Class of 1967 | 2014 | Issue 1
As I explained in my last set of notes, about two weeks before those notes were due, I sent an e-mail out to those on the Wesconnect 1967 e-mail list asking what was up with them, and I ended that e-mail by asking who their favorite Wesleyan professors were, and why. I included the first batch of responses in that last set of notes. Here’s what I learned from others who responded.
George McKechnie moved to Berkeley following graduation from Wesleyan, where he received a PhD in personality and environmental psychology. After a few years of teaching at Arizona State and then back at Berkeley, he left academia and launched a high-end audiophile business in SF (his clients included Boz Scaggs, Francis Ford Coppola, and Ray Dolby). In 1980, he moved to the Monterey Peninsula, where he practiced clinical psychology for two decades. In 1999, he and his son, Loren, launched Axiom Home Theater, which George still runs. He retired from psychology practice in 2005, when his wife, Dee Davis, also a psychologist, took down her shingle. He recently launched SyncMyHome.com, a consumer guide to home automation.
“In answer to your question about favorite Wes professors,” George wrote, “for me it would have to be Karl Scheibe. I would also like to nominate Ted Sarbin (Karl’s mentor), even though his connection to Wesleyan was tenuous; he spent a year at the Center for Advanced Studies a year after we graduated. I suspect that you, too, have fond memories of Karl [I do indeed. Could not be fonder]. He visited Ted in Carmel a few weeks before Ted’s death at 94 from pancreatic cancer and brought Ted by my home for a final visit. I must say it was a most bittersweet occasion.”
Pat Weinstein is still in the beverage business, running the family Pepsi-Cola franchise in Wenatchee, Wash. He writes: “The business is still exciting to me, combining major financial decisions, e.g., investment in a co-op production facility for 10 bottlers in the Pacific Northwest with local, very personal decisions, e.g., scholarships to the local community college. My wife, Susan Landon, has been asked to give the commencement speech at one of the community colleges in part as a result of our efforts to support the school.” One daughter (Eileen) just graduated from the American University of Paris with a master’s in international affairs, and is working (from Paris!) in the family business (in Seattle), doing IT and HR work (the wonders of the cloud). Another daughter (Emily ’97) is a project manager for Bridge Housing in San Francisco and was recently appointed to the Oakland Planning Commission. One of their sons (Matt) is the administrative director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, and the other (Andy), who created his own digital marketing company in New York, recently moved back to Seattle and he, too, is working in the family business doing sales and marketing. And, most impressively, Pat is still playing basketball. His team won the United States national championship held annually in Coral Springs, Fla., and then went to Torino, Italy, to defend the world title at the World Masters Games (they won again, but Pat came away with a torn meniscus; as of October 2013, he was recovering from the surgery he had in late August).
Bill Klaber’s newest book, which he started over a decade ago at a Wesleyan Writers Conference, The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell, was published in June 2013. It’s the fictional memoir of a woman who lived in the mid-19th century, a real woman who, one day in 1855, cut her hair, changed her clothes, and went off to live the rest of her life as a man. She did it to earn men’s wages, but the changes went far beyond anything she had imagined. As Bill explained in his e-mail to me, “True story, fictional memoir.” The early reviews were so encouraging that Hudson News decided to put it on the front table in all its US airport stores in the summer of 2013, and it was nominated by the American Library Association for the Over the Rainbow Award. For more information, check out MissLucyAnnLobdell.com.
After graduating, Charlie Green received his law degree from the University of Florida and has been a lawyer in Fort Lauderdale since 1970. He started a firm in 1980 that is still going (Green, Murphy & Murphy). He and his wife, Nancy, have two sons and four grandchildren (three girls and a boy): “Our second son graduated from Wesleyan in ’95 and met his wife there. Hopefully, there will be a third generation at Wes.”
In June, 2013, Jim Kates read translations at the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Mass. (their fair city). He was filling in for Franklin Reeve, who was ill (and who subsequently died later that month) and he read alongside his former teacher, Norm Shapiro, suggesting once again that everything that rises must converge.
Peter Waasdorp wrote, as he put it, “from across the decades—late as usual.” Here’s what he had to share: “I’m in Falmouth on Cape Cod, where I settled in 1997 with my wife, Tinker Cavanagh, after a year of sailing to the Exuma Islands in the Bahamas and back. Still doing carpentry part-time (with an ever more complaining body) and still doing political organizing. Occupy Falmouth is going strong, with more than 200 members and very active foreclosure, anti-nuclear power (the Pilgrim plant is in nearby Plymouth), climate justice, Citizens United, and other committees. Thanks to the help of the ACLU this past year, I mediated my case against the Town of Falmouth for wrongful dismissal from the Conservation Commission (with a withdrawal of charges and a $32,000 financial settlement). See Fred Freije annually or so, and just missed a 50th reunion at the Hill School with Phil Miller because it conflicted with my Northfield/Mt. Hermon 50th.”
Richie Zweigenhaft
rzweigen@guilford.edu