CLASS OF 1967 | 2023 | SUMMER ISSUE
Around the time of MLK Jr. Day, The New York Times published a front-page article about the likely effects on colleges if, as expected, the Supreme Court overturns affirmative action. Before I read the article, I saw the accompanying photo, a familiar view—the back of Olin Library, from the football field, scene of many a commencement (and many a walk across campus). The article focused on Wesleyan because it had been one of the first of the elite colleges that sought to diversify its all-male and almost all-white student body, an effort that really began during our sophomore year when Jack Hoy ’55, became dean of admissions. Almost as soon as I had read the article, I received an email from Ted Smith asking if I had seen it, an email that he sent to a bunch of classmates and that led to a series of shared, nostalgia-filled emails written by Harry Shallcross, Joseph Brooks Smith, Karl Furstenburg, Dave Garrison, Wayne Diesel, and Jim Kates. Some recalled Martin Luther King Jr.’s visits to the campus (King spoke at Wesleyan four times in a seven-year period, including a talk in the chapel in 1963 and another in McConaughy in 1966). I remember that when King spoke in 1963, Ron Young ’65 gave a fiery and eloquent introduction of King (actually Young introduced John McGuire, then an assistant professor of religion, and McGuire introduced King).
I was glad to be on Ted’s email list. My guess, and my hope, is that periodically there are similar exchanges about many topics among small groups of our classmates (the brothers at Chi Psi or EQV, baseball players, the guys who rowed crew, thespians, ethnomusicologists, or those who wrote for The Argus. . .). An article in a current psychology journal is titled “Reliving the Good Old Days: Nostalgia Increases Psychological Wellbeing Through Collective Effervescence”; you’ll have to read it to see what they mean by “collective effervescence.” These reminiscences of King’s talk in McConaughy confirm what the title of a 2017 article in The Wesleyan Argus claimed after McConaughy was torn down: “Gone but Not Forgotten: A MoCon Retrospective.”
More from the nostalgia department: I had a phone call from Don Stone, and we talked about Jewological matters (unlike me, a Jew who had no choice, Don, after growing up gentile and flirting with Quakerism and various other goyish denominations, became a “Jew by choice”; he is a member of a progressive synagogue in the Bay Area). We also reminisced about things Wesleyan, including how we came to choose it. Among the things I learned, or once knew and forgot, were: 1) Don roomed with Reuben (Johnny) Johnson freshman year; 2) he was in CSS; 3) his older sister, like mine, went to Mt. Holyoke (his sister became the president of Sarah Lawrence; mine won a Pulitzer Prize). Don claims that he is having trouble remembering nouns (join the club) but that he does fine with adjectives (and expletives).
Two items from the Wesleyan Blurb Department (or maybe the Wesleyan Old Boys’ Blurb Network, or maybe the Wesleyan as Social Capital Archives). #1. I wrote a blurb for Claude (“Bud”) Smith’s ’66 new book, Gauntlet in the Gulf: The 1925 Marine Log and Mexican Prison Journal of William F. Lorenz, MD. The book is based on the experiences of a prominent early-20th century psychiatrist who, in 1925, sailed a boat that capsized in the Gulf of Mexico. He and his crew subsequently spent time in a Mexican prison and he kept a journal based on this experience, which Bud explains, analyzes, and reproduces in this book (Shanti Arts, 2023). Among other things, I said in my blurb that it “reveals an insightful and engaging storyteller as Claude Smith recounts and deconstructs this fascinating story.”
#2. Larry Carver ’66, wrote a blurb for my new book, Guilford College, 1974–2020: Sort of a Memoir in Two Parts (Half Court Press, in cooperation with Scuppernong Books, 2023). Larry actually wrote a real review of the book for a real academic journal, and I chose some of it for the blurb, including the following: “In remarkably engaging, well-written prose laced with wit, good humor, and insight, Zweigenhaft also contributes importantly to our understanding of how the increased attention on the campus to Middle East politics, especially the conflicts between Israel and Palestine, affected Guilford and higher education in general, 1974 to the present, and to the challenges currently confronting small, liberal arts colleges.”
Full disclosure: My blurb for Bud was not my first blurb for a Wesleyan friend. For the late great Jim McEnteer’s 2006 book, Shooting the Truth: The Rise of American Political Documentaries (Praeger, 2006), I blurbed: “McEnteer has written a lively, insightful and much-needed analysis of the re-emerging genre of American political documentaries.” I meant every word of it, for Mac’s book and for Bud’s book.