CLASS OF 1966 | 2018 | ISSUE 1
The following message appears on Madison, Wisc., buses: “People of Meskonsing,/ Who rides with you?/ Saygo! (Greetings in good health!).” The author is our own Claude “Bud” Smith, one of a handful of Wisconsin writers selected for this Art En Route Project. Bud explains: “My words (unreadable, alas, in the attached photo) contain a message for our classmates…Meskonsing is the English spelling of the French version of a Miami Indian name for Wisconsin. Substitute ‘Wesleyan’ and you get the point. Ring the bells of old South College!”
How good is that! Well, almost as good as the life Bud, Elaine, his wife of 41 years, and their two sons are living in Madison, where Bud writes: “We take advantage of all things Madison and all things UW, and volunteer a lot for Wisconsin Public Television. I do not have a smartphone, but can now text on my flip phone, a miracle on the order of the loaves and the fishes. I play in senior softball and golf leagues, fish the state lakes and streams, and am a member of a terrific book club. My writing and publishing continue apace, and I am helping a number of former students get their books published. My reminiscence, “Touching Genius,” appeared in John Updike Remembered (2017), and I gave a reading downtown in December.”
I mentioned wrestling with retirement in my request of class notes, and David Luft responded: “Let me know if you figure out how to do retirement. We could do this as a theme for the class notes. Oddly enough, I’m around the same age you are. I think I will retire in the next year, and it’s hard to imagine my life without teaching and regular obligations.” David, who holdsthe Horning Endowed Chair of Humanities at Oregon State University, just sent his latest book, The Austrian Tradition in German Intellectual History 1740-1938/1939 to Cambridge University Press. “One of the things I think about doing with my retirement is writing other kinds of books.”
Essel Bailey, too, is thinking of retirement. He and his wife, Menakka, “just returned from Australia and Sri Lanka visiting family. And are trying to get to that retirement state sometime this year. Traveling to our farm in Calistoga though in a few weeks.”
No retirement, however, for Alexander “Sandy” Blount. Professor of Clinical Psychology, Antioch University New England, and Professor of Family Medicine and Psychiatry
University of Massachusetts Medical School, Sandy writes: “I am living in Amherst and have since the 1970s. Still married to Francesca Maltese (45 years this summer). She is retired, but I seem to be ramping up. I am teaching doctoral students in clinical psychology with a focus on health psychology and the integration of behavioral health into medical settings. I have a project to develop the workforce of people trained to do behavioral health work in primary care settings for the State of New Hampshire and I am working on a book tentatively entitled Patient Centered Team-Based Primary Care: The Leap from Good to Great. Let me know if you get that retirement thing figured out. For the time being, I seem to be fleeing it as fast as possible.”
Enough of retirement, well, not quite. Thomas Hawley, a California neighbor as it turns out of Essel’s, is “now retired” and with “my Dutch wife, Marijke, living on the banks of the Carmel River, growing grapes, making wine labeled ‘Blue Heron’ (called uncharitably by some “Dead Heron”), and painting sea and landscapes.” Thomas and James “Sandy” Van Kennen, you may remember, swam on the Wesleyan team that in 1963 set a New England record for the 400-yard freestyle relay. Thomas, suffering from “the cold and lack of female companionship,” transferred after his freshman year to Stanford where he stayed “for law school, spending summers managing Dave Packard’s apricot orchard. The major law firms did not exactly beat a path to my door after law school, and I ended up with only two offers: one from Anchorage, Alaska, and one from Monterey, California. Needless to say, I chose the latter and after three years at the Monterey firm, opened up a small private practice specializing in estate planning in Carmel, Calif. I authored the Artful Dodger’s Guide to Planning Your Estate, which met with very modest success.” Wonderful to catch up with Thomas, and he is “hoping to reconnect with some of the fine fellows I met at Wesleyan.”
Let me end with a tribute to resilience and good humor, both of which Will Rhys and his wife, Nancy, possess in abundance. Last year their house in Bridgton, Maine, “was destroyed in a fire caused by a lightning strike.” In the depth of last December’s bitter cold, Will wrote: “Hope your temperature gauge is not doing a nose dive like it is here. We have snow, but it is too freakin’ cold to get out and enjoy it. Hoping that we get a bit of a warm up next week…warmer than single digits. Nancy and I would also like to see a bit of a warm up so that our builders can proceed with the construction of our new house in a timely fashion…Guys working on House 2.0 are truly brave souls to be working through these winter days.Not ready to pack up and scurry off to Hawaii, although sharing a beverage with Hardy would not be thought amiss.” Best of fortune to Will and Nancy.
Larry Carver | carver1680@gmail.com
P.O. Box 103, Rico, Colorado, 81332 | 512/478-8968