CLASS OF 1974 | 2023 | FALL ISSUE
Reminder: Reunion dates: May 23–26, 2024. Consider joining our 50th Reunion Planning Committee. Participate as little or as much as your time and interest permit. We have monthly Zoom calls. Also, continue providing ideas for our reunion. Contact me (Sharon Purdie, spurdie@wesleyan.edu), Lucy Diaz at (ldiaz@wesleyan.edu) or Mandy Broulik at abroulik@wesleyan.edu to join the committee or to suggest ideas. See Pam’s review below to read what you have to look forward to!
Second Reminder: Please complete the short reunion survey if you have not done so. You can access it here: 50th Reunion survey.
Pam van der Meulen’s review of the Class of ’73 50th Reunion in May: “I attended the Reunion along with Sharon Purdie and Alfreda Gaither, to get ideas for our upcoming 50th. It was so much fun getting to know people and hanging out with them. It didn’t matter that I knew only one ’73 classmate at Reunion. Many had not seen each other in years, sometimes as many as 50 years, and they had a great time connecting and reconnecting. So, I am sure that our reunion will be so much fun, and I urge people to attend! I have also developed friendships with classmates I know only through reunions, and more recently through working on the Reunion Committee. It is not too late to join the Reunion Committee: it requires only a one-hour Zoom meeting every month—and like much at Wesleyan, these Zoom calls aren’t even required (and there are no grades). Hope to see more of you on the committee soon.”
Norma Williams was honored by the Real Property Section of the Los Angeles County Bar Association as its Outstanding Real Estate Lawyer at an Installation and Awards Dinner on May 23, 2023. Norma has practiced as a transactional commercial real estate attorney for her entire career since her graduation from law school at University of California, Berkeley in 1977. The criteria for the award included excellence in practice, leadership, and contributions to the legal profession.
Monique Witt reports: “Professional demands have kept us all busy. Ben has been on U.S./European tour with Rickie Lee Jones and was featured with his sextet in the May issue of DownBeat magazine. He’s currently returning from [a] Midwest tour with his sextet (Nebula Project) and will join multiple Brazilian groups for NYC dates. Dev is working on new product development and joint ventures for ExMachina. Steven is traveling and I’m recovering from knee surgery following a sport injury.”
James Kempf updates us: “I am thinking of coming to the reunion next year but I am not sure since I live in California. My wife, Renate, and I have resolved to only fly every other year to reduce our carbon emissions and while next year is our flying year, we have another trip planned, to Europe where Renate’s family lives. I may take the train, it’s three days or so from California to Connecticut, but I could then visit with my family in Pennsylvania. Renate won’t come in any case; she does not enjoy gatherings where she doesn’t know anyone except me. And, actually, I have not been in touch with any other classmates since a year after leaving Wesleyan except for Bob Gershen. He and I have an interest in start-ups working on decarbonization.
“As for me, after a short stint in the Peace Corps subsequent to graduating from Wesleyan in 1974, I earned a master’s and PhD in systems engineering, with minor in computer science, at the University of Arizona; met in Arizona and married Renate in Germany; and we moved to Silicon Valley in 1984. I’ve lived there ever since, working for high-tech companies, primarily large companies like Sun Microsystems or Ericsson. I semiretired in 2020 and have been working on software for renewable energy companies and building decarbonization since, trying to move the energy transition forward. Right now I am the CTO at a start-up based in Seattle, building a virtual power plant system. I also am a member of an angel investing group for cleantech start-ups, and work with them on assessing start-ups with a decarbonization mission. In our spare time, we enjoy hiking, music (baroque and Renaissance as well as EDM Trance), theater, including baroque opera, and road trips in California and the West Coast.”
Blaise Noto has lived in Chapel Hill for the past 12-plus years, enjoying being back on the East Coast (via 10 years on Maui). While in Chapel Hill, he has taught communications, public relations, and digital media at a few North Carolina colleges including UNC School of the Arts, and is still actively involved in a number of committees in the motion picture academy, as well as in the Wesleyan Alumni Admission Volunteer Program. In September, he moved back to his native New York but this time upstate to the Clifton Park/Halfmoon area. (Retiring? He’ll see!) He is looking forward to coming back to Wesleyan for our 50th, catching up with friends, and the brothers at DEKE.
John McLucas is exploring options for translating his latest novel, The Boxer’s Mask, into Italian. It takes place in Rome during the pandemic and looks at the challenges of language acquisition and living abroad. He is also, at long last, correcting the proofs for his translation of Tullia d’Aragona’s epic Il Meschino (1560), forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press in its The Other Voice series, which publishes bilingual editions of books written by women in Renaissance Europe.
During a recent visit to New York, John had a wonderful lunch reunion with Jon Raskin ’73 and Steve Greenhouse ’73.
News from Gray “Jon” Cox is as follows: “I continue to enjoy teaching philosophy, peace studies, language learning, and AI-related stuff in the program for Human Ecology at College of the Atlantic in my hometown, Bar Harbor, Maine, and serve as clerk for the Quaker Institute for the Future. I am especially excited to be sharing my latest book, Smarter Planet or Wiser Earth? Dialogue and Collaboration in the Era of Artificial Intelligence, which is now available at all the usual online places as well as the publisher. Anyone interested in a review copy can download a PDF at www.smarterplanetorwiserearth.com for free or get a paperback if you are thinking of using it as a text or for reviewing it for a journal, newspaper, or newsletter. Write me at gray@coa.edu.
“I am continuing to enjoy writing songs and have included some in the book. I had a delightful time with a bunch of CSS folks in a Zoom call that Larry Green organized this year and look forward to more opportunities to reminisce and catch up as our 50th year reunion approaches!”
Christopher Moeller reports, “In late winter Carolyn White-Lesieur contacted me on behalf of the Reunion Committee. Although we had barely known each other at Wesleyan 50-plus years ago, her calls were a treat that I enjoyed immensely.
“On my request Carolyn provided my contact information to Cathy Barnes. Cathy and I exchanged several emails. Coincidentally, my wife and I had already scheduled a trip to San Francisco to visit one of her friends. The three of us met for dinner with Cathy and her husband, Peter Busch. Remarkably, Peter attended two years of high school with me in Dayton. Although we tried, it’s hard to cram 50 years into one evening!”
Rick Kronick and his wife Amy’s two daughters and their husbands moved across the street from them for a magical two years during the pandemic, one family coming from Philadelphia and the other from Seattle. Both girls had two-and-a-half-year-olds when they moved to La Jolla, and each girl got pregnant and delivered babies while in LJ. One set of in-laws also moved to a few blocks away, creating the La Jolla version of the shtetl. Sadly, everyone moved away in July 2022; the good news is that the Philadelphia family moved to Berkeley, where Dorothy is an assistant professor at the Goldman Public Policy School.
“Following the magical two-year interlude during the pandemic, it has been a tough year. I shattered my pelvis in a bike accident at the end of January (complete with surgery and 19 screws and plates), my 97-year-old mother died in March, and Amy has developed serious cognitive impairment along with her multiple sclerosis. The good news is that my recovery has gone well—back up to cycling 140 miles per week, some swimming, yoga, and even a bit of shuffling. I’m working at creating a new kind of partnership with Amy and looking forward to celebrating her 75th birthday on August 19 at a party with 20 of our friends.
“I’m not quite smart enough to retire from the faculty at the UC San Diego School of Public Health, and continue a bit of teaching, as well as my Don Quixote-like attempt to convince policymakers that Medicare Advantage plans are being overpaid to the tune of something on the order of $1 trillion over the next decade, which even by D.C. standards is a fair amount of money. Governor Newsom appointed me to the board of the newly created Office of Health Care Affordability, which promises to be an adventure.
“Although we did very little traveling in the winter when I was hopping around on a walker, we’re back to pretty regular trips to Seattle and Berkeley to visit our quite delicious and amazing grandchildren (not that I’m biased) and their parents.”
John Gardner is semiretired after 45 years of work as a teacher, coach, and administrator at Avon Old Farms School. He has continued coaching hockey—this will be his 49th year coming up—and doing alumni development functions. He has also started a new business in helping to get male and female hockey players into New England prep schools, pathwaytoprep.com.
Ron Cartin shares: “Still living in Costa Rica and working as an actuary in the Costa Rican Social Security. I still love tennis but had to quit playing some years ago because of a retina detachment. Would love to get in touch with some of my friends from the Class of ’74 (specially friends from the varsity tennis team in the years 1970–1974 and from the Eclectic fraternity).”
Scott Burson informs us: “It’s been at least 20 years since I have contributed anything to class notes, but preparations for our 50th Reunion have unexpectedly flexed a nostalgia muscle. This entry should hold for another 30 years. Wendy Liebow and I married in 1979, have two adult daughters, and have lived successively in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Seattle, Washington, and Lexington, Massachusetts. After graduating from law school, I practiced law for three years. Discovering how poorly socialized I was to law firm life, I escaped to get a degree in librarianship and a seven-year career as an academic law librarian. The career thing finally stuck when I became an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board, working in the Seattle and Boston regional offices over 31 years. I retired in 2018 after concluding that I did not need to continue to subject myself to the insanity of the Trump administration. Haven’t looked back. Haven’t looked forward or sideways, either, but I take well to leisure.
“Other than my retirement, the recent headline is the relocation of both of our now fully launched daughters. Allison ’07 now lives in Freeport, Maine, working for the East Coast Greenway Alliance; Esther (nominally 2010, but transferred and graduated from Swarthmore) has just started as an assistant professor of psychology at Smith College. I hope to see many of you at our 50th Reunion.”
Jill Fuller-Johnston reports: “In December 2020 I lost my husband (an English-French horn player) after a long and difficult period of increasing dementia. It was during the very strict lockdown in Germany, so it was a very lonely time for me. To maintain contact with the community, I continue to work, but with a somewhat reduced workload. I still teach cello three days per week at the music school and am playing chamber music with excellent colleagues—in a string quartet and a piano trio—so I still have to practice regularly. Still living in the Sauerland, one of the most beautiful regions in Germany. This summer saw me hiking from hut to hut in the Swiss and Italian Alps, followed by visits to Ticino (Italian Switzerland) and Vorarlberg (Austria.) Then the whole family finally came to visit: my daughter with her family from England and my son with his family from Bonn. Despite the fact that it rained the entire time, it was an enjoyable visit because the small children are all the same ages (two and six) and the adults also get along well.
“Since May 2022 a Ukrainian family has been sharing my house with me.”
Claudia Catania updates us: “Just returned from Lloyd Komesar’s ninth annual Middlebury New Filmmaker Festival, which served four days of fascinating films. I highly recommend it to all for next August. Some of the Wesleyan grads partaking were Wayne Forrest, Sarah Cady Becker, Arthur Fierman, Bill Pearson, Rick Gilberg, Steve Goldschmidt ’72, Mike McKenna ’73, Michael Arkin ’72, Todd Jick ’71, Bob Becker ’71, Janet Biehl, Caroline White-Lesieur, et al!
“On the home front, my husband, John Cady ’71, and I enjoy having our older son, Max, just back from New Zealand and now a STEM teacher at Design Tech in San Francisco. Our son, Gavin, owns and manages from afar his restaurant, 1000 Figs, in New Orleans even though he lives with his wife, and their one-, three-, and five-year-old sons in Denver. John and I are planning to live in Denver a number of months per year, so give a holler if you know any folks we should look up!
“I’m no longer leading Playing on Air, the audio drama series of short plays I founded (playingonair.org; you can stream it or go to the podcast), but am enjoying newfound freedom as I weigh a world of possibilities. Travel ranks high. Sempre Avanti!”
In August, the board of directors of The Music Center (https://www.musiccenter.org/) announced the appointment of several new board members including attorney Richard (Dick) Kendall. As one of the nation’s largest performing arts organizations, The Music Center presents world-class dance performances, nationally recognized K–12 arts learning programs, digital arts experiences, and free and low-cost public concerts and events. In addition, The Music Center manages four theaters, Jerry Moss Plaza, and Gloria Molina Grand Park, on behalf of the County of Los Angeles.
“Each leader of our newest cadre of board members has been positively impacted by the arts throughout their successful lives and storied careers,” said Cindy Miscikowski, board chair of The Music Center.
Dick attended his first opera, Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, when he was 12 years old. Accompanying his grandmother to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, he recalls how stirred he felt while watching the fabled production—the experience cemented his lifelong dedication to the arts. Dick, a partner at Kendall Brill & Kelly LLP, with more than 30 years of complex litigation experience, joins The Music Center’s board of directors alongside his wife, Lisa See. He has his finger on the pulse of the performing arts field; he serves concurrently as a board member of BroadStage. Having witnessed firsthand some of the challenges facing performing arts venues and theatrical stages following the pandemic, he is determined to help The Music Center and Gloria Molina Grand Park thrive. Dick is also a member of the Human Rights Watch Southern California Committee and has served on the boards of Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and Western Center on Law and Poverty. He holds a juris doctor from the USC Gould School of Law. He and his wife live in Brentwood.