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Karen Van Dyck is still translating and writing about Greek literature and still at Columbia after almost 40 years, through the good, the bad, and now the crazy. She does spend more and more time on the island of Syros, where she and her sons built a house. Lots of grapes and olives. But she also loves autumn in New York—and Vermont. 

Pamela Dolin has temporarily (or not) retired from family practice and is working harder at caring for her two granddaughters, while watching her four adult children in their working lives. Her husband recently passed away. She wishes all her classmates a world at peace if possible!

Jean Weille lives in Manhattan with her husband and a daughter nearby; her son lives in San Francisco. Jean is a clinical social worker in private practice, specializing in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder. She is also interested in life transitions and recently co-led a workshop on conscious aging based on the book From Age-ing to Sage-ing by Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi. 

Rick Mandler is living in Manhattan, but spends a lot of time in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He is fully retired now, after nearly 35 years in media, mostly at Disney, but ending at Comcast. Retirement so far has been travel (with wife, Paula Katz), lots of reading, some writing on Substack, “Rick or Treat,” and lots of outdoor time with their dogs, Babka and Stapleton. He is still in touch with a bunch of Wesleyan folks and says it’s amazing how quickly and deeply they reconnect.

Kay McCabe was fortunate to have a long dance career and spent many years running the dance and arts program at Kimball Union Academy in New Hampshire. She is now devoting her creative energy to photography. She and her husband live in Vermont, not far from their son’s organic vegetable farm.

Miriam Hiser has been happily living in the San Francisco Marina District for the last 40 years and running her own law firm for the last 27. Being her own boss gives her time to indulge in her two favorite pastimes, open water swimming and ultra running, and plenty of time to visit family on the East Coast and travel overseas with her life partner, Dan.  

Frank De Poli lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but travels constantly across the world for work and play. Aside from a busy and wonderful family life, he owns a medium-size, multinational company that supplies equipment for fueling cars, trucks, planes, and ships. Based in Buenos Aires, it has companies in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil, and does business across Latin America.

Barbara (Miller) Legate recently retired from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston after 39 years. She lives in Galveston with her husband and enjoys walking on the beach, reading, and traveling. 

Elisabeth Cassels-Brown writes after 30 years of adjunct teaching at universities in Vienna, Austria, she has retired from academics and is moving from corporate training to more coaching, with an emphasis on supporting intercultural competence and team effectiveness in international NGOs. 

Mark Kushner is still in San Francisco, with two Wes kids: Kyra ’24 and Tor ’27. He saw Wes friends for his 65th birthday: Ben Binswanger, Dave Loo, and Scott Pearson ’84. After 30 years running inner-city schools, some private schools, and one art college, he retired but has been pulled back to the nonprofit world by being asked to take over a historic tennis and academic nonprofit, co-founded by Arthur Ashe, serving 1,000 low-income students around the Bay Area.

Martin Dobrow thoroughly enjoyed his time at Wesleyan, learned a ton, and made dear friends, but now wishes he had developed his love of history back then. If so, perhaps his new book—Original City, Original Sin: King, the Klan, and the Fight for Civil Rights in St. Augustine, Florida (published in October by Cambridge University Press)—might have seen the light of day much earlier. 

Charlie Brenner hosted Doug Green for dinner in Pasadena in May before moving family, dogs, and laboratory to Helsinki, Finland. 

Alexander deVaron ’84 writes that after Wesleyan, he immersed himself in Buddhism and various other meditation traditions for a dozen years, then went back to school for graduate degrees in music composition. In 2009 he was hired as a full-time instructor at Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance. He just retired and is returning to a more creative and bohemian life. His dear spouse, Jude, and he recently celebrated 40 years together.

As for me, the past six months have been a very soulful time, filled with change, grief, and joy. I still live in Brooklyn, teach art at Sarah Lawrence College (for one more year), and am now also spending several months a year in my childhood “home” area of Bradford, New Hampshire. I have built an art studio there, am reconnecting with Wesleyan best friends from the past, and feeling very much alive at 65!

MARION WILSON | marionwilsonart@gmail.com