• Subrata Narayan Chakravarty, February 1, 2025

    ByAdmin

    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 …

  • Steve Dunwell’s Photographs Now A Part of History

    ByAdmin

    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 ….

  • Chris Hoffman: We are letting our children down

    ByChris Hoffman

    [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…

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    “We Are All One Family” – Richard Seltzer

    ByAdmin

    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!

  • Class Notes, Jan-Feb 2025

    ByAdmin

    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…

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    Marty Cohen’s latest book of poetry is now available

    ByAdmin

    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.

  • Peabody’s Mineral Galleries Reopen – David Friend Hall

    ByAdmin

    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. 

  • Classmates arrange musical interlude for Will Steicker’s hospice care

    ByAdmin

    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:

  • George Lloyd Priest, December 17, 2024

    ByAdmin

    “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.

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    Yale roommates collaborate on a new novel

    ByAdmin

    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

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    Death and Time 29-29

    ByRichard Seltzer

    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….

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    “Underground Rock” Playlist Recovered

    ByThomas Guterbock

    Those of you, like me, who enjoyed the cutting edge of music in the late 60’s — what was called “progressive rock” — will enjoy this.

    Our classmate at WYBC, Kevin McKeown, went into professional radio, then into sound and film production in California, and eventually served as the mayor of Santa Monica. He compiled this amazing three-hour playlist of songs we used to play “back in the day.”

    Magical! I hadn’t heard “8:05” by Moby Grape in over 50 years. Here is the songlist … and the titles:

  • Paul Franklyn Lozier – August 23, 2024

    ByAdmin
    Editor’s Note:  If you have recollections, reminiscences or stories, or want to add anything, please either “Leave A Reply” at the bottom or email your thoughts to Dan Seiver or Wayne Willis.

    Paul Franklyn Lozier, 77, of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, husband of Janet, entered into eternal rest, Friday August 23, 2024. Paul’s life was a testament to his unwavering dedication to those he loved and the causes he championed.

  • Results from Colloquium 19: How We Fix Climate Change

    ByAdmin

    Our presenter, Wayne Willis, called on his experience as a tech entrepreneur and a leader with Citizens’ Climate Lobby to offer a solution to climate change.  His thesis, called “The EcoTech Synthesis,” observes:
    * Reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 requires CleanTech to replace DirtyTech.
    * That happens when the “Green Premium” gets to or below zero.
    * There are two paths to reducing the Green Premium ….

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    Andres Serrano: Beyond The Pale

    ByRobert Horvitz

    Editor’s Note: Our Robert Horvitz interviewed Artist Andres Serrano at an exhibition in Prague, and it was recently published in Trebuchet, the London-based magazine dedicated to contemporary art criticism. See the entire interview online, or reprinted in full here. It is an intelligent, in-depth interview, with high-quality reproductions of artworks from Serrano.

  • Class Notes, Nov-Dec 2024

    ByDaniel Seiver

    From Ted Snow: “There are a few benefits of having a stroke, which I did several years ago – like good parking spaces and getting special treatment at the airport – but I don’t recommend it. But a few good things came out of it: Time to copy and organize a lifetime’s worth of photos, and writing a book: The Sixth Element: How Carbon Shapes Our World. Before my poor health forced retirement, I was…