CLASS OF 1981 | 2023 | SUMMER ISSUE
Greetings from Zurich, where I am vacationing and spending some time with my middle son James, who has been living here for three years and currently works for Google. What a beautiful place, and what a wonderful lifestyle.
So much news this cycle!
Congrats to David Lynch who shared: “I’ve just signed a contract with Hachette Book Group for my next book, a history of what’s gone wrong with globalization over the past quarter century and a look at what comes next. Working title is The World’s Worst Bet: How the West Gambled on Globalization and Lost. It is scheduled to be published by Hachette’s PublicAffairs imprint in early 2025.” A timely topic—and a book we should put on our “to read” list in 2025.
Alyson Myers, president of the Fearless Fund, an organization dedicated to a healthy ocean and a transformational, productive, blue economy (www.fearlessfund.org) traveled abroad in February with Tory Estern ’82. Alyson writes, “Tory called and said: ‘You wanna go to Egypt?’ I said, ‘Yes, why not?!’ It was that simple!” They first traveled to Istanbul, then on to Cairo for a few days, after which they boarded a riverboat to Luxor before heading up the Nile ( south, actually) heading to Aswan. What an amazing trip!
Lisa Rudy wrote in from lovely Cape Cod, where she is now a juried master artist in photography. “I’ve also been writing and directing plays in local theaters,” Lisa says, “and you can’t get a much better view than the one we get from the performance space in the Woods Hole Community Hall looking out at the research vessels and Woods Hole passage! I’m still hard at work as a writer and consultant; have done a lot of work on autism inclusion at museums across the country, and our son (who is on the spectrum) is playing clarinet in the town band where his dad is the proud emcee. Meanwhile, our daughter Sara is graduating college . . . no grandkids on the horizon, lol!”
Barb Martin Herzlich and Sandy Herzlich are still living in the suburbs of Philadelphia but enjoying much more free time now that Sandy has fully retired. Barb is turning into one of the area’s premier potters. The only problem is that the pieces she likes she won’t sell because she wants to keep them. The pieces she doesn’t like she won’t sell because she thinks they’re not good enough. “Our home is bursting with ceramics!” Beyond the regular retirement activities of golf, paddle tennis, etc., Sandy’s filling his days coaching football at the local high school and working as a substitute schoolteacher. During Homecoming this past fall, Sandy was honored to be named, along with classmates Tony DiFolco and Tim O’Brien, to the 1980s All-Decade Football Team, followed shortly thereafter with a visit with Tony and his wife Linda at their home in Florida. “It was great to get back and see so many old friends.”
Elisha Lawrence, who is living in Redondo Beach and loving the LA life, shared that her son is getting his master’s in computer science at Stanford and her daughter, who is applying for her MFA, graduated Wesleyan Class of 2021. “That’s 40 years after me!” she writes. “It feels like it was just yesterday that I was studying in the reference room at Olin.” She is approaching 10 years working as AVP, Global Anti-Piracy for ABS-CBN, a large studio based in Asia that distributes their movies and TV shows into 190 countries. Elisha would love to hear from Wes people in the area; she has a Wes sticker on her car and routinely gets stopped by people asking what year she graduated. Apparently, LA is a hotbed of lot of Wes alumni!
Congratulations to Kathy Prager Conrad, who recently shared that she officially retired in March after an illustrious career of service in our nation’s capital. Her last job was at Accenture Federal Services. In Kathy’s case, “retiring” means a shift from full time to flexible work on a few key projects and from occasional to more frequent personal travel, along with more volunteering and family time. She kicked things off with a trip to Costa Rica; I am looking forward to details.
Deb Chapin checked in from a ski trip to Banff, where she was nursing a knee injury that prevented her from taking on the slopes but thankfully NOT the apres-ski activities. Snowshoeing was also on the itinerary. Cheers to that!
David Miller sent us an introspective note:
“I tested positive for COVID at the beginning of March, being vaccinated and boosted, and fortunately my symptoms have been pretty mild. However, the enforced isolation has given me more of a chance to reminisce and contemplate some things.
“For a few years, starting about 45 years ago, I was able to spend many nights at VVO looking deep into the sky. At that time there were only a few faculty and even fewer astro students. Even amongst that small crowd, I was one of the few who wanted to look through the telescopes with my eyes. I signed up for every observing shift I could and only on the coldest nights containing the longest exposures; 30 minutes or more of quietly tracking a star for Dr. Upgren’s parallax project in the middle of winter, had me questioning my activities.
“For years afterwards, I correctly thought I was spoiled; I had a 20-inch refractor and a 24-inch reflector practically at my beck and call when I was an undergrad. While the intervening years have placed me in the same room with bigger telescopes, I was never able to look through them. While paging through the images at APOD and marveling at the results from the Hubble and Webb scopes, I was filled with the longing and majesty of viewing a dark sky filled with stars.
“Having retired and having the time and funds to indulge some of my whims, I’m able to play with the new breed of smart telescopes. My Wesleyan education allows me to understand what is being done. My graduate studies and subsequent technical experience give me the how. My life gives me the why.
“Seeing details emerge from the seemingly dark sky and seeing the stars strewn across the screen like dust as the details of the nebulae and galaxies emerge makes me feel like I’m 19 on Foss Hill on a spring evening. I do wonder what the current majors feel as they gaze up at the night sky.”
That’s it for now. Happy summer!