CLASS OF 1967 | 2015 | ISSUE 1
I’ve continued to receive e-mails about memories of Wesleyan people and events, as well as current life experiences. Here’s some more…
Don Stone, who celebrated his 35th wedding anniversary with his wife, Betty, not long ago, lives in the Bay Area, with two grown children and two granddaughters within 15 minutes (“it doesn’t get any better than that!”). For more than 25 years he has been active in a Jewish Renewal community in Oakland (Kehilla Synagogue) and he continues to work part time at St. Mary’s College, a Catholic Lasallian Christian Brothers liberal arts institution 10 miles east of Oakland.
Jim Vaughan retired from a health care investment banking firm at the end of last year but signed up to teach The Business of Health Care course in 2015 to MPA students at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service. He is president of the Board of Trustees of the Frost Valley YMCA (“the largest independent Y camp in the U.S. and arguably the best”). In the small-world department, Mike Ketcham recently joined the Board. Mike had retired as senior executive at a YMCA in the state of Washington and had previously worked at the Frost Valley Y. Cheng Ong ’94 is also on the Frost Valley Board.
Jim Kates’ book of translations of selected poems of Mikhail Yeryomin won the second Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation in 2013 and was published in the fall of 2014 by White Pine Press. Jim also encourages me to inform you that the Wesleyan Progressive Alumni/ae Network (WesPAN) has been revived on Facebook.
Bob Runk discovered some digital home music studio software and has become obsessed (his term, not mine) with writing and producing music. He has a music site, which is called The Runkus Room (bobrunk.com). What’s he do? “Probably the most fun I have had so far is doing… are you ready?… a rap video with a great guy named Jeff Kitt (cousin to Eartha!). What a blast: youtube.com/watch?v=q4Qv4w8hTgs”
Bill Klaber wrote: “My book, The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell, that was published last year by ‘indie’ publisher Greenleaf Book Group, has been purchased by St. Martin’s Press in New York, and will re-debut as a St. Martin’s book in February [2015]. It has also won a few minor awards including a Stonewall Book Award for a book with gay/lesbian content, an Amelia Bloomer Award for a book with feminist content, and a Shelf Unbound Award as one of the ‘notable’ indie books of the year. That and a buck-fifty will get you a ride on the subway.”
Jim Sugar’s film, Swimming: Mind, Body, Spirit, was selected by the California Film Institute for inclusion in the 2014 Mill Valley Film Festival. He spends a lot of time these days “seeing, writing, producing, directing, and editing movies.” When he wrote, he was “halfway done with a film on the return of harbor porpoises to San Francisco Bay after a 60-year absence.”
Bruce Morningstar and his wife, Katie, live in what he calls “Paradise, Rosarito, Baja, Mexico,” about which he says, “It is Florida on the water without that horrible humidity, and no hurricanes.” My comment: Watch out, Bruce, for Don Henley has warned us, “Call someplace paradise—kiss it good-bye.” They visited Wesleyan in Oct. 2014, when his father, Joe Barry Morningstar ’39, was inducted into the Athletic Hall of Fame (his father won eight letters in three sports—football, basketball, and baseball). Their son, Kris, a chef for 12 years, just opened his first restaurant, in West Hollywood, called Terrine.
My college roomie, Steve Sellers, continues to live in Lexington, Mass., and work with SmartCloud, a start-up software company that provides energy planning services to various municipalities in New England but also elsewhere in the USA and abroad. It all happens in the cloud (smartcloudinc.com).
Jim Cawse, who holds 28 patents and has written many articles and a book, has added a blog to the website (cawseandeffect.com/chemistry-research/) for his consulting business, Cawse and Effect LLC. (“Experimental Design for Highly Productive Chemistry”). In February he did his first Webinar (“Effective Experimental Planning to Get the Most out of Your Freeslate Tools”).
And, finally, some sad news. Our classmate, Steve Hass, died at his home in Parkesburg, Pa., on July 31, 2014. Steve was married for 37 years to his wife, Jean, and had four children, seven grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. After majoring in chemistry at Wesleyan, Steve did post-graduate work in accounting at Drexel and Penn. He then became self-employed as an accountant. Donations in his honor may be made to The Jackson Laboratory, Development Office, and P. O. Box 254, Bar Harbor, ME, 04609.
Richie Zweigenhaft | rzweigen@guilford.edu