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!
A long-overdue update on Paul Severtson: “I became interested in music because “my mother was quite an accomplished cellist in her youth. She made sure that all five of her kids learned an instrument. Somehow she managed our musical training in such a way that she got a string quartet out of the first four. The youngest rebelled. He took up the oboe.” Paul majored in music theory and composition at Yale, and then received…
Per his 50th Reunion Essay, Marty Cohen retired in 2015 with six goals, two of which were to publish works in process and create new ones.
He’s made good on at least one of those goals by publishing Stone Seeds, which Amazon describes thusly: “Stone Seeds is about paying attention to the connections between people and places, poetry and birds, songs and silence, spirituality and the material world.
Marty has been publishing poetry and essays on literature and the arts in periodicals and anthologies since 1970. Stone Seeds brings together the best of his work since A Traveller’s Alphabet (1979).
In this post, Marty makes a generous offer to classmates and shares some personal news, too – read more.
Editor’s Note: Those who attended the Reunion last summer had an opportunity to get a private tour of the newly renovated Peabody Museum, including the expanded exhibits of dinosaurs and replicas of other prehistoric flora and fauna. We also got to see the work being completed on the David Friend Hall, a section of the Peabody dedicated to the mineral collection donated by David Friend, ’69 Calhoun.
This story is reprinted from this month’s Roskin Gem News Report, a leading journal focused on the natural gemstone industry. It reports on the formal debut of the completed exhibition, well documented with some stunning pictures.
Eliot Norman recruited Mary Langston, a well-regarded soprano, to sing “Over the Rainbow” as part of a musical program he put together for Dr. Will Streicker a few weeks before he passed away last Spring. Rob Riehle and his wife Byah joined others at Will’s home, where he was confined to home hospice. Owing to his immunocompromised state, Will (who Eliot and others knew as Bill) had to keep his distance, listening from an easy chair at the top of the stairs.
This performance was captured on an iPhone and is embedded here:
“Professor Priest was a distinguished scholar, revered teacher, and fierce mentor,” said Dean Heather K. Gerken, Yale Law School. “A scholarly pioneer, George left a legion of ideas in his wake. He was also a beloved member of our community, someone who managed to be an intellectual giant with great warmth, humor, and modesty. He made us think, and he made us laugh. And we all mourn his loss.”
Priest joined Yale Law School in 1981 and was named the John M. Olin Professor of Law and Economics in 1986…
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If you have recollections, reminiscences or stories, or want to add anything to the above, please either comment below the story or email your thoughts to Dan Seiver (seiverda@miamioh.edu) and Wayne Willis (support@Yale1969.org). If you have any good pictures, send them to Wayne, and he can add them to this post manually.
Calhoun roommates in ’68-’69, Scott Howard and Bob Brush have a lot in common: They sang together in the 1966-68 Baker’s Dozen and were founding members of the Roll and Pin Society (along with Bob Wheeler, James Hallet, Wayne Henderson, Charlie Peck, Brad Davenport and Bo Riehle).
Recently, they decided to collaborate in the creation of a first novel, with Bob as the author and Scott as the illustrator.
Bob is an Emmy-award winning writer and executive producer of The Wonder Years and recipient of other awards. Scott is a retired banker now deep into painting, non-profit work, and family. “Read More” to see more about the novel, The Piazza: Stories from Piazza Santa Caterina
Editor’s Note: This is an essay recently published in Medium. It has a unique take on The Game in 1968 as a metaphor for how we experience The End.
When my memory plays tricks on me, often the issue relates to time — the order of events and their duration. My perception of time varies with my emotional involvement in what is happening, as well as with my age. Time drags for a child and races ahead for someone as old as me. The final moments of a sporting event can remind us of the variability of time.
Because of rules that stop the clock, the last two minutes of a football game or a basketball game can go on and on, with reversal after reversal. I particularly remember the Harvard-Yale game of 1968….
