CLASS OF 1976 | 2022 | FALL ISSUE
Reminder that if you’re on Facebook, there are two groups that might be of interest to you: “Wesleyan 1976” and “Wesleyan in the 70s” (the more active of the two).
Thanks to everyone who wrote in with notes!
Debra Hafner writes: “My life has changed pretty dramatically post-COVID. I’ve gotten divorced and I’m moving from Reston, Virginia, to be the interim minister at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington, New York, in August. I’m excited about the new possibilities ahead! Since our services are now online each week, I’d be delighted to have classmates join us at 10:30 a.m. EST on Sundays! I’d also love to connect with anyone who lives on Long Island. It’s a bit daunting to move at 67 to a new community!”
Mike Donnella reports: “My second attempt at retirement did not stick, and I just finished my first year teaching and running the Center for Compliance & Ethics at Temple University Law School. Though a different time and place from Wesleyan, I am enjoying the experience, despite the occasional flashback. Guest speakers are welcome at the Center. Let me know.”
Phyllis Bethel is “[e]njoying semi-retirement from music therapy. Our son graduated from Princeton and our daughter is a rising sophomore at Vassar. Tina and I are counting our blessings having avoided COVID thus far. Can’t believe I am going to my 50th high school reunion!”
Oliver Griffith: “I’m still living in Paris after retiring from the World Bank in 2016 and should get my French citizenship in the near future. I find France to be a far more rational country than the U.S. I continue to write freelance for NGOs, corporations, and international organizations, but am also doing a lot more performing in Parisian jazz clubs. I combine this with travel around Europe, which was great during COVID with far fewer tourists, and more recently worldwide in Club Meds (free vacations). A couple of months ago, I had dinner with classmates Alida Jay and Meg Walker, who had been with me in Paris 48 years (!!) earlier for the Wesleyan Program in Paris.”
Carol Bellhouse says: “We have snow on the mountains (August 10) so I’ll be heading back to my winter home in southern New Mexico soon. It’s been a great summer in Colorado—I’m attaching photos of the fresh snow, the moon in the aspens, and my waking view every morning. Love it here, but not so much when there’s 12 feet of snow on the ground!”
Barb Birney is ‘[l]ooking forward to celebrating my 50th high school reunion in Amherst, Massachusetts. Following that, I’ll be visiting my 97-year-old parents in Virginia. Dad is Bob Birney ’50. Post-COVID retirement activities are a lot more fun with restrictions lifted. Currently, I volunteer at the Mount St. Helen’s Forestry Learning Center. Interpreting a BIG BOOM story is always effortless.”
Rob Buccino is “[s]emi-retired and splitting time between Manhattan and northwest Connecticut, playing a lot of music, gardening, and daydreaming. Daughter Nora just got an MBA from NYU and started working with McKinsey. Shout-out to David Apicella and the Eclectic crew from way back when.
David Harmin and I have had a wonderful summer taking part in mini-reunions. We got together for lunch in Rockport with Karen Gervasoni and her new husband, Greg Horan, Mel Blake, Beth Penney Gilbert, and—of course!—Tom Kovar. (For me, it’s not a reunion unless Tom is there.) Everyone is well. We were evenly split between those of us who are still working and those who were retired. I have to say that the retired group made an excellent argument for joining them! Karen and Greg are taking off on a cross-country road trip in their camper van, seeing America before winter sets in. We’ve also seen Nina Rusinow Rosenstein, her husband Simon, Marjorie Allen Dauster, and Rip Dauster ’74 for our semiannual get-together; all are well and, once again, enjoying retirement.
Nic Collins sent in class notes! It’s his first time; I’m hoping other classmates will decide if Nic can do it, they can do it too. Here’s his report:
“This may be the first time I have ever submitted to the alumni magazine. Which puts me in a poor light indeed, considering the depth of my gratitude and affection for my Wesleyan experience. Given Karen’s carte blanche on length for this online issue, some background might be in order. I met Alvin Lucier on my third day on campus at the end of summer in 1972. I performed at his memorial service in New York two months ago. In the 50 intervening years, I dragged my family around the world on ‘nothing more than boops and beeps,’ in the words of one puzzled friend—despite our cheerful dean (Sheila Tobias?) calling me into her office in the fall of our senior year to confess, “Wesleyan doesn’t have a great job-placement record for electronic music majors.”
“Maybe not, but I survived (marginally at times, I admit) thanks to what Wes provided. I met Susan Tallman ’79 in the Arts Center, married her in Essex, raised said family with her (Ted, b. 1990 in NYC; Charlotte, b. 1995 Amsterdam), and we’re still together. I was lucky to grab a Watson Fellowship on the way out of Middletown, which sprinkled me around Europe for a year. San Francisco in the late 70s, NYC’s East Village in the 80s, Amsterdam and Berlin in the 90s. In 1999, running on freelance fumes with two kids in international schools, I accepted a teaching job at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I wrote a book on hardware hacking for music, now in its third edition (see http://www.handmadeelectronicmusic.com), whose resulting sounds would be familiar to anyone who took a class with Lucier.
“The pandemic coincided with a sabbatical that should have been spent back in Berlin but instead confined me to the old family summer house in West Falmouth, Massachusetts. I can’t complain, but it was not the most musically conducive location for an urbanite until, in those fraught months between the election and the inauguration, I somehow managed to produce this: http://www.nicolascollins.com/LuckyDip.htm.
“Not to finish on a down note but, speaking of fraught, I’ve never been as worried about the future of this country and the larger world as I have in the last five years. I’m keeping my Chilean passport current, renting a small apartment in Berlin, and hoping that one of these two lifeboats can float me if things get even grimmer. But what am I leaving to my children?”
And, finally, Seth Lerer sent me this lovely piece, entitled “Bicentennial: A Wesleyan Memory”:
“There were weeks when every day could be a poem. Sunrise, sunset, a great sandwich, or a blade of grass. My undergraduate ambition was to take the sublime and the stupid and turn it into poetry, to live a life rewarded in the verbal transformation of the everyday into the eternal. I’d spend hours looking for such inspirations, walking corridors, standing in the rain, or orchestrating crazy things to do that would be done just for the memory of having done them: a 2am mock Bar Mitzvah in the dorm, a drive to Montreal for breakfast, a staying-up-all-night reading the Aeneid out loud in Latin.
“In the spring of 1975, I realized that the opportunity was there, at last, for something lasting. I don’t know how I heard about it, or even if I knew what to expect, but I became convinced that spending April 18 on the common in Concord, remembering the ride of Paul Revere, the shots heard round the world—that this would be the moment that would make me a poet.
“Again, it was so long ago I don’t remember how I planned this trip or how I got there. But I do remember that I asked a girl to go along. Her name was Pam, and I cannot conjure up our friendship or why I asked her (did I ask her first or last?). But somehow, Pam and I got on the Peter Pan bus from Middletown, Connecticut, and made it to Concord on the night of April 18. I do remember that she wore bell bottom jeans and a white t-shirt with a sweater, and I dressed up in my tweed jacket and my button-down shirt, and as we both walked into Concord common—already, shortly after sunset, filled with people on the grass, playing guitars, having a picnic, dancing—we must have seemed like travelers from another time, beamed in to witness a great moment in history, except missing the date by 200 years.
“There were some speeches. Someone showed up in a tricorn hat. I don’t think Pam and I said much to each other, but by 10 pm or so we were both bored and hungry. Pam’s mother and her stepfather lived somewhere in the Boston area, and she suggested that we crash with them and cadge a meal. We got up off the grass, and walked away, and as we walked, our hands found each other, and our fingers interlocked. Like tendrils looking for a tree, I thought. And at that moment, even though we’d never kissed, we’d never talked romantically, we’d never done a thing—at that moment, it was the most intimate experience I’d ever had, unspoken, unrequested, two hands in the aftermath of a great historical anticlimax.
“We wound up, unannounced, at her house and without seeing her parents, Pam let me sleep in the guest room and she disappeared into what must have been her own, old room. The next morning, having showered but put on the same clothes from the day before, I met her stepfather at breakfast. He was a Chinese man in his 50s, reading the newspaper, and picking at what must have been last night’s chicken dinner. He looked at me, I sat down at the table, and without breaking eye contact, he picked up a whole chicken thigh with a pair of chopsticks and, through some trick of leverage, held it up and split the bone in half, the piece now hanging together by remaining bits of skin and meat, and I could hear that snap, and he brought the whole thigh up to his mouth and took a bite and put the rest down on the plate, and never stopped looking at me.
“Somehow, with or without Pam, I made it back to Middletown. I knew I had my poem in my head, and in an afternoon I wrote it down.
“Bicentennial”
Emerson, obsessed with pageantry,
Saw revolution in sunrise,
Doctrine at dawn.
He saw himself enmeshed in memory
Of dead for liberty
In Concord, crotch of history.
In the moment is the glory,
In the memory is the myth,
In the dream is history.
“I read it out loud to myself a few times, and then typed it up. It looked so clean on the good piece of bond paper, the ribbon from the typewriter, recently replaced, giving each letter a depth and heft that I could feel as I ran my fingers across the sheet. I typed up three or four more poems that day, ones I’d written in a class with Richard Wilbur— mannered, learned things about the clown Will Kempe in Bedlam and the pet fox kept by Stalin’s crony, Nicholai Bukharin, and a couple of translations from Old English. Still on a high, I folded them in thirds and took them to the library, where I found the current issue of The Southern Review and copied out the name and the address of the editor. I ran back to my room, typed up a cover letter and an envelope, put too many stamps on it, and mailed it. No self-addressed stamped envelope, no nothing else. Just the poems.
“Classes would be over in a month, and certainly, as I remember, before we were done, I got a letter in my postbox telling me that The Southern Review was going to run my poem, “Bicentennial,” in their Spring 1976 issue and that I would receive a check for $15 upon publication.
“I floated out of the mail room, walked up the hill and stood facing the football field, the May breeze catching the letter in my hand and making it flutter like a wing.
“A full year later, weeks before graduation, three copies of The Southern Review appeared in my mailbox, along with the check. There was the poem, my name, and my name again in the notes on contributors. I flipped through. There were unpublished poems by Delmore Schwartz, essays by Kermit Vanderbilt, Larzer Ziff, and Albert Guerard. There was a translation of something by Paul Valery and a review of a book of poems by the then barely known Geoffrey Hill.
“Fifteen dollars was a week of student groceries. A round of drinks for virtually everyone I knew. A round-trip ticket to Concord. I sent the poem to Richard Wilbur, ensconced in his pastoral in Cummington, Massachusetts, and he wrote back right away, letting me know how he ‘much liked the movement of Bicentennial’—such a Wilbur phrase, with its inverted word order and its alliterative push. Did he craft such sentences, or did he really think like that? And, rereading my poem, now, what made me think it literature? So full of adolescent overstatement. Who writes a poem with the word “crotch” in it? After over forty years of teaching, I can imagine how Wilbur must have reached deep to say something positive about such lines.
“I graduated, went to Oxford, to Chicago, and to teaching jobs at Princeton, Stanford, and the University of California at San Diego (where I served as dean of Arts and Humanities for five years that would fill a whole magazine, let alone a class note). I wrote a dozen books. I won awards. You would think all of this would have filled me with self-esteem. But then, they say there’s nothing like your first time.”