall of the Roman Republic. That essay, “Is Donald Trump more like Hitler or Augustus Caesar? Honestly, it’s both” attracted a lot of eyeballs online and on social media.
A few hours after Salon published the article, Breitbart News took exception to the thesis of Jim’s essay in a prominent article, set forth below. Read the Breitbart critique and Jim’s original. Who’s right?
[update, 2/19: The recording of the Class Colloquium is now available.]
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We kick off our 2025 zoominars with an interview with Hughes Norton. (Register now.) Hughes was a leader at International Management Group, the legendary sports management company. After a meteoric career representing Tiger Woods and heading up IMG’s Golf Division, Hughes suffered some rapid reverses in both career and life — all of which he addresses candidly in a new memoir, Rainmaker.
This should be a fun time, especially for golfers, frustrated golfers, sports enthusiasts and those of us who’ve endured the “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” more generally.
Register now for Class Colloquium 20, Feb. 18th at 2:00 pm EST.
Subrata Chakravarty passed away on February 1st, just three weeks before his 78th birthday. His family reported that he passed away peacefully at home while in hospice care, no longer suffering from the dementia he had endured in his later years.
Juju, as he was known during our bright college years, graduated with honors and immediately enrolled at Harvard Business School, graduating in 1971. Following this, he embarked on a distinguished career as a business journalist, contributing to some of the most esteemed business publications in the world, including Forbes, Bloomberg, Institutional Investor, and the Boston Consulting Group.
Subrata arrived at Yale after attending an Indian boarding school. Although he spent …
The Boston Public Library recently acquired one of the limited edition portfolios Steve Dunwell recently published, “With These Hands.” Each set contains nine archival silver prints showing New England textile mill workers 1973-1977. There are only 12 sets in this Limited Edition.
This purchase is an excellent start on Steve’s goal of getting all the important archival repositories in New England, plus some key national institutions, to purchase and preserve these silver-process prints of a bygone era that he was able to document shortly after we graduated.
This project began in early 1973 when Steve was invited to visit a textile mill in ….
[Op-ed from the Boulder Daily Camera, Boulder CO]
If there ever was a time for true adulthood, it is now.
This is difficult to acknowledge, but our collective home is in dire straits. We are in ecological overshoot: there are too many people on the planet consuming too much and producing too much waste for civilization as we know it to continue. We are already seeing increasing numbers of unprecedented storms, floods, fires and droughts around the world as well as conflicts over dwindling resources and masses of refugees driven by all of it. Climate change is but a symptom of the bigger problem of ecological overshoot. Our present economic and political systems…
Our prolific classmate, Richard Selzer, has done It again – by publishing his newest book, One Family. This one is very different from his other books, many of which have been profiled in these pages. This is not a novel; it’s an exploration, a meditation on the nature of human connectedness.
The book starts with a mind-blowing thought experiment (and proof) that, if you have European ancestry, it’s likely that you are related to every other person with European ancestry on Earth today. We are indeed … ONE FAMILY.
Richard also makes a generous gift at the end of the article — access to a free copy of the book!
