CLASS OF 1967 | 2017 | ISSUE 3
Classmates, many of you attended Reunion in late May, and all of you should have received both the Reunion book and the supplement, so you know most of what I know about what’s been going on with our classmates. Therefore, I’m mostly going to take a break from writing the usual column this time around.
However, I would like to celebrate Brian Frosh ’68 who has been in the news. As far as I know, during my four years at Wesleyan Brian was the only other person who also had gone to the same high school that I did (Walter Johnson High School in Rockville, Md., at the time the only high school in the country named after a major league baseball player. The Big Train. You could look him up. Now there is a high school named after Roberto Clemente in Chicago, and a charter high school named after Jackie Robinson in Los Angeles. Who knows, maybe there is a Duke Snider high school, a Ted Kluszewski High School, or a Jose Valdivielso High School).
After Wesleyan, Brian earned a law degree from Columbia (come to think of it, he followed me to Columbia, also) and subsequently went into private practice in Maryland. He was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates, twice, and then five times to the Maryland Senate (winning in 2006 with 75 percent of the vote, and in 2010 with 70 percent of the vote). In 2014, he was elected attorney general of Maryland.
Over the years, Brian has received lots of good press. The Washington Post called him “one of the most admired, intelligent, civil and hardworking lawmakers in Annapolis.” These are very much adjectives that capture what I remember about Brian.
In June, I became aware of some of the current work he is doing, as did many people around the country, when he and the attorney general for D.C. sued Donald Trump for violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution. The two attorneys general asserted that Trump’s holdings not only affected businesses in the Washington area, but raise broader, more important issues. In an interview with the Associated Press, Brian asserted that: “We have economic interests that are impacted, but the most salient factor is that when the president is subject to foreign influence, we have to be concerned about whether the actions he’s taking—both at home and abroad—are the result of payments that he is receiving at the Trump Hotel, payments that he is receiving at Mar-a-Lago, payments that he is receiving at Trump Tower, payments that he is receiving in all of his other far-flung enterprises, and he brags about it.”
I got a number of e-mails and phone calls from high school classmates and from my sister telling me, “Hey, Brian was on the front page of the New York Times” or “Brian was on national television.”
I know that many of you are aware of the many stars produced by Wesleyan’s film and theatre program, such as Lin-Manuel Miranda ’02 (if you have not seen it, check out his performance of Hair on the streets of Los Angeles with James Corden online), and various other alumni political luminaries like Michael Bennet ’87, a senator from Colorado, and John Hickenlooper ’74, governor of Colorado. Now you also know a bit about Brian Frosh.
More about our class next time.
Richie Zweigenhaft | rzweigen@guilford.edu