CLASS OF 1950 | 2016 | ISSUE 2
I had a nice telephone conversation with Bill Ackerly, who called “out of the blue” after the April issue of Wesleyan. He was a Sigma Chi, pre-med, and became a psychiatrist. After living 50 years in Cambridge, Mass., his current address is in New Hampshire. He lives in his own home with solar heating, which is literally on the Appalachian Trail, so he has a lot of visitors. His wife, Frances, died five years ago. Bill has four children, one of whom, Susan Ackerly ’88, went to Wesleyan. Bill said he has reduced vision now, due to macular degeneration.
Bill visits periodically with classmate Dick (Crickets) Powell and wife Margaret, who live nearby at Kendal at Hanover, a retirement community in Hanover, N.H.
Frank Johnson wrote: “Dear Bud: I wanted to let you know that I enjoyed reading through the class notes in the Wesleyan issue I, 2016, and was able to recall not only classmates but fellow students from ’45 (Bud Lovett, who actually graduated, I would guess, in 1948) to ’55 (Stu Rapp, a classmate from Yale Divinity School, and for some years now a resident of Bethel, Conn., where I went to high school). In between those years are a number of others: Bill Brooks ’49 (fraternity brother, fellow track runner) and his late brother Hap ’48, with whom I worked at Downey House; from the track team Barney Kathan ’51 and Biff Shaw ’51; another runner, Ken Taylor ’52 (which reminds me of the fact that a group of UCC ministers—Hank Yordon ’49, Frank Johnson ’50, Barney Kathan ’51 and Ken Taylor ’52 all ran cross country for Wesleyan, I think for at least one season at the same time). And I want to mention a classmate, another of the runners: Bill Malamud, who, you reported, lives in LaSalle Village. You might tell him that my daughter’s across-the-street neighbor in Wellesley, Inge Reinhard, over 90, now lives at LaSalle, and we have visited her there with our daughter. With all good wishes, Frank.”
We received a handsome poster from David Black, a sculptor, who has been a professor of art at Ohio State University. Titled “Urban Sculpture,” it has a photo of David as well as a large-scale metal sculpture in red. Made of generous swirling lines, placed in the center of a central plaza walkway, the piece dwarfs the people who relax nearby or walk past and casts interesting shadows on the paved stone below. It’s a beautiful, truly impressive piece. The text is also in an Asian language, and the English version reads: “David Black terms his large-scale sculptures ‘proto-architecture’… a combining of architectural forms: columns, arch-like units, canopies, benches… with sculptural elements: imagery, a mix of stable forms with high energy, projecting movement. Black, in fact, began his college career as a physics major. His highly imaginative constructions are carefully engineered. He’s what the Russian constructivists called an ‘artist-engineer.’
“Black’s sculptural enclosures seem in flux as one walks in and under. Fresh images cut through banal urban settings with integrally designed walk-in, walk-under sculptures. Black has almost 40 now sited across the U.S., from Alaska to Tucson, San Francisco to Washington D.C. His sculptures soon evolve into ‘people places,’ a livable city’s invitation to pause and reflect. They are recognized for a special clarity and tridimensional vigor.”
Bud Dorsey | margiedorsey5@gmail.com
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