Class Notes

I’ve settled down in my recliner, with the sound of raindrops on the roof of my man cave, and it’s Labor Day weekend. My wife, Becky, is out having lunch with her BFF, and our cats are napping, leaving me with the opportunity to do notes for about the 120th time. The television is muted with college football back again, and there is an assortment of games to watch in this information and entertainment age.

I think back to our years at Wesleyan, with the intimacy of our portable football field provided for our gallant squad of Cardinals. Eight games each year with the likes of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the Coast Guard Academy, and those other two schools of the Little Three, creating a much-needed break from studies. There were also soccer games and cross-country runs to entertain us. Dave Ransom and Jack Buttles toiled on the gridiron, and athletes such as Lou D’Ambrosio and Peter Sipples powered our soccer teams to successful campaigns.

I frequently think about the why when it comes to a liberal arts education at a place like Wesleyan. I learned to trust my capacity for learning, and the ability to translate the knowledge to answering questions. I can’t imagine how many answers I have given in the domain of exams or in my career in obstetrics and gynecology. There came a time at Wesleyan where I studied for an exam, and found myself prepared to give the answers. I found the capacity to choose the moment that I was prepared to handle whatever was asked of me. I trusted that they would ask me questions that I had the right answers for. My Wesleyan experience led me to trust my abilities to handle the tasks that were ahead in medical school, and as a practicing physician, to answer requests by patients, nurses, and other medical professionals. I believe I learned not to fear making the wrong replies after four years at Wesleyan.

News from alumni: Garry Fathman is still active as a professor of medicine at Stanford. He has three children, all married and employed, and three grandchildren ages 4-6. He celebrated his 74th birthday last week and says, “All is well in my world.”

Wink Davenport: “It has been a few weeks since the Olympics have been over and I still think about them and what they mean to me. You will remember that they have been a big part of my life: Player in 1968 in Mexico, referee in 1984 in LA, and administrator in 1996 in Atlanta where my daughter, Lindsay, won her gold medal in tennis. Watching our athletes compete and win was amazing and made me proud to be a part of the games.

“This summer has been very quiet. Jay McIlroy has been in Poland with his wife for several months and won’t return until November. Louie D takes off to his place in Montana and Palm Springs. We will all get together around the election and try to figure out where our country is going. It doesn’t look too promising.”

Rusty Messing: “I have finished my second book of poetry, Midnight’s Breathing, and am very pleased with it. I am still writing and hopefully will come out with a third book sometime next year. There have been other big events in my life. Our daughter, Ali, now has a beautiful little girl, Rumi. Our son, Jake, also has a beautiful little girl, Goldie. Jake and his wife will soon be leaving their condo in Brooklyn and moving cross-country to Healdsburg. Our other two grandsons, Joe (16) and Solly (14), along with our daughter, Jeanne, are dealing with the challenges of being teenagers. My health is good (knock on wood), my mind is slower, my smile is as wide.”

Brooke Jones: “I’m retired from 30 years at Rockwell, International, and doing some part-time work with a start-up. Now doing part-time math instruction for kids at the North Orange County Community College District. My wife, Judy, and I toured Italy last year to celebrate our 51st anniversary. This year, we’ve been enjoying our children and grandchildren, who all live within a couple hours’ drive. I’m also running for the local water board to run out the bums who used the drought to raise our rates last year to 250 percent of the previous rates, with promises of more to come. See facebook.com/Jones4YLWD.

“Sadly, we lost Spurgeon Leon Robinette who died in his sleep in June. A memorial service was held in September at Triple Creek, his home for many years in Arkansas.”

Allen Ames: “I am still alive and able to sit up and take nourishment. I live in a condo in Clinton, Conn., near the water with my ADHD dog. I have renewed friendships with a number of former students through social media. I have ’swallowed the anchor’ this spring and I am boatless for the first time. I have five children, 10 grandchildren, and one great-grandchild, if I am counting correctly. All are beautiful and/or handsome, talented, and brilliant.

“Finally, coach Don Russell is being inducted into the Wesleyan Athletic Hall of Fame. He arrived at Wesleyan in 1960 and always related to our class of 1964. He was my freshman basketball and baseball coach and did a great job. He eventually was athletic director at the powerhouse that was and is Wesleyan sports.”

Harry Lanford has lived in Maine since 1979 and in Bangor since 2005. He retired from a career doing marine electrical and electronics for the Hinckley Company in Southwest Harbor. He married Ann Davis in 2005 and has children from an earlier marriage to Sheila Wilensky: Brook Wilensky-Lanford (married and in a PhD program in American religious history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Ethan Wilensky-Lanford (married and PhD student in anthropology at Rice). Ann and Harry enjoy traveling in a motor home.

TED MANOS, M.D. | ted_manos@yahoo.com

In response to a plea from the Alumni Office for information, Bill McCollum e-mailed a note: “My wife, Janice, and I live in Kansas City. I retired from the practice of law three years ago. We have three children and three grandchildren.” While admiring his brevity, I thought that there might be more there so I called. He is a Blue Devils fan due to his having gone to law school at Duke and he still goes to at least one basketball game a year. He and Janice were married in 1970. After a career in childcare, she, too, retired, but they both still do volunteer work with needy children. While they have been “all over Europe” their travel now is mostly to visit their children (in Rochester, N.Y., Georgia, and D.C.) and grandchildren (two in high school, one in grade school). Bill is very interested in history and devotes a lot of energy and time in helping with the restoration and maintenance of two nearby historical houses. One is where wounded Civil War soldiers from both sides were cared for, and the other was a way station for people migrating west, way back in the really old days. From 1968 to 1970, BiIl was in the U.S. Navy. After OCS, he was trained, sent west, and served as commander of a small, really fast air-cushion craft in the Delta of South Vietnam. He left the Navy with the rank of first lieutenant.

Samuel “Bo” Grimes writes, “My wife, Sabra, and I have just been accepted for admission to a very nice retirement community called Tel Hai in Honeybrook, Pa. By a set of unexpected circumstances, we have obtained exactly the cottage we had hoped for in the community.

In December, we will move about 70 miles from our present home outside Baltimore to a small town in the Amish and Mennonite farm country halfway between Lancaster and Philadelphia. It will be a considerable change in our lives, but my younger sister has been living in the area for 10 years, which will help us to connect, and it’s close enough that we can be back in Baltimore in less than two hours. The present challenge is to clean out the house before embarking on a new life in a new place. We’ve been accumulating stuff far more than we need for the last 20 years.” Bo retired in 2012 after 49 years of teaching English and computer skills at the Gilman School in Baltimore. After graduating from Wesleyan, he got his teaching degree at Johns Hopkins. Since the draft existed then, I asked him how he’d avoided it. He said the headmaster of the Gilman School wrote a very persuasive letter to his draft board, which “convinced them that I was needed more there than as cannon fodder.” Sabra is also retired. She had worked as a scheduler at Gilman for years until she was replaced by technology. She sings in a local choir, plays the piano, and they both like music. They have two daughters who are 38 and 34. Once they get settled at Tel Hai, they will continue to travel.

Pete Smith wrote: “I think that this is probably my first communication with Wesleyan since, oh, maybe 53 years ago. I became disaffected during the craziness of the late 1960s and have not felt the urge to reconnect, though I did stop by the campus a few years ago in the late summer with nobody around at Alpha Delt. My professional life in brief: I spent 15 years in the foreign service, then moved to NASA, and retired as director of international relations in 1996 at 55. I lived in West Virginia for 22 years, then moved this summer to a smaller stone ranch house in upper Baltimore County. I’ve been married to my wife, Lynn, for 52 years this summer. We have two children, a daughter, 50, and a son, 48. Our daughter lives in Baltimore and has five children. Our son is in Charlotte with two daughters. I am still pursuing ham radio after 62 years and writing for various magazines in the field. Morse is probably my second language by now at probably 35-40 words per minute. The fascination continues to be that it’s just me, the ionosphere, and my station. No Internet, so the challenge continues.” Pete got into ham radio at 13, thanks to a radio club at his middle/high school. “My parents were quietly supportive, although there wasn’t much money for that purpose. I remember buying a second-hand Hallicrafters receiver and a Heathkit transmitter and just kept floundering around. In those days you had to know Morse for even the lowest class license, which is no longer the case for any licensing level.”

Richard Currie reports that he and “my lovely wife, Suzanne” just celebrated their 50th anniversary this year with trips to St. John, Virgin Islands, in January and a riverboat cruise up the Rhine during their anniversary month of April. And now a Trekkie alert! Their son, Tom, is working on visual effects for a new Star Trek series for CBS, while daughter Karen is stage managing for several professional companies in the D.C. area. Both visited Dick and Sue during their year-long anniversary celebration. Sue continues to work as a pastor in the greater Pittsburgh area while Dick volunteers with Meals on Wheels and Food Bank to combat hunger in the Monongahela River Valley. His food pantry received the 2016 Outstanding Agency award from the county bank office.

BYRON S. MILLER | tigr10@optonline.net
5 Clapboard Hill Rd., Westport, CT 06880

In April, Hank Fotter moved into the Elim Park Health Care Center in Cheshire, Conn., where his wife, Harriet, moved into the adjacent independent living center, Elim Park Place, a two-minute walk away. She writes that Hank started falling in October 2015, and by January 2016, he was in a wheelchair and needing around-the-clock care because of a “devastating combination of long-term physical illnesses and steadily declining cognitive abilities.” She says that Hank would enjoy receiving notes at 150 Cook Hill Road, Apt. #6110, Cheshire, CT 06410, and seeing visitors. Her cell phone number is 203-592-2733 if you’re in the area.

Bob Gause writes, “I’m still working at my first job, pediatric orthopedics, simply because I love it. Children I operated on 35 years ago return with their children and I can recall each case.” He spends time “on that same Winterport, Maine, farm” and at a camp on Moosehead Lake, and has written four fiction books. He says, “The last 75 years have been so exciting, I can’t wait to see what the second half has in store.”

Gary Wanerka was honored for his long service as a pediatrician and allergy specialist by receiving a Distinguished Service Award from the town of Branford, Conn. After his pediatric training at Yale, he served four years in the U.S. Army in Germany, and then began his practice in New Haven in 1974. He started up Branford Pediatrics and Allergy in 1982. Just like Bob Gause, he says he has many “grandpatients” and even some “great-grandpatients.” His wife, Chris, children Laura and John, and grandchildren, Trey and Reese, were present when he was presented with the award.

This year, Len Wilson was inducted into the National YMCA Hall of Fame, located on the campus of Springfield College, joining 130 other members. An interesting note: The YMCA Hall of Fame is housed in the building where basketball was invented, which had been the original YMCA training center for directors. Len has been retired for 10 years and says that he and Joyce “have settled into spending summers on the Jersey Shore with family and friends, and enjoying the rest of the year doing a little traveling away from our condo life in South Philly.” He is the first classmate to write (or admit) that he’s “caught the pickleball bug.”

And sad news on the passing in March of Dirck Westervelt in Brewster, Mass. He was retired after a long career as a psychiatric social worker. He spent two decades with the New York State Office of Mental Health, and specialized in the treatment of adolescents. He also volunteered for years as a counselor for Vietnam veterans. Our condolences to his family.

Reunion coming up: With the calendar turning to 2017, we are reminded that our 55th Reunion is coming up—May 25 to 28. Mark your calendars now, and we hope to have a good turnout once again. I hear that Len Wilson will be offering pickleball lessons.

DAVID FISKE | davidfiske17@gmail.com
17 W. Buckingham Dr. Rehoboth Beach, DE 19971

“Thanks for the e-mail,” writes Eric “Swede” Wilson, “to ’nudge’ me to recall some items that may be of interest for the class notes. I am still gainfully employed in my second job as in-house counsel for a Tuscaloosa-based holding company, after retiring from the FBI after 26 years in 1989. Margaret and I continue to have good health, and she is very busy painting and volunteering for various organizations in Tuscaloosa. My daughter, Avery, is now back living in Nashville, after moves to Del Mar, Calif., and Atlanta within the last five years. My son, Eric, is still gainfully employed as an attorney in Tuscaloosa. He has one son, who will turn 13 in November. My other son, Martin, is still working in NYC, and will have his second young adult novel published by Harper Collins in 2017. So, everything is good. Looking forward to our 60th in another five years.”

Howie Morgan claims: “Not much new here. Changing home address to Florida, but Betsy and I will still be running up and down the East Coast. Kids and seven grandkids are all well. None are looking at Wesleyan. Looking forward to Reunion in 2017.”

Jack Mitchell proudly proclaims: “My grandson, Lyle Mitchell ’16, just graduated from Wesleyan and granddaughter, Dana ’18, is a junior at Wesleyan!” In addition, Jack relates: “I’m in the process of partnering with a global firm to do workshops re: personalized customer service using my Hug Your Customers book as the centerpiece. We added Mario’s stores in Portland, Ore., and Seattle, Wash. We now have eight men’s and women’s clothing stores. It all started with Mom and Dad when we were sophomores and is led by our third generation of sons and nephews! Still having lots of family fun with Linda—married over 55 years!”

Calvin “Pete” Drayer informs us: “Sandy and I have moved into a retirement home. I am still serving as a senior judge about 10 days a month. I am saddened by the loss of members of our class and my fraternity.”

Soon after receiving Pete’s expression of grief, the loss of another classmate was sent to your class secretary. William N. Schultz, a former Navy man and a graduate of Westtown Quaker School in Pennsylvania prior to his attendance at Wesleyan, died on Aug. 6. Bill worked as an art and antique appraiser in Philadelphia, and was a Philadelphia Eagles and jazz enthusiast.

News from Foster Morrison: “I have a little consulting job editing the maps for a biography of a Liberty Ship captain. Those vessels were mass-produced in WWII to move masses of material to the European theater. Captains and crews were trained PDQ. When the war was over, most of the ships were scrapped and the captains and crews had to find other work. But it all ended the Great Depression by putting much of the foreign competition, specifically Japan and Germany, out of business for a while. So we’re back there again, but with a China converted to capitalism of a sort.”

Foster continues, “I actually worked for two mapping agencies, but know little about making maps; mostly I programmed computers using Fortran, which looks kind of like algebra instead of zeroes and ones (binary numbers). Fortran converts the algebra to the binary numbers, but other computer languages have largely displaced it after all these decades. But with PCs you can now run your computer jobs every few minutes instead of once a day on those huge machines that cost millions of dollars.”

Respectfully submitted,

Jon K. Magendanz, DDS | jon@magendanz.com
902 39th Avenue West, Bradenton, Fl 34205 

John Berry wrote the following: “Our daughter, Clay Berry, returned from Russia last year after spending two years as the treasury attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow with numerous trips to Kiev, Ukraine. This spring she was appointed a deputy assistant secretary of treasury, the department’s highest non-political position, with responsibility for Europe, Russia, and all the former Soviet republics. Meanwhile, my wife, Mary, continues to row competitively with the Vesper Boat Club in Philadelphia—a substantial commute from our home in Alexandria, Va. She will be rowing this fall in the Head of the Charles Regatta and plans to compete in the International Masters Regatta next year in Bled, Slovenia.”

Ed Chalfant wrote the following: “Not much going on. Nice lazy summer, with trips to North Carolina and Maine to help with the lobster crisis. Winkie is doing a lot of really good painting with acrylics and showing locally. I am working on a theology and set of liturgies for end-of-life issues and events. Continue to hold services every week at our little ’start-up mission’ which is able to give about 75 percent of offerings to mission outreach partners due to really low overhead and generous people. Both of us are very well and just celebrated 57 years of marriage this week.”

Dan Freedman is retired completely from MIT after a multi-year phase-out. Dan and Miriam now live in Palo Alto, Calif., near their two children and granddaughter. Although retired, he works nearly full-time in the physics department at Stanford. This is the 40th anniversary year of the discovery of supergravity, and his original paper (with two co-authors) was honored in June by celebrations at the Majorana Institute for Physics and Culture in Sicily and at CERN Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Dan also presented lectures describing his research at the Supergravity: What Next? Workshop held in September and October at the Galileo Galilei Institute for Theoretical Physics in Florence, Italy.

In March 2016, Peggy and Dave Hale traveled to Croatia, where they cruised down the Dalmatian coast, with stops in Montenegro and Albania, to Athens. A bus tour took them to Olympia and Delphi.

Congratulations to Jay Levy for receiving the 2016 Global Citizen Award from the Global Interfaith AIDS Alliance, an international organization that does pioneer work against HIV/AIDS in Africa, particularly Malawi. During the last three decades, Jay has investigated the mechanism of HIV infection and has contributed to the development of anti-retroviral therapies. In response to sad news in the last issue, Jay recalled that he, along with Wink Adams and Powell (Al) Johns, were among the few who lived at Soest House the first six months of their freshman year. Jay recalls that “it led to a real bonding of that group. It is with great sadness to us all that Wink now joins Al with his passing. Their spirit and memory will always be with us.”

Bob Sade edited The Ethics of Surgery: Conflicts and Controversies (Oxford University Press, 2015). Most of the authors of the articles are surgeons, giving a real-world cast to the discussions and arguments; the exchanges are enriched by an admixture of lawyers, sociologists, philosophers, and others with expertise in ethics.

Charlie Smith is the author of What the Market Teaches Us (Oxford University Press, 2015). Rather than attempting to explain and predict how the market functions—a futile endeavor—this book focuses upon the rich teachings that the market offers us for dealing with ambiguities and unexpected and contradictory happenings.

Bill Walker is the author of Danzig (Create Space Independent Publishing, 2016), a novel of political intrigue set in Central Europe in the 1930s. Richly atmospheric, it is gripping historical fiction in the grand tradition that has received rave reviews. Bill has a website at authorwilliamwalker.com that describes the book and provides a convenient link to buy it from Amazon in electronic or print forms. You are encouraged to read the novel and then to submit your review.

On a personal note, one of the highlights of my summer was taking part in the annual ferry boat contra dance in July. An enthusiastic 150 dancers, along with caller and musicians, took a regularly scheduled Washington State ferry round trip from Anacortes to Friday Harbor on San Juan Island. It was great fun, especially when the ferry encountered strong currents that tipped the dance floor!

SAL RUSSO | salandjudy@hotmail.com
2700 Kentucky St., Bellingham, WA 98229