Editor’s Note: If “singing is an athletic activity, plain and simple,” then our Whiffenpoofs are Olympic class athletes. They really nailed it during reunion weekend.
Just give a listen to this 30-second clip of them singing!
You can go home again!
Your scribe and nearly 400 classmates, with 300 spouses and family members, returned to Yale for a fabulous 50th. My limited word allowance cannot do justice to the rediscoveries of old friends, and, yet again, the making of new ones. Add in nonstop intellectual stimulation, animated conversations day and night, a steady supply of libations and tasty comestibles, all topped with two servings from our gentlemen songsters, the superb 1969 Whiffenpoofs.
I had fully expected to “retire” as webmaster after the reunion. Yeah, yeah … the Reunion Committee said they wanted the site to continue, but I didn’t think there was enough “news” to sustain a community website. Then an odd thing happened: Many, many people approached me during the reunion, saying they hoped the site would continue in some form. Please read on and leave, in the comments below, YOUR thoughts about what we should do here, what the site should be or do.
Here are some photos from the reunion:
In the course of our 50th Reunion activities, we were reminded in casual but animated conversation during our Class Dinner, that University Commons is being completely renovated into a campus-wide student center, including its traditional role as the principal dining hall for the university. First, some history. University Commons (1902) is part of the Yale…
Thanks go to David Tufaro, who was the first classmate to respond to the request to send in pictures or videos from the reunion. Please send in any you have and share with the rest of the Class! (Use the contact form or email us directly.)
The recent passing of Charles Reich and an experience in Claudia Rankine’s poetry seminar during our 50th Reunion a few weeks ago prompt these thoughts.
The Charlie Reich seminar of which I speak actually occurred in the law school, but undergraduates had the run of the campus, and it was widely attended by them.
When our class of ’69 arrived at WYBC, the big attraction for many of us was hosting rock and soul shows on WYBC 640 AM, closed circuit to the Yale campus. Over the spring break of our freshman year, though, we who heeled WYBC helped build a new state of the art stereo FM studio…
Charles A. Reich, who as a 42-year-old Yale Law School professor swapped button-down Brooks Brothers shirts for hippie beads and vaulted to intellectual celebrity by venerating the counterculture in his manifesto, “The Greening of America,” died on Saturday in San Francisco. He was 91.
Had any of us been thinking 50 years ahead as we graduated, we probably would not have guessed that one of the defining issues of the next half century would be the challenging relationship between people and the planet. It turned out that 1969 marked the beginning of what is commonly thought of as the…
Several discussions at our 50th Reunion touched on two memorable themes from our senior year: the Black Power movement and the football team. These themes intersected in historic fashion at the Dartmouth game at Yale Bowl on November 2, 2018, when our two black cheerleaders stood at the front of the cheerleading squad during the…
The ClassBook was a big hit, with the accent on big! Over 800 pages, 8 pounds, 530 personal essays, obituaries, and 12 longer essays offering broader, deeper looks at our experiences over the past 50 years. Yet, sadly mistakes were made.
John Waldman was one of the first classmates to submit his essay online, and yet, …
Everyone Contributes – Let’s Document What Just Happened.
We need to document what happened at the reunion, mainly for the many classmates who could not attend for medical or other good reasons. Volunteers are writing up reports on events like Classmates In Concert and the Class Survey presentation. But we need MORE of you to volunteer and help document the …
The final numbers are in from the YAA, and Silliman outpaced everyone, holding off late surges by Morse and Branford. Final results (classmates attending divided by living classmates per college):
My contact with a broad swath of Yale ‘69 preparatory to our 50th revealed widespread unease with what Yale now appears to “be.” This disaffection was repeatedly invoked as the source of decisions not to attend the Reunion – prompting our Reunion Committee to assert that the Reunion would be about renewing connections between classmates,…
Editor’s Note: Bill Newman was one of the reunion co-chairs. For so many classmates who attended our reunion, the event was a beginning for us and even more so a celebration of that beginning. We collectively kicked off a new phase for the Class, one where there are new friends, and we rekindled old relationships. …
