CLASS OF 1968 | 2021–2022 | WINTER ISSUE
Hal Skinner is a retired lawyer (Duke) in the Jacksonville area who recounted being on campus a couple of years ago for a beautiful Homecoming with his son, Hal Skinner Jr. ’92, and some grands. Hal Jr. is a very busy epidemiologist who, along with his wife, are professors at Lehigh. Hal’s daughter and her husband are attorneys who live nearby. Hal and his wife, Ana, were traveling extensively. He walks the dog and the beaches. He adds he does not like aging.
Jeff Lincoln succumbed to Parkinson’s on November 21, 2019. I knew him just well enough to know him to be a kind and gentle man. Turns out he lived in Guilford, one town over, and was an IT manager at Yale. Had an MBA from the University of New Haven and served as treasurer of some community organizations including the Shoreline Unitarian Society. A founder of Guilford Cable TV, he believed in creating an environment where people share information. Long active as a Boy Scout leader, he enjoyed the outdoors. He had two children and five grands with whom he spent summers at a family cottage at Groton Long Point.
Rich Kremer ’69 summers in Norwich, Vermont. The only thing he loves more than golf is family. As he has a lot of both scheduled this summer, he is one happy camper. He plays regularly with a couple of great characters: Nick Browning ’69 and Walter Abrams ’69.
Bill Carter is in Hanover. He’s been involved with Ashoka, a change-making, international NGO, for 40 years. Ashoka is currently focusing on scientists and social entrepreneurs addressing climate change. His wife, Nancy, has been a school board member for 25 years. His oldest son teaches in Saudi Arabia, his middle daughter is a social worker in Chicago, and his younger son does energy retrofits in Portland, Oregon.
Bill is working with Chris Palames, who is in western Massachusetts and the creator of Independent Living Resources, a nonprofit he runs from his house that is making an impact throughout western New England. Presently, he is creating a platform on Patreon for content-creators to share their responses to and experiences with disability—including his own. (He was injured in a wrestling accident while at Wes.) He noted with warmth his life-long friendships with John Bach ’69 and Professor John Maguire, whose civil rights work served as a model for Chris’s work with American Disabilities Act issues.
Sidebar: John Maguire was an extraordinary person, one of the faculty members who made Wes what it was. By his own account, born a bigot, he became, among other things, a personal friend of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a graduate of Yale Divinity School, a Freedom Rider, and president of the innovative State University of New York–Old Westbury.
Ray Solomon retired as the long-time dean of Rutgers Law School–Camden (with a year tacked on as chancellor of the Camden campus). To mark Ray’s work at Rutgers, an anonymous donor contributed $3.5 million for the establishment of a Solomon Scholar program for outstanding students committed to public service. Ray’s entire career has been in legal education: After a J.D. and a Ph.D. (American history) from Chicago, he clerked for a Federal Appeals judge in Cincinnati before working eight years as an administrator and research scholar for the American Bar Association’s Foundation. After a stint at Northwestern, he moved on to Rutgers. Originally from Philip County, Arkansas, he is involved with memorializing the Elaine Massacre, a little known 1919 racial conflict that was one of the most deadly in American history. He is married to a Russian literature professor he met through the late Walter Kendrick. Part of 1968’s Golf Club (Dave Gruol, Pete Hardin, Craig Dodd, etc.), he keeps up with a slew of classmates. He has two daughters and one grand.
Many of you are smarter and better read than I. Nonetheless, I would like to recommend Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration and Caste, as it taught me more about race in America than anything I have ever encountered.
Our world-class ornithologist, Paul Spitzer, is now a columnist for Connecticut Estuary, a quarterly that is focused largely on the four-state Connecticut River watershed and Long Island Sound. Paul characterizes it as “a noble effort to document and, thus, protect the natural and cultural features of the region.” Living on the Choptank in Trappe, Maryland, he swims daily. He notes, “We’ve had a big, luscious vegetable garden for years . . . Chris is a brilliant woman of the soil, and we eat well.”
Some months ago, Wink Wilder quite aptly noted that being 75 then was akin to having a high draft number back in the day. So, in that sense, we are most fortunate geezers. (I slept better after my second jab.) While slowly falling apart, I was not keen on dying quite yet and am profoundly grateful for having seemingly survived the pandemic. And profoundly sad for those that did not.