CLASS OF 1967 | 2023 | FALL ISSUE
Having spent part of the year in Florida and part of it in Westport, Massachusetts, for eight years, Tom Drew and his wife Carolyn Benedict-Drew decided to sell their place in Florida and buy a place in Manhattan. They are now still sharing their Westport time, but they share it with the Big Apple instead of DeSantis- and Trump-land. Children (four of them, including Joshua ’89 and Jacob ’98) and grands (nine of them) are all within striking distance of the Apple. Tom, a cardiologist, and Carolyn both retired in 2015, celebrating by sailing a boat from Westport to Sarasota. Now, they are into a new urban adventure.
After he read about Len “Bergy” Bergstein’s death in a recent set of notes, Rick Nicita emailed me. Bergy, he told me, was his temporary roommate sophomore year (“I can still hear his cackling laugh”) before they went their separate fraternal ways—Bergy to Chi Psi and Rick to Psi U. Rick enjoyed his career as a movie talent agent for 40 years and then was a “personal manager” for a few years. Now he is involved in producing movies. As he explained it: “I am producing a movie which filmed in Dublin starring my former client Anthony Hopkins, titled Freud’s Last Session that will be in theaters on Christmas Day, and I have a few other movies that might happen with former clients like Al Pacino, etc. However, I’m not 24/7/365 like I was back in the day. Instead, I spend my life with my wife of 38 years, fellow producer Paula Wagner, play bad golf, and read good books. That suits me better now.”
Our classmate Jim Kates emailed to inform me that he now has a website (as he put it, “I’ve finally entered the very beginning of the 21st century with a website”). It has information about Jim (on the website he describes himself as “a minor poet, a literary translator, and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press”). It also has lots of great visuals, lots of information about books Jim has written and translated, and much more (including a letter he wrote to his draft board in October 1967). I encourage you to check it out at https://www.jkates.net/about.
(Poaching again, this time from ’64.) When the story broke, I heard from one of my ’66 sources (actually, Smith College ’66, not Wesleyan ’66) that Rusty Hardin ’64, considered a “Texas legal titan” by the Austin American-Statesman and a “legal icon” who is a “Texas legal legend” by the Texas Tribune, was named as one of the lead lawyers working with the Republicans in the Texas Senate to impeach Ken Paxton, the suspended Texas Attorney General (also a Republican). Rusty has been the lead attorney in many high-profile cases. He represented the estate of Texas millionaire J. Howard Marshall in the dispute with former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith (she, memorably, responded to one of his questions in court by saying “Screw you, Rusty!”, a comment that has continued to reverberate as Rusty moves through life). He also represented the accounting firm Arthur Anderson in the Enron case, and he has represented many professional athletes, including Rudy Tomjanovich, Roger Clemens, Calvin Murphy, Warren Moon, Scottie Pippen, and Wade Boggs. Rusty had this to say about the Paxton case: “This is not about a one-time misuse of office. This is not about a two-time misuse of office. It’s about a pattern of misconduct. I promise you it is 10 times worse than what has been public.” (However, after a 10-day trial, the Texas Senate acquitted Paxton. According to the Texas Tribune, this was “his most artful escape in a career spent courting controversy and skirting consequences of scandal.”)
(More poaching, from further afield.) A retired guy with time on my hands, I have been reading (in, not all of) a 1,460-page book by David Garrow ’75 titled Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. Published in 2017 (to mixed reviews), it is a prodigious work, based on over nine years of research that included more than 1,000 interviews, all conducted by Garrow himself. Garrow, who was in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan, with a subsequent PhD in history from Duke, has written extensively, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. There is much to quarrel with and much to admire in this enormous and ambitious volume.
This leads me to today’s quiz. Who is your favorite Wesleyan author, and why? Two categories. First, those who were Wesleyan undergraduates (e.g., Amy Bloom ’75, Robin Cook ’62, Jennifer Finney Boylan ’80) and second, those who taught at Wesleyan or had other affiliations with the school (e.g., Paul Horgan, William Manchester, Phyllis Rose). Prizes to be announced.