CLASS OF 1967 | 2016 | ISSUE 1
Classmates: I head from Karl Furstenberg, who had this to report: “Charlotte and I are still in Lyme, N.H.. Great place to live after many years as dean of admissions and financial aid at Dartmouth. Retired several years ago, as did Charlotte, from research at Dartmouth Medical School. Now busy with granddaughters (Lizzie and Alice), who also live in Lyme. Daughter-in-law Emily teaches at Tuck School at Dartmouth and Eric does kid care and furniture building, as well as part time teaching at Dartmouth in econ. Great to have the entire family so close by. I’m plenty busy with some educational consulting, maintaining our old farm, coaching youth XC skiing, hiking and running, and an informal role at Dartmouth. Life is good in northern New England, if we ever get winter. Look forward to seeing folks at our 50th!”
Some of you responded to my e-mail, asking what courses you wish you had taken at Wesleyan. Bob Runk (after assuring me that it is not too late for me to take an economics class, but cautioning me to make sure that Paul Krugman is not the teacher) said there were many courses he wishes he had taken, especially more history. Bob continues to make music, including a music video that he describes as “a hip-hop/rap thing called La Playa Walk.”
Michael McCord wrote “I wish I had taken the Shakespeare survey course and maybe a course in music or art, though I certainly valued everything I did select.” Michael and his wife, Elisabeth, have lived in the same house on Beacon Hill in Boston since 1974. He is the headmaster of The Learning Project, a K–6 independent elementary school with about 120 students. Elisabeth is the business manager at the school. Retirement? “We anticipate retiring at some point, but there’s still satisfying work to do and, fortunately, we are in good health.”
Walter Beh wrote that he “retired from the practice of law in Hawaii after 45 years of fun and sun.” He now spends his time “going to the beach, watching the youngest of my nine grandchildren, and taking naps with said grandchild.” He did not identify a class he wishes he had taken, but he did remember one that he was glad he took: “I always remember with fondness my time at Wes, especially my freshman year in French class.”
A few people remembered (quite clearly!) classes they did take that they wish they had not taken. Jim Vaughan, for example, wrote this: “I’ll tell you what I wished I hadn’t taken….calculus. Got pneumonia the first semester of sophomore year, missed a lot of classes, and drew a blank on the final. Big “F”!! Put me in the academic doghouse, and the dean made me move out of the Psi U house (thankfully, in hindsight, because I eventually made up the lost ground and graduated on time). Should’ve taken an incomplete.” After Wesleyan, Jim was the supply officer on a U.S. Navy destroyer, went to Columbia Business School, and then worked as an investment banker, concentrating on the healthcare sector for the last 20 years. He now lives in NYC and Oyster Bay, N.Y.
William Vetter still regrets that he was not allowed to take calculus (maybe the same class Jim Vaughan was in) because he had previously taken a calculus class in high school. Instead, he was placed in a physics class he didn’t like, and then a linear algebra class, and then a multidimensional calculus class….all of which convinced him to drop out of science and math and go into the COL. After Wesleyan, he went to Stanford Law School, and then to Vietnam, and then back to Stanford Law, graduating in 1972. Over the next 35 years, he worked as an attorney, first with a small firm, and then in house for some large corporations (mostly for Martin Marietta and Rockwell International). He and his wife, Agi, who grew up in eastern Hungary (as Bill explains, “she escaped, got asylum in Germany, and eventually got refugee status in the U.S.”) have two children, both of whom live in Denver. Bill and Agi now live in Greenville, S.C., but their house is up for sale and they are planning to move to Denver (“If we’re successful, a place in Denver will be our seventh home in 38 years”).
I also heard from Dave Garrison. He and his wife, Suzanne, live in Dayton, Ohio, where Suzanne teaches commercial law at Wright State University. Dave taught Spanish and Portuguese there for 30 years but retired in 2009, and now spends his time “writing poetry, reading, playing golf and tennis, and sailing in the summer.” As for which classes he wishes he had taken, he had this to say: “I wish like everything I had taken a class with Richard Wilbur. Here was one of the most famous poets in America and I never signed up to work with him. A great opportunity lost.” [Note from your class secretary: I did not take a class with Richard Wilbur. However, thanks to Joe Reed, who put Richard Wilbur on his team in a student-faculty charade match we had in the fall of 1966, I did play charades with him once. He was quite charming. Their team also included Paul Horgan, so they were a tad more literate than we were.]
As Karl Furstenberg mentioned in his e-mail at the top of these notes, our 50th Reunion is coming—2017. Weird but true (seems like we just had the 45th). I hope you’ll be able to come back to Wesleyan for it. For those of you who have not been on campus for a while, there is a lot of new stuff to see, and, hopefully, a lot of old (and getting older) classmates…
Richie Zweigenhaft | rzweigen@guilford.edu