Class Notes: Sep/Oct 2017

Chris Hoffman (JE) writes: “I’ve just published my third book of poetry, On the Way, featuring poems about nature and spirit and a longer poem about the Camino de Santiago (www.hoopandtree.org). After a career in applied group psychology (organization development), I now devote most of my time to poetry and to volunteer work related to keeping a livable climate.”

A delayed report from the Seattle Times: “John Thomas (Thom) Graham (BC) passed away unexpectedly on November 17, 2012 due to complications from a farming incident. Thom was an architect in the family firm, John Graham and Co., during the 1980s, and then self-employed in the 1990s. Thom was an avid gardener, tinkerer, inventor, sculptor, bee keeper and bread maker. When he moved to his farm in 2010, he raised cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, pigs, and more in a remodeled turn-of-the-century barn on the Olympic Peninsula. He is survived by his three children, Ian, Rose, and Heather.”

According to the 1969 Classbook, Thom was a non-resident member of Branford and was married to Bonnie Dolgow in December 1967. We have no other information.

The July/August issue of this magazine had an excellent interview with our own Frank Shorter (MC). Most of us are aware that Frank would have won another marathon gold in 1976, if he had not been beaten by the East German Cierpinski, who was later found to be a doper: “Cierpinski was implicated by East German track and field research files uncovered by Werner Franke at the Stasi headquarters in Leipzig in the late 1990s.”-Wikipedia.

The question is: What will it take to get that gold medal stripped and shipped to the man who deserves it?

Planning for the 50th Reunion and Classbook is well underway. Your scribe will provide more details in upcoming issues. Our reunion will either be the last weekend in May 2019 or the first weekend in June 2019. Put it on your calendar!

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

-Carl Sagan, astronomer and author (1934-1996) ,