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Classmates,

Fewer obituaries this time around (but warning: there is one). Mostly, however, I bring you news from the living (at least, they were living when I wrote these notes).

Walter Beh wrote the following: “After Wes, I went to University of Pennsylvania Law School in Philadelphia and [afterward] practiced law there for a year. Then headed to Honolulu, where I practiced real property law for 44 years and was vice chancellor of the Episcopal Diocese of Hawaii for close to 30 years. By then I no longer owned a suit but was the proud owner of 50-plus Aloha shirts and was the grand old man to four children and 11 grandchildren. Kids were fine, but grandchildren are the best. Looking forward to our 60th Reunion.”

Bob Runk sent me his books about golf, designed to make people laugh rather than improve their game. They have titles like How to Line Up Your Fourth Putt and When to Regrip Your Ball Retriever. He did not start to play golf until the 1980s when he was working in the aviation and aerospace insurance and reinsurance business. One of his company’s biggest clients was Japan Airlines, and Bob’s boss and the Japanese director of their New York office played golf together. Bob’s boss told him it was “mandatory” that he, too, play golf, so he did. He started to jot down notes based on his observations of the game. The rest is literary history. The books sold well (over 70,000— a number unheard of in the academic circles in which I move) and even include a blurb from Rick Reilly, a Sports Illustrated writer of considerable renown.

Punch Elliott checked in from Wisconsin. Now retired, he practiced plaintiffs’ law for 51 years and was a judge for 15 years in the 1970s and 1980s. He has a wife (Pam) of 55 years, three children, and eight grandchildren. He and I are on the opposite poles of the golf spectrum. He plays 200 times a year and has shot his age five times—as those of you who read my class notes carefully know, I play once a decade and struggle to make double bogies on a par three course. He even coaches the local high school boys’ golf team: “The high school kids are the best to coach and the best to be around.” He got his nickname at an early age, and it stuck: “I universally use my lifetime nickname, Punch.”

And, sad to say, there is another death of a classmate to report. Bob Callahan died New Year’s Eve in Florida (he had been dealing with health issues for a number of years). Bob noted in his entry to our 50th Reunion book that he was the first in his family to attend college. In the 1970s and 1980s he was the president of a large labor union (7,000 members) and then shifted into fundraising for various universities in Florida. John Andrus shared a memory that reveals something about both Callahan and Andrus as freshmen at Wesleyan: “I’ll go on record for giving him credit for keeping me in school freshman year—we had Spanish 101 five mornings at 8 a.m., and if Bob hadn’t rattled my door each a.m., I’d have slept my way back to New Jersey.”

Andrus passed Spanish 101, graduated from Wesleyan, and worked for JPMorgan Chase. As he explained, in his email to me, “Spent my career in the trust business, and after vowing to stay away from the New York rush and work in a smaller pond, ended up through multiple mergers/acquisitions with JPMorgan Chase.” He and his wife, Penny, have four children and 12 grandchildren. “Most of my days are spent traveling up and down the East Coast to various athletic events so that I can give any one of the 12 grandchildren unsolicited advice.”

Finally, let me say that as a graduate of both Wesleyan (BA) and Columbia (MA), when I read Robert Kuttner’s article titled “Columbia’s Capitulation, and Wesleyan’s Pushback” in The American Prospect, I was proud to be a Wesleyan grad and embarrassed by my Columbia degree. I can say no more.

RICHIE ZWEIGENHAFT | rzweigen@guilford.edu