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As our 80th birthdays arrive, humor is called for—Jeff Nilson providing some, writing: “As part of my aging, I have been writing limericks lately. Like earworms, they occupy more and more of my consciousness. Oh well! Soon I will be turning 80, which has given rise to this verse:
Soon I will be turning 80,
An age when the world less weighty.
I have lost all my glam,
But I’ve learned who I am.
(Oh I forgot.) . . . I’ve had a lot of gas lately.”
Jeff apologized for sharing this “bit of doggerel” with an English professor, and I replied that “Edward Lear is a favorite of mine,” while pointing out that “Samuel Johnson defines ‘doggerel’ as an adjective: ‘Loosed from the measures of regular poetry; vile; despicable; mean.’ And as a noun: ‘Mean, despicable, worthless verses.’ Yours hardly falls under these definitions, and I rather imagine that Johnson admired a good deal of what at the time was thought of as being doggerel, quoting as an illustration of the word in use a passage from Addison’s Spectator: ‘It is a dispute among the criticks, whether burlesque poetry runs best in heroic verse, like that of the Dispensary; or in doggerel, like that of Hudibras.’ I say if age brings one to writing limericks, bring it on. I hope you won’t mind me including this in our next class notes. Your classmates, as I am, will be delighted.” I trust you are.
Jeff went on to write: “I haven’t thought much about Johnson or Addison over the past 50 years. It is most wonderful to think of these two giants tickling your brain. I vaguely remember Johnson’s definition of a fishing rod as a stick with a hook on one end and a fool on the other. Here on Cape Cod, one would never utter such a definition. There is a huge amount of money spent to transport fishing rods and their men into the waters around the Cape, so that they might catch a fish or two. Our granddaughter, Sarah, works at the Allen Harbor boatyard detailing and occasionally repairing boats costing between $20,000 and $100,000. During the summer, most sit idly waiting for their owners to take them out into Nantucket Sound.”
Jeff gives this update on the family: “Grandson Isaac will soon finish his second year at Wesleyan. Grandson William is exploring colleges with strong music programs. He told his mother, Elizabeth ’88, he didn’t see any point in finishing high school as all he wants to do with his life is to play music. He plays bass guitar, piano, and stand-up bass. Unlike his grandfather, he has a beautiful singing voice. Granddaughter Sarah has been accepted at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Marietta and our children are healthy.”
On March 7 Harold Potter wrote from Logan Airport that he and his wife, Lee, were “on our way to Lisbon tonight. The last time we were there was 1980. Bill Machen, a fellow classmate, was with us then. We are traveling with Lee’s roommate from Swarthmore this time.” Below is a photograph of Lee and Harold in the village of Carmona, Spain. “We are now in Ronda, which is in the mountains. Pretty spectacular. Granada and then Madrid next.”
Harold “enjoyed the recent comments from classmates about MLK” and went on to spark a conversation by writing that he “remember[s] James Baldwin’s visit too.” Others have as well, Thomas Hawley writing “remembrance of James Baldwin . . . was one of the highlights of my too brief Wesleyan experience.”
David Luft chimes in that “I might never have known who Baldwin was if he hadn’t come to chapel. I learned a lot from him, especially about the experience of being Black. Interestingly, Ta-Nehisi Coates said roughly the opposite on some matters when he visited Oregon State, but he meant the same thing. Baldwin wanted me to be able to acknowledge his Blackness, while Coates didn’t want me to think I was white. My parents actually never told me I was white. But you didn’t meet a lot of Black guys in Allentown in those days.”David goes on to add: “I’m working on a Czech intellectual history and on a collection of my essays called Toward a Central European Intellectual History.”
David Griffith,who also had an “impromptu lunch with Martin Luther King . . . just the two of us, in the CSS dining hall,” gives us this gem: “I remember drinking with Mr. Baldwin, late in the evening in our dining room at what had been EQV. I’m taxing my memory to recall the conversation with him, Franklin Balch, and Willie Kerr, who were often visitors at or after dinner . . . . While Dr. King looked into my whole being with what seemed a benevolent interest in my family and Colorado Springs and the high mountains, during my unexpected lunch with him, Baldwin was the literate cognoscente, offhand, lubricated, smoking (I believe), and I felt regarded me with the regard that any civilized person would have for a guy in blue jeans from the Wild West.”
Peter Monro had a dazzling encounter with “James Baldwin not at Wesleyan, but rather at the American Protestant Church in Paris, where he was living in 1965. In that church’s crypt, I also sat across from Joan Baez, who had broken off her tour of England when Bob Dylan took it over. She borrowed a guitar to sing at one of the weekly hootenannies held down there.” Hard to top that! Peter goes on to write: “The one celebrity of interest I met on campus was Norman Thomas, the aging socialist. I recall Jimmy Sugar, who would become a National Geographic photographer, taking his portrait.” Peter “was already planning my overall, and ultimate, appreciation for my Wesleyan education, which I suspect is quite unlike most others in both content and consequences. Ultimate because a serious medical diagnosis for my wife assures that I will have little time to offer further comments.” Here is his account of a brave, adventuresome, life well lived:
“Essentially two of my undergraduate years were spent abroad: summers in Tours, France, and academic years in Paris, first with the College of Letters as a sophomore, then pivoting back to a regular curriculum to spend the next year in the Sweetbriar junior year abroad [program], rooming with classmate Stephen Giddings, among others.
“My fluency and knowledge of French culture did not lead to an academic career, nor to the diplomatic career as political analyst in a Francophone country for which I had hoped. I married and started a family too quickly to permit that, which is why I now have two wonderful daughters, Catherine, 55, an outdoor enthusiast in Burlington, Vermont, and Allison, 53, a marketing specialist in suburban Boston.
“My Wesleyan mates—few in number (Phil Shaver, Sam Carrier, Jim Brink), strong in persuasion—pushed me to graduate school. But I walked—quite literally—out of graduate school in Worcester, Massachusetts, and down the street to a first career in journalism. It was a wonderful choice, informing me about all manner of things I wouldn’t have otherwise known, especially the nature of civic community that I had missed moving every couple of years growing up.
“When I burned out of that field at 35–stress and alcohol fueled its demise—I moved near my two daughters in rural Vermont with only enough money to buy land. So together we constructed a homestead—a log cabin from slash, a two-story house off the grid, hauling water, chopping wood—think David Budbill’s Judevine Mountain—(I’ve just recovered photos of daughter Catherine hammering the outhouse together).
“It was a five-year project that segued into my second career—after another year of graduate school—as a landscape architect, a wonderful calling for me, complete with constructing my pencil designs with shovels and tractors, and conserving land in stunning places, mostly here in Maine.
“Over the decades, French has allowed me to fully engage with clients in the Acadian-infused folks in northern Maine, to hike isolated areas of France in the past 10 years, where I was more than once the first American locals had ever met, and to help asylum seekers from French-speaking African nations here in Portland.
“As a result of my years abroad, I lacked much contact with professors or students or the campus community in Middletown, but Wesleyan deserves a doff of my hat for its unique offering of a lengthy immersion in a wonderful foreign culture. (That undergraduate experience also convinced me I could learn other languages, so in the past decade I’ve spent one spring in Lucca learning Italian and two months hiking the Camino de Santiago after ramping up in Spanish.)
“One anecdote: In Paris of the ’60s, I befriended a plumber, who—despite being a Communist—bought a café where he one day accosted me with a pointed finger, saying, ‘Your capitalist society is dying!’ He was showing off for two mates in his Communist cell standing at the bar. I smiled and replied, ‘Yes, that’s why your daughter is studying English in London.’ He roared with laughter, introduced me to his pals, and gave me a free cognac.”
It finally happened: Tom Pulliam’sgranddaughter, Madeline, met Hardy Spoehr. Hardy writing: “We had a great visit with Tom Pulliam, his wife, Alice and . . . Madeline in January. Tom still looks like he can take the rugby ball from scrum over the goal line. Madeline is a student at our University of Hawai`i.” Hardy goes on to write: “Last month, February, I received a great call from Rick Crootof who, with his wife, Linda, gathered with his family on Kaua`i. . . . Great to catch up with both.”
Tom Pulliam corroborates the long-sought visit. “In February, finally got together with Hardy Spoehr and his wife, Joyce, in Honolulu. The occasion was visit to granddaughter Madeline, a sophomore at U. of Hawaii where she is studying marine biology and art. . . . She’s a self-taught surfer, so Hawaii suits her just fine. Was terrific seeing Hardy, who is still paddling in outrigger canoe races, and as it turns out, he has been competing in those races for years against an old rugby coach of mine, who also joined us all for dinner, which is how each found out: both recognizing the other as member of an opposition team.” Tom gave this further update on his ever-engaged, active life: “And speaking of rugby, one of the true highlights of the year was the return to rugby by oldest grandson, Evan, now a junior in high school, to play for his high school team, which resurrected its rugby team after being dormant for 100 years. He had stopped playing for couple of years to concentrate on MLSNext soccer, which forbids its players from playing any other sport. Evan couldn’t resist, though, and led his team to [a] six-game win streak, concluding a great season during which he played 9, the same position I played for several decades, and demonstrated skills that vastly surpassed any I possessed over a long career. An unexpected event: an action photo of Evan appeared on the cover of the national high school rugby magazine, but his MLSNext coaches undoubtedly never saw it. Evan will visit Connecticut College in a few weeks, which is interested in him playing soccer there, the same Connecticut College from our Wesleyan days (and nights), but not really the same at all. Wife, Alice, and I head to Italy at end of April for three weeks. Should be fun and probably a little different experience from my last visit to Italy in 1978 on a rugby tour. Still spending lots of time with daughter Amanda’s family. They live about seven minutes away. In addition to Madeline and Evan, there are Jay (14) and Ben (11 soon), who are also athletes. We spend many happy hours watching them compete.” Tom ends with this thought that no doubt many of us share: “Never planned a life this good. Never expected it. Has not stopped me from thoroughly enjoying it.”
Clark Byam writes that he has “nothing to report other than I’m now 80, still hiking. . . .” This led to a back-and-forth about the importance of staying active. I had no idea what an athlete Clark was and is, asking him innocently about his time on the Wesleyan swim team, and getting this: “I had a bad sinus infection my senior year at Wesleyan that kept me out of practice for three weeks. I came back for one week of practice and decided I no longer had the desire and quit the team. There was a biology professor who had spent a year in Japan and had also gotten his black belt in judo and was offering a class in judo. I took it, and it was a challenge but learned a lot from it. I also trained and boxed in the Golden Gloves my first year in law school before I went into naval aviation training in September of 1967. Later when I was a lawyer in Pasadena, I played a lot of tennis, over 10 years, at Cal Tech tennis courts with a client who was Cal Tech graduate and brilliant. Also played a lot of racquetball at a local gym. So, you might say I was a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, but I stayed active.” Whew! Keep it up, Clark! His parting words to all of us: “Stay healthy!”
LARRY CARVER | carver1680@gmail.com
P.O. Box 103, Rico, CO 81332 | 512/478-8968