UPDATED comments, posted 4/8/24 Remembering Donald P. Ferguson, ’69 Mark Alden Branch’s “Old Yale” article, “The Stories Behind the Names,”, in Yale Alumni Magazine, November/December, 2023, focuses on five of the 35 Yale alumni killed in the Vietnam War. One of them, Donald Ferguson, ’69, is also part of another group of five men killed in that war, memorialized by a plaque, at the base of a flagpole flying the American flag, placed in 2018…
Note: In this essay, Jim Sleeper reports on Death of a Yale Man, a memoir from Malcolm Ross, Yale 1919. Ross, a son of an “old stock,” prosperous family, who graduated Yale in 1919, sold bonds briefly and then turned to years of body-wracking labor alongside miners and oil drillers and became a New Deal official with the National Labor Relations Board.
Editor’s Note: Reunion co-chairs update us with announcements re: which college will be our reunion HQ; previews of likely presentation topics; timing of the memorial service and Class Dinner; and other updates.
Ken Brown, who roomed with Richard Sophomore and Junior years offered the following for the class notes.
Richard L. Farren of New York City, age 76, died suddenly at his home on December 3, 2023. Richard was a practicing attorney at the time of his death. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1965. He matriculated with the Yale Class of 1969 but graduated in three years …
Yes, it’s quaint, and a bit nostalgic, to sleep in our old rooms … on those “Yale single” bedframes that squeak when you sit on them. But many spouses or partners are not so, um, adventurous, nor brave enough to deal with shared bathrooms, third-floor walk-ups and the other limitations of dorm living. They (or we!) want a regular hotel room, thank you very much.
Every member of the Yale community knows that November in New Haven is filled with compelling and colorful events. Whether Princeton or Harvard is the opponent, the campus is energized by championship football, the YAA Assembly, the Yale Medal Dinner, and the Blue Leadership Ball, all concentrated into a single long weekend. This year Harvard was the opponent and The Game attracted over 51,000 to the Yale Bowl, a robust crowd that excitedly saw the…
Bruce was born May 12, 1947, in Detroit, Michigan. He grew up in Skokie, Illinois and attended Niles West High School where he became a state champion gymnast.
He studied economics as an undergraduate and for his PhD (Yale, 1972). For his graduate research he studied how human behaviors can cause departures from the principles of rational economics, a topic that was not well received at the time, but which (as Bruce would wryly note) led to a Nobel Prize for some later researchers.
Note: Op-ed published in Climate Psychology Alliance – North America, December 2023
Fundamentally, all psychology is ecopsychology and all therapy is ecotherapy. This is so because the psyche exists within society and society exists within the environment. A person, or a society, cannot be healthy or whole without a respectful, reciprocal relationship with the encircling hoop of the natural …
Lee Mundell died on June 26, 2023, after a brief illness. From Legacy.com: His wife and children were with him. He served in the United States Air Force where he was a pilot and flew in Vietnam. He then graduated from Golden Gate University (MBA 1974), and the University of Georgia School of Law (1977). While in law school, he was a teaching assistant in the university’s Terry School of Business, became a Notes Editor…
We all know we were born at the right time — our music was the greatest of the century, our football team was the most exciting since Yale joined the Ivy League, we came of age in an Age of Aquarius and our classmates were truly exceptional. Yale just confirmed our preeminence by identifying six people for “lifetime leadership awards” — with two of the six from our class!
Reunion co-chairs Bill Newman and Derry Allen report that YAA has assigned the 55th Reunion for the Yale Class of 1969 to the weekend of May 30 – June 2 of 2024. Mark your calendars! Save the dates!
Here’s what little we know so far about on-campus housing, hotels, program, cost, registration, etc. And here are some things you can do over the next month or ….
Reunion co-chairs Bill Newman and Derry Allen are asking for YOUR help in formulating the “class-only” reunion events. Please join an ad hoc “planning committee” for two one-hour zoom meetings to a) define and then b) choose the reunion events offered by the class.
Please click here to indicate that you’d be willing to serve on this ad-hoc committee.
Editor’s Note: New book by classmate Matt Flynn:
Confessions Of A Church Lawyer: In Defense Of Christianity
In this compelling book, the author, who served as legal counsel for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee during a tumultuous period of sexual abuse claims, delves into three critical missions.
First, they unveil the unvarnished truth behind the abuse cases, shedding light on the profound …
From online sources: “James Vincent Minor III of Wilton, CT died unexpectedly on April 1, 2023 in Norwalk Hospital at the age of 75. Jim was born to Betty and Dr. James Vincent Minor II in Norwalk, CT. He is survived by his wife Andrea Byrne Minor, his three children, James Vincent Minor IV, Sister Mary Hannah (Emily), Andrew Minor, and his beloved granddaughters Zoe and Holly. An accomplished academic, he studied at Portsmouth Abbey,…
Is anyone else in the class composing and performing original music? How about all the folks who serenaded us at the 50th — Classmates In Concert: Drost, Zamcheck, Bicknell? How about all you veterans of those wonderful acapella singing groups we enjoyed in the ’60s?
Michael Folz (who’s recovering from kidney replacement surgery!) and his wife Maureen have mastered a new piece of recording equipment and have created three new songs. Check ’em out! And here’s a playlist of all three songs.
Note: In 2012 I gave a talk to a group of Yale undergrads who gathered at the Yale War Memorial on Beinecke Plaza — about how liberal education, especially at elite institutions such as Yale, finesses but sometimes clarifies the difference between self-censorship that’s prompted by fear of a state, of corporate employers, and of other authorities versus a kind of self-censorship that’s prompted by the seductions of power, i.e., by calculating that …
