CLASS OF 1966 | 2022 | FALL ISSUE
We begin in admiration: Larry Duberstein has just published his 10th novel, The Hospice Singer—in Larry’s words, “a tale revolving around the unexpected connection between one of the singers (part of a small choir offering in-home concerts to the terminally ill) and a beautiful and mysteriously lively young ‘client.’ The connection develops into a long and winding story with passages of amateur detection, cross-country picaresque, shifting relationships, and surprising resolutions. The intriguing but little-known phenomenon of hospice concerts can be seen as uplifting or depressing—it’s both, really.” Larry goes on to pay tribute to Richard Wilbur, pointing out “something very special about the man . . . his extreme generosity regarding what poets might choose to do, how they might approach the art . . . I was playing around with the [William Carlos] Williams’s sort of poem and never once did he say a discouraging word, either about the folly of skinny uber-objectified lines or about the fact that mine stunk. He simply made his comments as though intrigued and curious, maybe made a suggestion or two, and went along with the pretense that I was writing poetry. ‘Generous’ barely touches it. The word ‘kindness’ sits very close by, and it is, these days, a rare word and a rarer trait. . . .”
Gary Conger is “still in touch with John Wilson (almost daily), Cliff Shedd, Bill Boynton, and Bill Gernert. We had a reunion of the Fab Five (or the Eclectic basement rats) in Boynton’s Arizona home in 2018.” Gary is “happy to report that I and many loved ones have survived (so far) the COVID pandemic,” that his new “lady friend” has inspired “me to read War and Peace. I’m currently on page 1,169.” Gary’s son, Nick (41), “works for Biden’s EPA as their press secretary. He’s been a soldier for animal protection and the environment since he graduated college. My daughter, Laura (39), has become a nurse practitioner. She is married to a quite successful banker and now independent entrepreneur. They have given me two incredibly energetic grandsons, now ages 6 and 4.” Gary “still remember[s] fondly that truncated academic year” he and I spent in Kuwait, truncated because we wrote and distributed widely an eight-page mimeographed satire on life in Kuwait. A few days later the American ambassador, fearing prosecution, got us out of Kuwait.”
Rick Crootof, Essel Bailey, and Sandy Van Kennen attended the 55th Reunion of the Class of 1967 and our 56th. Rick writes that he and Essel had “a great dinner” with the Board of Trustees, that he “talked with over a dozen students . . . all of whom are at least double majors, some triple! All polite and engaging. They all must have taken theater courses, because they were so convincingly interested in what I had to say about the ‘old days.’” He and Sandy got in a swim, Rick “looking for a flip turn lesson… Sandy and I told every student we met on campus or shar[ed] a meal [with], to make sure they walk
into some professor they liked and say ‘Hey, can we hang out?’. . . . Saturday night Sandy and I had dinner for 2 1/2 hours with author Robin Cook ’62! That was exciting.” Having fond memories, I asked Rick to send me a photograph from the pitcher’s mound.
Rick and Linda and Jack Knapp and his wife Carla, had plans “to embark on our fourth iteration of a Viking Cruise to Scotland and Norway” in mid-June only to be disappointed because of canceled flights.”
For Paul Gilbert “there hasn’t been much travel or getting together in the last couple of years,” pointing out that the “recent losses of friends and family has a sobering effect,” a feeling many of us share. Paul “had scheduled a series of books on transitions in life but I kind of lost my mojo in the COVID lockdown . . . . Now at 78, I’m just concentrating on daily pleasures and helping my wife who is 13 years younger, to plan her retirement from the practice of law next February. We’ll become a little more mobile then but having three cats will probably prevent us from taking a round-the-world cruise.”
Jeff Nilson hasn’t “left the Cape except for trips to Lexington to see our daughter, son-in-law, and grandsons, Isaac and William. Cape Cod has all the beauty and art that I need. So, I don’t mind sticking close to home.” Jeff includes “one of my silly math verses”:
The Numbers That Wanted to Be Counted Backwards
Sally the hen wanted to count to 10.
“I will count forward like other hens.
I’ll start at 1 and go quickly to 10.
And I shall do it again and again.”
“Not so fast,” said Sally’s numbers.
“WE like counting from 10 to 1.
No regular counting for us.
Counting backwards is much more fun.”
Sally breathed and swelled up her chest.
“I shall count forward; that is that.”
“We’ll run away,” her numbers cried.
Sally said, “You’re acting like brats.”
Sally began to count.
She shouted, “1!”
The 1 started to run.
It said, “Being counted forward is no fun.”
She yelled, “2! 3!”
The 2 and the 3 started to fuss.
They said, “You shouldn’t have counted either of us.”
She screamed, “4! 5!”
The 4 and the 5 tried to hide.
“We’ll never be counted forward,” they cried.
Sally shrieked, “6! 7!”
The 6 and the 7 hid in a shack.
They said to Sally, “We’ll never come back.”
Sally yelled, “8! 9!”
The 8 and 9 climbed a tree.
The 9 said to Sally, “You’ll never count the 8 or me.”
Then Sally felt badly about screaming so loud.
She missed the sign that said, “No yelling allowed.”
Realizing that screaming had done her no good.
She resolved to whisper to be understood.
Then Sally the hen whispered, “10.”
The 10 said to Sally the hen,
“The numbers will return
If you count backwards from 10.”
Will you help Sally the hen
Count backwards to 1 from 10?
Please put the missing numbers in the blanks.
Sally will offer you her deepest “Thanks.”
10, __?___, 8, 7, __?__, 5, __?__, __?___ 2, 1.
And he had his grandson send the following cartoon:
Clark Byam “retired at end of last year after 49 years of practice with same law firm. Now play some golf, hike in hills where we live almost daily. Also keep in touch with my three kids. Son lives about 5 miles from me; two daughters live in Texas. Also follow stock market.”
Andy Kleinfeld tells us that “Amazingly and very fortunately, I have no interesting news, not even any uninteresting news.” But Andy’s no news turns out to be great news. He is still working, but not too hard, as a circuit judge; he and Judy, “married in 1967,” continue to enjoy their dream home, “a log house on a hill with a view of Mt. McKinley (now Denali),” which they bought in 1974; and “all three of our kids are grown and doing fine, as are our six grandchildren. We very much appreciate our good luck.”
Andy goes on to write: “We were also damned lucky to get so fine an education at Wesleyan. My law clerks mostly have gone to elite schools, but generally are not as well educated as we are. My kids managed to learn a lot in college but could easily have wasted the opportunities. I suspect that much of the deficiency I see in my law clerks is because the schools let them take whatever courses they want, so their course selection is by uneducated people, themselves. I think one of the things we paid for and received was the excellent guidance from the faculty on what to study, and not just the studies themselves.
“We also benefited a lot from the tolerance for different points of view and lack of censoriousness (maybe Nelson Polsby was kind of hard on institutionalists in his campaign for behaviorism, but that was healthy). E. J. Nell taught us neoclassical economics so well one might imagine that he was not a Marxist (though he taught that well too). Dick Buel, Reggie Bartholomew—wow—I can still quote them (and do). And I still think about imperialism with Barber and Butler, where we learned what happened and what people thought at the time, rather than learning only that it was bad. I sure miss our classmates and professors who are gone. I still think of Pete Spiller. As do, I’m sure, the girls he romanced from time to time.”
In response to David Griffith’s reminiscence in our last class notes, Andy assures us that “it wasn’t me who fell asleep in Professor Reynolds’s class.”
Barry Thomas enjoyed David’s account of Rip Reynolds’s class, writing: “What marvelous reminiscence from Jack Knapp and reflection from David Griffith! I was not in that class but, as a fellow public schooler, feel a great sense of empathy with Jack. And now, after 55 years or so, can enjoy David’s wry humor. For me, the revelation came in freshman English with a young professor whose name I do not remember—a really fine professor and, as it turned out, a very nice fellow. It was the poetry. I did not have a clue. ‘The horror! The horror!’” The professor was James Lusardi, whom many of us remember with great affection.
“Granddaughter Madeline,” Tom Pulliam writes, “will attend University of Hawaii and study marine biology. I have emailed Hardy Spoehr to let him know and told Madeline and her family what a wonderful person he is, encouraging them to make contact with him. I got new hip in April to go with couple of bionic knees, everything working fine. Just back from trip to Montana and North Dakota; Montana to see longtime rugby teammate who built a home in Paradise Valley near Livingston, and also to catch up with old high school classmate in Bozeman. Alice and I had great time with both of them, then headed to her hometown of Fargo for memorial service to celebrate life of her older sister.
“In few days heading to Lake Almanor in northeastern California for vacation with kids (our son and daughter, his girlfriend and daughter’s family); have been going there 40-plus years now, and it thankfully has changed very little. In September my old Pleasantville, New York, high school class will hold a reunion in Healdsburg, California (Sonoma Valley), which should be interesting, and also a great deal of fun.
“Other than that, just loving being involved in grandkids’ lives. They live about seven minutes away and the boys (ages 15, 12, and 9) are outstanding athletes, baseball and soccer in the summer. In fall rugby will replace baseball. Life is very good.
“Read with sadness of the death of John Driscoll ’62, who was from my hometown of Pleasantville where he coached me in football when I was about 12. He was a magnificent human being who helped many, many Wesleyan students successfully navigate that awkward four-year period of their lives. Those of you who knew him might be interested in watching video of his retirement ceremony on YouTube. I made donation to the Freeman Driscoll Endowed Scholarship Fund in his memory.”
At its spring convocation ceremony, McGill University awarded Dr. William Dietz the degree of Doctor of Science Honoris Causa. Congratulations to Bill on this fitting recognition of his many and longstanding contributions to understanding and helping to treat childhood obesity.
We end with this inspiring note and “small whimsy” from Daniel Lang who continues to teach, publish, and contribute as an administrator. “Next month I will start a three-year term on the Board of Directors at King’s University College. I find it somewhere between amusing and puzzling that some people still think that I know what I am talking about. My public economics and finance graduate course begins again in September. . . . Two papers have been cranked out for publication. Two more are on the way.” Dan’s “small whimsy” is a gem, ever so telling about our lives at Wesleyan in 1962–1963. Note that the professor is Lusardi.
A Swinger of Birches
“Wesleyan, when I was there, was preppy. Many of my classmates were from private schools. Most were from upper middle class professional families. Almost all of them were better prepared academically and more sophisticated than I was. In an odd, self-defeating exercise Wesleyan let you know this. Remember Hess Haagen? The results of a battery of tests, as well as academic statistics from high school, were assembled for each student in comparison with the averages for each entering class. This ensured that those who were insecure to begin with stayed that way with the knowledge that they were at best average. So I did not think that my personal experiences had anything to add to discussions in or outside class.
“About two-thirds of the way through freshman English there was an exception. The professor, a man recently from Yale named James Lusardi, assigned the Robert Frost poem, Birches, about ‘swinging’ birch trees. The usual class discussion ensued, with all sorts of literary metaphors about the deeper meaning of this or that. This had been going on for some time when Professor Lusardi abruptly interjected in his characteristic booming voice, ‘Doesn’t anyone here know what Frost is talking about?’ Well, I did!
“On Ledge Farm, where I grew up in Rhode Island, there was a field separate from all the others. It was called the White Field. I don’t know why. I think that the name had something to do with the huge number of small rocks that were turned up every time the field was plowed. It was a new field, one edge of which went right up to a steep ledge that dropped off about 100 feet into one of Fred Babbitt’s fields below.
“It wasn’t really a new field. It was reclaimed from a field that at one time was much larger and had been allowed to go wild. It was new in the sense that it had been re-cleared in my grandfather’s time. So the trees that grew around the field were young, and were more hardwoods than white pines, which made up the woods on most other forested places on the farm. There were plenty of young birches, not much more that saplings, 25- to 30-feet tall.
“One of my jobs in the summertime was to take a lunch pail—it was like a little milk can with a cover and bale—to my grandfather when he was working in a field far away from the house. The White Field was about a half mile down the road. Grandpa Manfred had a playful side to him. After his lunch he pointed over to a birch tree on the edge of the field and said that it would be a good tree for swinging. My first thought was ‘Where’s the swing?’ I thought he was teasing me with a joke.
“‘No,’ he said, ‘the tree is the swing.’ He was in his late 50s at the time with a bad arm from polio, but he climbed about two thirds of the way up the tree and began to rock back and forth until the tree started to sway 6 feet or so either direction. Birches, at least when they are young, evidently are very elastic. Then he lifted me up into the tree so that I could climb the rest of the way. The top of the tree was so whippy that it didn’t take long to figure out how to make it swing. After that, it was something that I always looked forward to at the farm. I learned, painfully, that other trees were more brittle than birches and would snap without warning. I also learned that even birches would snap if you tried to swing them in the winter.
“That’s why I knew what Robert Frost was talking about, and that my better-schooled classmates didn’t. Professor Lusardi, who intended his question to be rhetorical, was gobsmacked.”
