CLASS OF 1982 | 2024 | SUMMER ISSUE
Dear Classmates,
I’m starting off with the very sad news that our classmate, Janet Wickenhaver Allon, who had a long career as a journalist in New York City, died this past February 17, after a couple of months battling an illness. I asked her good friend Jonathan Weber to write a few words about her:
“Speaking for a magical Wesleyan friend circle, we’re crushed by Janet’s sudden and shocking death, all the more difficult because it was so inexplicable. It was only in December that I saw her in New York, all her charm and smarts and dry humor fully on display, and I never imagined that only a couple of months later I would see her near death in a hospital ICU. Her son, Jonah, and daughter, Lena, were there when I visited, showing incredible poise, and our hearts are with them and their sister, Tess, and Janet’s wonderful partner Larry, who was a hero through a brutal couple of months.
“I’ve known Janet since my first days at West College in 1978, and she was a charter member of an amazing group that has stayed close, with various ebbs and flows, ever since—Hannah Marcus ’83, her roommate, and Lawrence Comras, Steedman Hinckley ’83, Molly Turner ’83, Raleigh Levine ’83, Dena Wortzel ’83, Eric Sack ’83, Becky Mode ’86, Chris Erickson ’87, Ed Hernstadt (honorary ’82), and, if they were still with us, John Moynihan and Sara Garment ’83, among many others. As a freshman, she was a cute, smart, funny, and slightly shy girl from the Philadelphia Main Line, a bit patrician in her way but also goofy enough for WestCo. I appreciated her athletic bent—she’d been a competitive figure skater, and was a strong tennis player, and we even spent one winter break ski bumming together in Vermont, cleaning rooms in a ski lodge (I don’t recommend it).
“Later on we had a lot to share as journalists: in proper Wesleyan fashion she was curious about all sorts of things, and I especially admired her work in the trenches at Street Sheet, and then at AlterNet, her compassion and kindness always shining through. We already miss her very much.”
In cheerier news, Joe Fins is on a partial sabbatical this year, and spent the first semester as an Old Dominion Humanities Council fellow and visiting professor at Princeton, teaching a course in the classics department entitled, Bio/Ethics: Ancient and Modern. While at Princeton, he was also working on a biography of Dr. Lewis Thomas, author of The Lives of a Cell, whose papers are there. This semester he’s teaching in the COL as the Koeppel Visiting Professor of Letters. “It’s been a marvelous homecoming and it’s made me reflective about our time at Wes,” he says. “It has retained its character and remains an intellectually synthetic place.”
Robert Smythe has largely left the stage and turned to his longtime love of baking. He and Susan Smythe opened Pastry Pants in downtown Swarthmore, Pennsylvania—and hope you’ll drop by if you’re in the area.
I stopped by an art show in San Francisco, Evoke, where Paul Baker ’84, who has been making assemblage sculptures for years, was showing some of his new, imaginative, and intriguing boxes (think Joseph Cornell). “I call my pieces ‘constructed sculpture’ since they are about 80% built from scratch,” he says. “The rest is made up of carefully selected objects that bring with them a patina of use and lost history.”
I caught Steve Budd performing his latest one-person show, Seeing Stars, a heartfelt and hilarious take on family dysfunction and father-son relationships, in San Francisco. He’s been touring in Hollywood and other venues. Look out for it!
I’ve been trying to keep writing despite old magazines shuttering, aging out of new ones, and losing whatever luster I once had in the publishing world by starting my own Substack publication, The Phrazer, and have been happy to see many of our classmates on that platform. That nickname goes back to Wesleyan, perhaps coined by Barnaby Dinges ’81, whom I had the pleasure of seeing in San Miguel de Allende with his wife, Vicki. We exchanged memoirs and his Ragged Run was eye-opening. Like a lot of people, I arrived at Wes thinking everyone else seemed to have had it easy growing up and were so confident. Think again. Barnaby’s memoir, among other things, was a real tribute to Wes’s aid-blind admissions policy, because he and his brother, Casey ’79, orphaned and bilked of their inheritance, could never have otherwise matriculated and become the valued and beloved members of the community they are.
Take care, classmates.
Laura