Author: etaylor

Please write to your class secretary.

Hi all.  Here’s what we have:

Dave Dowsett writes from Portland, where he is practicing dentistry and focused on the connection between oral and systemic health—understanding how the mouth bacterial biome plays a role in disease and health. “It’s a cool, geeky way to really think about prevention rather than simply early diagnosis and treatment. I think my true love with health-care practice is caring for athletes of all ages and their unique needs. I am currently the secretary for the Academy for Sports Dentistry—a group of about 250 dentists across North America, who spend a lot of time making sure athletes are safe, performing at their best, and fixing them up when trauma happens. I’m looking after kids’ soccer clubs, my daughter’s high school teams, the Portland Winterhawks WHL/CHL hockey team, and even a few Olympians. It can be really fun, and you get to meet amazing people from all around the globe.”

Dave is “still married to his dental school love, Kristi (who stopped practicing almost 18 years ago after our first was born). She was raised in Honolulu, and we have been so very lucky to have spent lots of time there with her family over the years. I have three kiddos: Kekoa (15-year-old boy), a sophomore at my alma mater Jesuit HS—he is all theater, math, and art. Currently, he is playing the part of Sheldon Plankton in the upcoming performance of SpongeBob, the Musical in March. I see him at Wes so perfectly. Lehua (17-year-old girl), a junior at all-girls St. Mary’s Academy and a soccer nut. We watched the Wes women this fall make it to the national semis. Super cool.  We have a neighbor whose granddaughter is going to Wes next fall to play and this has really piqued Lehua’s interest, sooo . . . we’ll see. Maile (19-year-old young woman) is a first year at American University in DC, studying chemistry. She really wants to be a forensic scientist and would love to be Abby on the show NCIS.  She loves DC and the East Coast, so I may have lost her. . . .  When Kristi and I dropped her off last August, Laurie Malkin came down to spend the weekend. Had an absolute blast exploring the city, the food, laughing, and reconnecting. In fact, Maile and Laurie hit it off so well that Maile spent a good part of Thanksgiving break in Jersey and in NYC. She even got to go skating in Central Park and hang out with Bethel Gottlieb and her kids. I am still jealous.

“We plan to be back out visiting at spring break, in an attempt to do the college-tour thing. And the Broadway thing. And the trip-down-memory-lane thing.  Please COVID, give it a rest.”

The older daughter of Edward Ungvarsky and Olivia Smith ’91 is off to New York City next fall to Fordham University—Lincoln Center Campus, with an intended major of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies and a fashion marketing minor. “Yowza, they say! The kids and staff at Bridges Public Charter School, which Olivia founded to support children with and without special needs, have weathered COVID-19 well.” Ed walks their pandemic shelter rottweiler and practices some law.

Catharina (Lina) Schuetz (Will) writes from Dresden, Germany, with news that her eldest, Florian, joined the class of 2025 at Wes. “He is lucky to have real classes with live faculty, and is enjoying himself immensely . . .  I get nostalgic when he sends pictures from campus.”

Finally, congratulations to entrepreneur Raquel Graham who pitched her company Roq Innovation, which she founded in 2014, on Shark Tank in January, and landed a deal with two of the Sharks!  Raquel’s company creates innovative apparel accessories. The cаtаlog includes Nekz, а more mаnаgeаble аnd less cumbersome аlternаtive to scаrves; Heаdlightz Beаnies, which hаve а powerful light аttаched to them; and light-up gloves аnd heаdbаnds. Rаquel hаs been written up in Forbes and has аppeаred on Good Morning Americа аnd The View. Her products have been sold on the Home Shopping Network and featured on Mаrthа Stewаrt’s Americаn Mаde and on Oprаh’s Fаvorite Things lists. Raquel wants to keep innovating exciting products that make a real difference in people’s lives and plans to launch three new products in new categories. You can watch a clip of Raquel on Shark Tank at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkmfiS0GD9M. And this just in, Raquel was invited to speak at Wesleyan’s TedX event in April.

Wishing you all a wonderful summer and, as always, looking forward to hearing from you!

Peter writes for this issue.

With sadness we report that our classmate Alisa Kaufman passed away on March 20 after a short battle with pancreatic cancer. After graduating Wesleyan, Alisa attended law school at University of California—Davis. She practiced immigration law in California, and is survived by her husband, three children, and two siblings.

Marjora Carter writes, “My first book was just published! Reclaiming Your Community: You Don’t Have to Move Out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One.”

The National Kidney Foundation (NKF) has announced the appointment of Hubert Allen to its national board of directors. Hubert resides in Chicago, Illinois, and is the executive vice president, general counsel, and secretary at Abbott, the global health care company, where he leads a diverse global team of over 250 lawyers that interact with legal systems in more than 100 countries to support Abbott business all around the world.

Justin Gubar proudly reports, “My friend, Deirdre Davis, received a well-deserved promotion at the end of 2021. After joining American Express a little over three years ago, she is now vice president and senior counsel—Trademark & Copyright, IP Law and Strategy Group. No one better to protect your IP!”

Stephen Gannon has relocated from New Jersey down to Vero Beach and is enjoying the fantastic weather. I had dinner with Stephen and his wife Marta in December, and the new climate is certainly agreeing with them.

Lastly, I am happy to report that my podcast, The CPG Guys, is currently ranked #1 for Consumer Goods Industry podcasts according to Feedspot, and Shopify recognized it as one of the top 10, e-commerce–focused podcasts to follow for people in the CPG/retail industry. We just published our 175th episode.

Greetings, classmates! As I write, we are looking forward to our 35th Reunion and slogging through the dark days of winter in the U.S. Northeast. In anticipation of May’s Middletown events, the reunion committee hosted a Zoom social hour in the cold days of February. We split into first-year dorm breakouts and enjoyed reminiscing about when we were 18. And we brought some wonderful memories to life.

The Clark breakout talked about the noise of Olin construction and how it really upended morning sleep for many in the dorm—except for Michael Pruzan who is from New York City. To him, noise was noise. They laughed about the 8:30 a.m. weekly calls on the hall phone for Sue Romeo from her mom, who apparently hung on the line waiting for her, and Sue almost never arrived to pick up the phone. Then they remembered the amazing tip that Dave Perryman’s Clark roommates left him on his first lunch shift at Downey House. Amazing, that is, until he realized that Eric Apgar had rubber cemented all the coins and bills to the table. The group also discussed the great bathroom stall mystery of 1983–84, when some mischievous dorm mate stuffed a pair of blue jeans and shoes and propped it up in one of the stalls in the second-floor unisex bathroom. There, the solitary figure sat resolutely, maybe stolidly for several days. Like Rodin’s The Thinker, it was contemplating lofty principles, no doubt, until an intrepid group of students knocked on the stall door to see if everything was “okay in there.”

In the Butterfield group, Daria Papalia and I recalled Meteor Farm, a choral piece written by Professor Neely Bruce, that some of us performed in NYC’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine. This was a piece where each person in the choir sang an independent verse simultaneously, until the group joined together to sing METEOR FARM all at once. I demonstrated and people were surprised that I remembered my unique words and tune.

Sue Roginski told the Butterfield group that she had a bit of time on campus last fall with Molly Rabinowitz and Paul Blanchard. They walked around campus and through downtown Middletown together during a very rainy Homecoming weekend at Wes. During the pandemic, Sue has been working online, thanks to Zoom. The dance nonprofit she is a part of first paused during 2020, and then moved their dance events to the virtual platform in 2021. What has evolved because of that work is now the first-ever dance film festival in the Inland Empire. Hope you all can check that out on June 25th (www.placeperformance.org)!

The Butterfield group was entertained when Dave Robinson showed us all Chris Roellke’s commemorative bobblehead. I’ll let Dave take it from here. He writes: “For those that missed it (i.e., anyone who hasn’t come across one of Chris’s many social media sites), Chris Roellke became the 10th president of Stetson University on July 1, 2020.  That’s right, “Rolks” is now a university president.  To be honest, much like the grade he got in Constitutional Law at Wesleyan, he owes his presidency largely to me and my backroom maneuvering on his behalf. All kidding aside, due to the pandemic, the celebration of his presidency was postponed for more than a year, but on November 6, 2021, Chris was appropriately honored with an official inauguration. I had the privilege of contributing a short video testimonial that was played alongside other testimonials, including one from Wesleyan’s own president, during the ceremony on the Stetson campus in DeLand, Florida. In recognition of my contribution, I received a limited-edition Chris Roellke bobblehead. I’m sure Chris tried to convince the school to put him in a baseball or basketball uniform; alas, the bobblehead is decked in the traditional cap and gown.  Nevertheless, go Rolks, go Hatters!”

The reunion committee had one more of these calls in the spring. It was a great build up to our 35th! I hope you were able to make more memories of our time on campus if you were able to go back in May.

Our class is still looking for one or two volunteers to be Class Secretary and gather stories to share with our classmates. If interested, write to me or to Liz Taylor ’87 at classnotes@wesleyan.edu.

We didn’t get many submissions for Class Notes or many volunteers to serve as secretary.  Via our Facebook group (255 members), we asked for submissions, and Emily Zaslow Hourihan commented, “I got nothing!!! Ha ha. Xox,” to which Steve Cadigan replied, “C’mon. I don’t believe you,” and she then said, “I’ve been in my bathrobe for three years!”  Also on Facebook, there was a lot of discussion about William Garson Paszamant, better known as Willie Garson to his many fans and throughout the entertainment industry—stage, film, and television. Best known for his role in the iconic HBO television series Sex and the City, he died of pancreatic cancer last September.

In case you missed it, the prior issue of the alumni magazine had a full-page picture of Michael Bay accompanying a story about the future of film and a full-page article by Steve Cadigan about his book on the future of work.  Because Steve had been LinkedIn’s first HR officer, I went to LinkedIn and discovered that several classmates have a great relationship with their employer. Later this year Becca Golden will be celebrating her 30th anniversary with the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, where she oversees national grant-making programs, and Forrest Maltzman will soon be celebrating his 30th year as a professor of political science at George Washington University.  Via Facebook, Steve also noted he had a chance last summer to visit Tony Zimmerman and his wife Anne at his home in Hartford, has been in regular touch with Gus Conroy who is in Houston—comparing notes on life and work—and also met up with Scott Donohue, who humbled him in a tennis match and then asked if Steve wanted to go on a bike ride up a steep mountain with him . . . no thanks.

How are the rest of you doing with your aspirations?  I also know that some have retired, while others are moving on in different ways.  Bridge Growth Partners, a leading technology investment firm, announced in November that it had appointed Jonathan Harber as senior advisor to identify and evaluate investment opportunities. He has expertise, insights, and relationships from more than 30 years as a pioneer in education technology. He recently was CEO for Pearson K12 Technology, overseeing a business unit with 1,000 employees and serving over 25 million students.  Another job change was Noah Pickus, who after 25 years at Duke University, joined the Minerva Project as chief academic officer and their associated university in the role of professor of social sciences.

Lastly, David Hill deserves our deep thanks, as he continues to serve in a leadership role in the university-wide Alumni Association.

Hello, Classmates!

Aaron Gershenberg has transitioned to Angel and Impact Investing, based in Park City, Utah, leaving Silicon Valley Bank (and SVB Capital) behind after 23 years. (He continues on as founding partner emeritus for SVB.)  He is looking forward to spending more time in Africa and Israel, and to looking for sustainable economic development models.

Michael Llewyn had an exciting fall running for borough president of Manhattan on the Libertarian Party line (despite not being a registered Libertarian).  He got 1.8% of the vote, focusing on “less zoning, more housing, lower rents.” You can find “Manhattan Borough President General Election Debate” on YouTube.  In and around the campaign, Michael got married in 2019 and lives in midtown Manhattan; he teaches at Touro Law Center, and blogs about land use issues at planetizen.com and marketurbanism.com. You can find his law review articles at http://works.bepress.com/lewyn.

Shawn Dove, who felt (like so many of us) that 2021 was an “intermission,” is facing the third act of his life with our shared milestone birthday. His major takeaway from the pandemic is to “stop lamenting my irretrievable and start loving my future self.”  “Sage”-ing instead of “age”-ing.  He has  sunsetted the not-for-profit Campaign for Black Male Achievement, and has launched the Corporation for Black Male Achievement—a publishing and consulting firm that curates “community building and leadership development engagements that elevate stories of loving, learning and leading Black men and boys.”   His book, co-authored with Nick Chiles (a Yalie, but all is forgiven), I Too Am America: On Loving and Leading Black Men & Boys was published at the beginning of the year. And he has started as managing partner of venture philanthropy firm New Profit. The firm’s mission is “investing in breakthrough social entrepreneurs by employing the rigor of venture capital and the humanity of the nonprofit sector. Excited about the focus of supporting Black and Brown social entrepreneurs.”

Ophelia Papoulas threw herself a rockin’ in-person party for her milestone birthday (in the lull between delta and omicron), and she appreciates her excellent timing. She adores her career in molecular research, which has allowed her to see real people in the lab every day.  We have mentioned Ophelia’s needlework-for-charity endeavor (dundysisters.com), which she runs with her sister Bettina; they have been donating proceeds of their work to mental health charities, as COVID has made needs in this arena skyrocket. On the home front, her son has turned 18, and after battling ADHD, OCD, and other mental demons, he has started at community college and is doing well.  She continues to see her longtime boyfriend, local musician/bandleader and Samsung recruiter David Cornell Hurd. She continues to care for her aging mother-in-law, whose dementia has worsened. She will be found around and about Austin, Texas (aka Musk-ville or Texla).

Until next time.

Forty years ago, we were navigating our first years at Wes! I’m grateful that so many of us have remained friends over the decades. Here’s news from some of those friends:

Marc Stein’s fifth book, Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism, was published by the University of California Press in March. “The intro includes some autobiographical reflections on our years at Wesleyan!”

KT Korngold has been accepted into a Montessori doctoral program through the University of Wisconsin–River Falls. She is part of the first cohort of this inaugural program, which began in May 2022. KT continues to direct the Montessori Children’s Center and Center for Montessori Education in West Harrison, New York.

Christopher Kylin dared me to include this note: “Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary has happened to [me] for over 2,133 days; [I anticipate] continuing this streak for at least another 7 days.”

Barbara Schwartz writes: “I hope everyone is doing okay in these crazy times. I have been doing okay. I am finally leaving the agency where I worked for 32 years. I was director of a therapeutic after-school program for homeless and at-risk children.  I am now just doing counseling and supervision in private practice. I still feel so young that it’s hard to believe we are headed toward 60 soon. My partner and I still hike every summer in a national park. I would love to hear from anyone who remembers me from Wesleyan.  I still have such fond memories.”

Joan (Edelman) and David Landon live in Walpole, Massachusetts. Dave is an archaeologist with UMass Boston and Joan is drug safety analyst with Harvard Medical School. They are empty nesters but are “expecting our first grand baby at the end of February and could not be more excited! We know everyone has had their own share of sadness over the course of the pandemic but we hope there has been some light as well.”

Amy Nash and I saw one another IN PERSON in Minneapolis in October. She is still working from home, coming up on 25 years as communications manager at MSR Design, a nationally recognized architecture firm. “I did manage to travel to NYC and Martha’s Vineyard last summer. While in NYC, I had dinner with Mike Groseth ’83. During last summer, I also had the pleasure of seeing Beth Purnell Gartman and Tim Dyke ’86 who were visiting Minneapolis on separate occasions. And last fall, I caught up with Caroline Hale-Coldwell and Nancy LaMarca Gordon, two other Wesleyan alumni who live in the Twin Cities. It was a great year for reconnecting with classmates even if it was a challenging year in every other way.” Amy also continues to write poetry.

Nancy Vélez, a fundraiser with over 26 years of experience in the nonprofit and higher education sectors, is the principal gift officer at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Nancy lives in the Bronx.

Bill Wrubel is “very excited to report that my daughter Maisie will be a [first-year student] at Wesleyan this fall, where she will be in the class with Andy Meier’s daughter Oona! They were both one-year-old babies on campus at our 20th Reunion in 2005.”

Hilary Jacobs Hendel works as an emotion-centered psychotherapist. Her 2018 book, It’s Not Always Depression, has sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. Hilary runs Emotions Education 101 classes on Zoom and published the Emotions Education 101 Turnkey Curriculum. Hilary also has many free resources on emotional health at hilaryjacobshendel.com.

That’s all for now. Write me anytime with your news and updates.  Take care, my friends.

Greetings! Time marches on and despite this never-ending pandemic, our classmates continue to thrive. I have spent the last two years working in urban education and when not putting out fires, reading, cooking, meditating, and trying to make sense of it all. I send everyone fond wishes for a happy and healthy new year.

Charlie Brenner left the University of Iowa, where he was head of biochemistry for 11 years, to become the inaugural chair of a new Department of Diabetes and Cancer Metabolism at City of Hope in Los Angeles. He started a virology project in the lab, met President Roth and Peter Gilhuly at the home of Luke Wood ’91 and Sophia Nardin ’91, and saw Brad Whitford ’81 play Ebenezer Scrooge. Living in Pasadena, Charlie works out on the Mirror and jousts on Twitter!

Franky De Poli lives in Argentina and owns and runs a company that sells equipment to fuel cars, planes, ships, and trains across Latin America. Franky remarried nine years ago and is delighted to announce the arrival of a new baby girl (Mia) in April. A true “modern family,” he has three wonderful children from his first marriage, two grandchildren, and all get along great, including his ex-wife. Franky remains in close contact with Paul Gross ’84 and met up on campus with Mike Whalen and Paul DiSanto ’81 when he last visited.

Judy Korin hunkered down at home in LA this past year and finished producing a documentary film many years in the making—Rebel Hearts. The movie premiered at Sundance and after a nice festival run, the film is now streaming globally on Discovery+. She enjoyed telling the colorful story of a group of progressive Catholic nuns in 1960s’ Los Angeles who stood up to the patriarchy of the church. Judy is excited to share it with the world!

Heather Rae sold everything and relocated to southeastern Florida to build out her functional health and genomics practice (cutting-edge science to assess root chronic health conditions: environmental toxins, nutrient levels, variants in enzymes (genes) of inflammation and detoxification, cellular voltage, and membrane lipids). Way to go Heather! Having just started to see an integrative and functional health doctor to address assorted ailments associated with growing older, I salute you!

Nancy Rommelmann launched a media company, PalomaMedia.com, in November, and is working on a book that includes her coverage of the 2020–2021 protests in Portland. She currently splits her time between NYC and Houston.

Despite being quarantined for most of 2020, Janet Binswanger managed to make the best of it, and got married on a beautiful sunny evening in September. She writes, “Neil and I have a blended family of 6 kids and are extremely happy together. I have the greatest job at Vynamic, a health-care management consulting company as their curator; curating all their events, team experiences: aka ‘Director of Happiness.’”

David Frankfurter and Anath Golomb shared their activities during the “plague year.” They (1) adopted a second puppy (of diverse breeds) brought up from Houston; (2) held in-class university teaching, while simultaneously managing Zoom students; (3) saw psychotherapy patients by Zoom from home, while said Houston dog barks at UPS trucks; (4) dined outdoors in 45-degree windchill; (5) enjoyed overly international Zoom seders; and (6) not getting COVID!

At the end of February, Megan Norris began a new position as CEO of Miller Canfield, the law firm for which she has been practicing for 35 years.  She writes, “Taking on the position as we come out of the pandemic is a bit of a baptism by fire, and 200 attorneys are a lot of cats to wrangle, but I have spent my entire career here and it is very satisfying to finish it out this way.” At the beginning of the pandemic, Megan’s daughter, Taylor Matthew ’17, moved back to Detroit from Boston for grad school. With an MA in teaching, Taylor begins her career as a teacher in the Detroit public schools.

Karen Miller Zoomed with a bunch of her field hockey/roommate crew: Gretchen Millspaugh Cooney from Pennsylvania, Sue Stallone Kelly from New York, Barb Bailey Beckwitt from Colorado, and Tammy Rosengarten Darcas from Australia. While a couple of them may have had a glass of wine, Tammy, being in Australia, enjoyed her morning coffee. Karen’s daughter finally got married after postponing it for a year and resides in Latvia while her husband plays hockey for the KHL of Russia. Her two other daughters moved back to the Connecticut area to be with their brother.

Glenn Duhl (with wife Peggy), Matt Ember, and Laurie Sklarin Ember ’84 had a couple great days together in California.

Lastly, I wish everyone a happy 60th. Many have wrote of their celebrations: Taya Glotzer and Michael Sommer, Tom Donnelly (and Heidi), Peter Jankowski (and Dottie), Frank Moll ’84 (and Diana), and Melanie Peters had a reunion to mark the occasion.

 

Greetings,

Hard to believe our 40th is upon us. Big thanks to fundraising superstar Joe Barrett and Virginia Pye for hosting a happy hour to reconnect us before we saw each other IRL at the reunion (yay!).

You sent some great book recommendations. I’ve already devoured Elizabeth Feigelson’s suggestion, We All Need New Names by Zimbabwean NoViolet Vulawayo, and Ginny Pye’s, Still Life by Sarah Winman, set in Florence. Ginny has a new book coming out, but that’s hush-hush til the deal is inked.

Charita Brown’s memoir, Defying the Verdict: My Bipolar Life (2018), is particularly relevant now because of the uptick in mental-health illness diagnoses during the pandemic. Charita is on the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI) board of directors, was featured in a NAMI short doc, Shattering Racial Stereotypes to Defy the Verdict (on YouTube), and was awarded the Baltimore group’s 2021 Marcia G. Pines Lifetime Advocacy and Service Award. Congratulations!

The wait is almost over: The novel Peter Blauner started writing in 2002, Picture in the Sand, will be out early next year from Minotaur/St. Martin’s Press. Meantime, he’s writing shorter pieces for the New York Daily News and Nancy Rommelmann’s ’83 website Paloma Media. He says Christ in Concrete by Di Donato is an overlooked knockout read.

Speaking of the devil, Matthew Capece writes that while he and his wife Alexis were sipping port and eating nata in Portugal, he read Blauner’s Highway—“a disturbing and gutsy novel.”

David S. Parker, too, has a book out in May: The Pen, the Sword, and the Law: Dueling and Democracy in Uruguay (McGill-Queen’s Press). Yes, he says, it’s a history book from an academic press about a faraway place, but it’s written for the nonexpert with a good mix of jaw-dropping storytelling to balance out the historical-legal explanation of why Uruguay was the only country in the world to legalize dueling, between 1920 and 1992. I must know!

Maya Sonenberg’s third collection of short stories, Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters, received the Richard Sullivan Prize and will appear in August 2022 (University of Notre Dame Press). Her daughter is a freshman at Wes, and she met up with Sam and Ellen (Friedman) Bender at Homecoming/Family Weekend in October, when she also picked apples at Lyman Orchards, ate at O’Rourke’s, and hiked at Wadsworth Falls. She recommends In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova.

Jonathan Weber is back from Singapore with a new job, editor in chief of an ambitious online news start-up called The San Francisco Standard. He’s delighted to have teamed up with executive editor Heather Grossmann ’98 to reinvigorate local news.

Congrats to Rachael Adler, who married twice this year (to the same guy)—a COVID wedding at a clerk’s office during the pandemic, then August with the whole family. They moved to Oakland, launched her daughter to college, and she just completed her first semester of graduate school in psychology at the Wright Institute. Whew!

Rob Lancefield retired early from a 27-year career in museum work, most recently as head of IT at the Yale Center for British Art. While continuing some service with professional organizations, Rob is enjoying a simpler life with very little Zoom. He looks forward to reacquainting himself with his favorite guitar.

No sooner did Karen Paz move permanently to her summer house in Maine than she was elected a town selectperson. She recommends The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.

Patty Smith was appointed to Virginia Governor Northam’s LGBTQ+ Advisory Board. She and her wife Cindy married on April 4, 2020, in an early Zoom wedding. She recommends Brian Castleberry’s Nine Shiny Objects, and Stephanie Grant’s ’84 memoir Disgust.

Other book recommendations:

Emilie Attwell: The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish. (“She was told as a girl she could either see a psychiatrist or go to a comedy camp!” says Emilie, who, being the former, had to laugh.)

Karen Wise:  Amor Towles’s A Gentleman of Moscow.

Jim Dray: The Prince of the Skies by Antonio Iturbe, based on the extraordinary life of Antoine De Saint-Exupery (The Little Prince).

Dena Wallerson: Kliph Nesteroff’s We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy.

Susan Cole: The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.

Paul Meltzer: Japanese movies from the 1950s, especially those directed by Ozu, Kinoshita, Naruse, Ichikawa, and Kobayashi.

Jon Philip Rosenberg (who just finished writing the second edition of Atlas Shrunk): Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III and Red Notice by Bill Browder.

Finally, a shout-out to my co-secretary Michael Ostacher, for exceptional achievement in macaroon making (especially the ones dipped in dark chocolate). My husband Peter Eckart ’86 pronounced, “Everything in the world that is perfect is encapsulated in a macaroon by Michael O!” Indeed.

Cheers!

Greetings from Brooklyn!

I’m seeing themes in this edition of our notes.  Many of us are going strong, as we continue to do what we do, while others are winding down, and even retiring.

For example, Paul Robinson tells us that he was recently notified “I’ve been granted a patent (for you computer techies, it’s related to the Spectre vulnerability reported a few years ago).  This is my fifth patent overall but my first solo, which is a nice career capstone.”

John Hester reports that he is happily retired and enjoying traveling.  He landed in Summerville, South Carolina.

Dave Smith writes that “After 32 years of federal service, I retired from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. I plan a combination of loafing, strategic environmental consulting, travel, and home projects going forward. While I enjoyed my time with EPA, having real time for nature, family, my guitars, and novel reading is a wonderful change. Best to all!”

Meanwhile, Michael Getz and his wife Tiziana is delighted that their daughter Melissa “had a wonderful, carefree, pre-omicron wedding in early December of 2021.”

That’s where we are in life, I guess, as we trudge deeper into the second half of our first century: winding down, retiring, and marrying off our children.

Others of us are still going strong with our careers as well. Ramon Pineda writes that he is happy to have changed jobs and is now working for E.W. SCRIPPS in Corpus Christi, Texas. “With NBC, CBS, CW, and Telemundo affiliates, we produce more news than any other broadcaster in the area.” Ramon adds, “News matters to us and we are always looking for great journalists who wish to join our family in Corpus Christi or the other 40-plus markets we serve.”  If you know a journalist in the area, please let him know.

Barry “Pono” Fried continues to offer his unique tours of Hawai’i’s culture, nature, history, language, music, food, wildlife, sacred sites, beauty spots, and less visited country villages, on Maui, Kaua’i, and the Big Island of Hawai’i.

Some of us travel and get together, which we cannot take for granted these days. Belinda Buck Kielland, Livia Wong McCarthy, and friends celebrated Belinda’s 60th birthday two years late in Tanzania this October, “when there was a small window of opportunity to travel. There’s nothing better than the gift of time with dear friends and roommates.” B and Liv wrote that they hope to see more Wes friends soon.

Delcy Fox also wrote that she was “fortunate to celebrate Christmas with my family in the Netherlands, where my son is on a two-year assignment. Since the country was on total lockdown, we took day trips to Germany and Belgium. In November 2021, I enjoyed viewing the Jasper Johns exhibit at the Whitney Museum in NYC with Gary Shapiro. We reminisced about when Jasper Johns came to Wesleyan. In January 2022, I had a Zoom dinner with Miriam Stern Sturgis and her husband Gary Sturgis ’77. Miriam and Gary recently welcomed their fourth grandchild, Adina Clare Paulsen. Throughout 2021, Miriam and I did Israeli Dancing together (via Zoom) every Sunday.”

As for myself, I can’t leave well enough alone. Like many of you, I suppose, I can’t seem to stop learning about all sorts of things and accumulating more and more certifications within my craft. After decades of work as a financial professional, I am now a recently minted CFP® Registrant (who does that at 62?). I have also become a certified tax coach through the American Institute of Certified Tax Planners.  I also continue to help on the Emergency Committee for Rojava, as they continue to be under threat of ethnic cleansing, and worse, from both Turkey and ISIS. My 17-year-old is still deciding where to go next fall, which has a lot to do with why I’m not joining others of you in winding down quite yet.

The weekend before these notes were due, my wife and I saw a dance performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” Yes, the idea is audacious, and was accomplished brilliantly.  I came home to an email from fellow Brooklynite and classmate, Brenda Zlamany, letting me know that her portrait depicting five pioneering women scientists from Rockefeller University will be permanently installed at Rockefeller University, with an unveiling scheduled on April 14th.

And that’s seems to be our world: finding windows of availability for travel, seeing friends and classmates in person, or using Zoom and other remote means to get together, moving our work and careers forward, or winding down (by choice, I hope). In our 60s, I am keenly aware that entropy works. As B and Liv remind us, let’s not take things for granted, and work, against entropy, as much as possible, in gratitude.