CLASS OF 1967 | 2026 | SPRING ISSUE
1967 ARCHIVES | HOME
← 1966 | 1968 →
Let’s start with the increasingly inevitable obituary report. Our classmate, Jim Ruhlen, died on July 4, 2025, in Overland Park, Kansas. Jim transferred into Wesleyan as a sophomore from Baker University, a school in Kansas, and spent three years at Wesleyan, majoring in chemistry. He won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study chemistry at Caltech, but, after a year or two of that, decided to go to medical school. After earning his MD from the University of Kansas, he had a long career as a doc in the Kansas City area. Based on the many testimonials on the obituary website that I saw, he was much loved and appreciated by patients and colleagues. Jim is survived by his wife of 59 years, Leigh, two sons, two grandchildren, and many nieces, nephews, grandnieces, and grandnephews. Dave Garrison did not know Jim at Wesleyan but came to know him later in life when Dave and his wife bought a condo in Prairie Village, Kansas, that was just a mile away from where Jim and his wife lived. Dave described Jim as “warm, generous, and kind.”
On a happier note, our classmate Anthony Caprio, who served as president of Western New England College for 25 years (from 1996 to 2021), was honored in September 2025 by the school with the Delbridge Family Spirit of Philanthropy Award. Among the many nice things said about Anthony as he received this honor, was this: “Few individuals have shaped the trajectory of Western New England University as profoundly as Dr. Caprio. His vision, relentless pursuit of excellence, and ability to bring ambitious ideas to life transformed not only the campus landscape, but also the institution’s identity and aspirations.”
I wrote about George McKechnie in the Fall 2024 Issue, noting that in addition to practicing clinical psychology, he had started some “home audio” businesses. He was the founder and president of Audio Excellence, Inc. and then two more audio companies, Axiom Home Theater and Sync My Home Inc. He now has a new enterprise, called SmartHomePlanner.com, a web business designed to help consumers understand smart homes, so they can make informed decisions about what to buy and how it can be custom-tailored to their specific needs.
McKechnie is clearly looking forward. I am looking back (and I should note, my wife and I still have a working rotary phone on our kitchen wall). Not long ago, I found myself thinking about the summer before our freshman year. I was pretty sure that the college sent us a book that we were supposed to read for a discussion that was to take place during orientation, but I didn’t read it (and, I remember, I was embarrassed about not having read it when my group—the first floor of Nicholson 5—met for a discussion led by anthropologist David McAllester). The book, I was almost certain, was Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which I now realize caused quite a stir and created deep divisions, not only nationally but in the Jewish community. Arendt also wrote extensively about totalitarianism, and it occurred to me, in my dotage at age 80, that Eichmann in Jerusalem might be of greater interest to me now than it was when I was a teenager, given recent events in Israel, Palestine, and in the USA.
In order to check my memory, I sent emails to some classmates (Steve Sellers,Tom Drew, Gar Richlin, and Reuben “Johnny” Johnson) asking them if they remembered the college sending us Arendt’s book. I won’t reveal what each did and did not recall (the responses ranged from absolutely no recollection at all to some clear memories), but I will tell you that Reuben (who was in CSS) confirmed that I was right—the book was Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Reuben subsequently sent me a flyer showing that in 2013, in order to commemorate the 50-year anniversary of the publication of that book, there was a conference at Wesleyan. The promotional materials for the conference included the following: “Arendt completed writing her work on the Eichmann trial while she was a fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for Advanced Studies (now the Center for the Humanities) and first published it as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. It immediately caused a controversy that has not fully subsided to this day; it also opened up a new chapter in the public awareness and understanding of genocide and played a crucial role in the emergence of the academic field of Holocaust studies.”
You guys remember receiving and reading (or not reading) this book?
Whether you do or not, I now have read the book and think Arendt had some valuable things to say about Israel, Palestine, and totalitarianism. As evidence that Arendt’s work is still, or once again, relevant, here is a link to an article that appeared in The Conversation in late January titled “Repeated government lying, warned Hannah Arendt, makes it impossible for citizens to think and to judge”: Hannah Arendt article.
RICHIE ZWEIGENHAFT | rzweigen@guilford.edu