Vincent Joseph Pitts – 50th Reunion Essay

Vincent Joseph Pitts

100 Mansfield Rd.

North Haven, CT 06473

vincentpitts@comcast.net

203-239-5198

Education: BA, Yale 1969; MA, Harvard 1971; PhD, Harvard 1975

Avocations: Associate Fellow, Branford College (Yale)

College: Berkeley

Yale opened windows for me on worlds I didn’t know existed and I have done my best ever since to explore them: two careers, five books, much foreign travel. Throughout it all I have benefitted from the encouragement of extended family and good friends. Do the details matter? I think not.

For me, our upcoming reunion calls to mind memories of the classes celebrating their 50th reunions during our undergraduate years: the classes of 1916, 1917, 1918, and 1919. I can still see them in their blue blazers and straw boaters trying to make sense of a Yale so very different from theirs: Dink Stover meeting Doonesbury. Now it’s our turn, and I wonder what the current crop of undergraduates will think of us as Doonesbury meets Salovey. Let us hope they are kind.

As for Yale, much gratitude as we say “hail and farewell, ave atque vale.”