CLASS OF 1976 | 2026 | SPRING ISSUE
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Thanks to everyone for responding to my blatantly guilt-inducing plea for notes. You really came through! And it was so gratifying to hear from people we haven’t heard from in a very long time (if ever).
And, yes! It’s the year of our 50th Reunion! If you’ve missed the steady trickle of email about the reunion, let me know. There’s a lot going on, and I’ll be happy to catch you up (and make sure you’re in our database for future news).
Al Cohall sent a note!: “Hi everyone! I just retired after a long career at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where I developed several programs for vulnerable populations (young people at risk for, or living with, STIs and HIV), as well as formerly incarcerated individuals with significant medical, mental health, and substance use issues. I also ran a CDC–funded Prevention Research Center and an STD/HIV Prevention Training Center. I had the opportunity to teach at both the School of Public Health and the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. It was a blast! Now I get to relax, exercise, write, and spend time with my wonderful wife, five kids, and three grandkids.”
From Rob Williams: “I plan to be at the reunion. For the past five years I have been an infectious disease physician on the island of Maui in Hawaii. This is a great place to work as the lifestyle is much slower than southern New Jersey, where I had been working for the previous 33 years. Most of the family is on the mainland, and we are expecting grandbaby number eight in January. I keep in touch with Pete McArdle, Dennis Harrington, and Harry Loeshelle. Next week I am expecting a visit from Bob Thompson who will vacationing on Maui. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in May.
“Attached is a picture of myself, Pete McArdle, and Dennis Harrington. This is after the Trinity game in 1975. It’s the last football game the three of us ever played.”
From Fred Fuchs: “I spent 12 years in LA with Jay Abramowitz, Bruce Singer, and Lars Fredrickson. I am still in California, but [in] the Bay Area, and have a film club the last five years with the guys each month, with also Sid Rothberg, Hank Alter ’77, and Dave Apicella. We meet each month online.”
From Mel Blake: “I’m happily retired for three years and enjoying life with wife, Rebecca, in Portsmouth New Hampshire. Taking advantage of good health to travel, play tennis, and take long walks in our beautiful historic town. I’m looking forward to seeing classmates at the reunion!”
Faith (Breslow) Szydlo updates us that she’s living in the greater Boston area and has recently retired from a career as a software engineer. She’s happily spending time with her granddaughter.
Elyse Grasso writes: “In 2025, I published the first two novels in a fantasy series. I am working on the third volume.”
Deepest sympathy to Ken Carpenter for his very recent loss: “[My] wife of 48 years, Susan (Johnson) Carpenter ’77 passed away peacefully, at home surrounded by family, the morning of January 4, 2026.”
Meredith Bergmann had a very productive year. She created a monument for a park in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, that will be unveiled in June; it’s currently at the foundry. Her sculpture, Mother & Child with a Glock, won best in show from the New England Sculpture Society’s Mattatuck Museum show.
In poetry, Meredith’s chapbook A Special Education was reissued, and several of her poems were published in various publications in 2025.
Her biggest news was finishing filming Pointing Fingers, the first commercial, full-length feature film written by, about, and starring people with minimally-speaking autism, currently in postproduction. The film was written by Meredith’s son, Dan Bergmann (a playwright and activist who lives with minimally-speaking autism), and directed by her husband, Michael (a writer and film director). Meredith was DP and production designer.
Joe Mabel writes: “As an administrator and contributor to Wikimedia Commons (like a job except for the getting paid part), one of many things I’ve been up to is cross correlating old photos of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest (clear up into Alaska, at times) in four different Seattle institutional collections. I’ve found a surprisingly high error rate in the titles and descriptions. At this point, I’ve had easily over 1,000 corrections and additions accepted by one or another collection. Here’s a link to an illustrated lecture about that I gave in 2023: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmabel/Final_draft_of_talk_for_WikiConference_North_America_2023.
“Also, in terms of connecting to other Wes alums, last spring I was in Los Angeles and had lunch with Martha Meade (who was burned out of her longtime home in Pacific Palisades and is currently living in Thousand Oaks); this summer I saw Kerri Rubman and her husband, David, when they visited Seattle (where I have been based for almost half a century); and on an October 2025 visit to NYC, I got together with David van Biema ’80 and Jim Melloan ’77 at Caffe Reggio, a Greenwich Village coffeehouse where I was a weekend regular during my high school years.
“Looking forward to seeing people at the reunion or possibly in NYC the week after. Or in Seattle in the summer, if anyone is headed this way.”
Deborah Lyons writes: “Having retired from Miami University (after 36 years of teaching, not 21 as it said in the last notes), I am moving back to New England at the end of May, either to Northampton or elsewhere in Massachusetts. I welcome any advice about choosing a new home. My email is still lyonsd@miamioh.edu.”
Bruce Demple seems to have had the best possible year! He tells us: “2025 began with my wife, Sue, completing chemotherapy, and no additional treatments were needed. We celebrated with our first-ever trip to Hawaii in February. We had a few wonderful days on the Big Island, one of which involved the morning spent on a lovely beach and sunset up at 9,000 feet on Mauna Kea. Lots more on Hawai’i too. We spent several more days on Maui with longtime friends from my Berkeley grad student days—they’ve been asking us to visit there for years. Returning by way of Berkeley, we learned that our younger daughter there was pregnant. That was the second such news, as our older daughter in Brooklyn was expecting, too, in the spring. Granddaughter Daphne arrived at the beginning of May and granddaughter June in mid-September. Girls rule! It’s been such a joy to watch them develop and work on exploring the world, while being informed about the proper way to care for babies. . . We had the first all-family gathering in Berkeley for Thanksgiving; Sue and I came back to Berkeley for the Christmas–New Year holidays, which was great fun. Amongst the family excitement, we did some traveling in the summer, including a visit to Sue’s family and our friends in England, with a several-day foray to Berlin, seeing my 85-year-old dear friend Klaus, whom I met immediately in the months before WesU when I went to work in a factory in Göttingen, West Germany. I know his family well, through kids and grandkids, too, so it was very rewarding after a six-year break. In early October we attended a scientific meeting in Trondheim, Norway, which was Sue’s first visit to the country (and maybe my eighth). Rainy but beautiful. Oh, yes, one thing I let my colleagues know at the meeting: At the end of 2025, I would be retiring (past tense now appropriate). That’s definitely a bittersweet decision: Being a research scientist and university professor really was my calling, found somewhat by accident late in my college career. I will miss that and I will miss the students too. But family beckons!”
Leslie Gabel-Brett writes: “I am looking forward to teaching my course again this spring at Wesleyan, Social Activism and Theories of Change. I am working with my co-teacher, Beverly Tillery, to revise the syllabus to reflect the very challenging times we are in. I am also looking forward to attending our 50th class reunion!”
Laurette Tuckerman sends greetings!: “Hi, classmates! The short story is that I married and moved to Paris in 1993, where I’ve worked as a scientific researcher (in fluid dynamics, numerical simulations, and bifurcation theory) ever since. I have three children, all around 30 years old, and I can’t make it to the 50th Reunion because I am organizing a contra dance weekend. Come by to visit!”
Susan (Peterson) Avitzour writes: “The past half-year [2025] has been relatively quiet for me, after the craziness of the June war with Iran. I’m extremely thankful for the Gaza ceasefire and the return of the hostages and still managing to hold onto my hope for a far, far better future for all of us in this tormented corner of the world.
“On the personal level, I’m doing very well, other than normal age-related orthopedic complaints— though it turns out that even at the age of 70, one can find solutions and get back into reasonable shape! I’m spending most of my time nowadays working on my writing (to which I’ve returned after a yearslong dry spell), learning my part and singing in a choir, birdwatching, and of course spending time with those of my descendants who are living in Israel.
“Half of my children and just over half my grandchildren are now living in the Bay Area (Berkeley, etc.), so we’re planning a trip to the States in May. I had hoped to be able to attend the reunion, but unfortunately, I can’t be on the East Coast at the relevant time. I hope that those of you who can make it to the reunion will have a blast!”
And from Doug Hurd: “I finally did retire. After Wes, then professional school, DDS, married a wonderful gal, spent some time as a researcher and teacher, interrupted by a really bad auto accident, then private practice in upstate New York for 38 years. My wife and I have made the most of this beautiful part of the state that we live in, been involved in our community in areas we felt worthwhile, and now have more time for travel.
“I did visit and keep contact with Wes, but mostly with members of the art department where I worked for awhile as a student (not my major). Finally, it was my children that kept me coming back.
I have two children, both graduated from Wesleyan with honors. My son has a PhD in geology, and while at Wes, was a New England wrestling champion (I wrestled for four years also). My daughter graduated with high honors in dance, now has a master’s in nursing.
“I am hoping to make it to the reunion.”
From Barb Birney: “It’s been fun to spend time with my dad, Bob Birney ’50, filling in details for a biography that I’m writing. He is 100 years old and resides in Williamsburg, Virginia. I asked him a question that I suspect no one has asked since he graduated. I asked him who recommended in 1946 that he go to Wesleyan. After some casting around, he tentatively called up the name of a boyhood friend. I called the alumni office to find out if a Willard Lockwood (’46) had ever graduated from Wesleyan. For sure, Willard went to Wesleyan on the Thorndike Prize and graduated in 1946. Dad is in a nursing home with some paralysis, but the mind is as sharp as ever.
“I’ll be visiting with friends on the East Coast around Reunion time, so please let me know if you want to get together. Email is: barbarabirney@msn.com.”
We heard from Larry Gilius! He tells us: “I’m writing this on my third day of retirement. And I can say that retirement is a good invention. I enjoyed the past 19 years as head of the Writing Center and other operations for Mount Hood Community College, east of Portland, Oregon. I particularly enjoyed the brave, resourceful, and big-hearted students there, who taught me so much. But it is interesting and very promising to ask about each day now, ‘What do I need to have happen today to feel fulfilled?’ rather than ‘What should I do for my employer today?’ I think I can get used to this. Nancy, my wife of 34 years, and I are enjoying having our daughter visiting from Scotland. She completed a master’s program last year at the University of Edinburgh in ‘high performance computing’—supercomputing. (OK, I’ll brag. There were 800 applicants for the 40 spots. She was the only student accepted from the U.S.) She works now for Great Britain’s main center of supercomputing in Edinburgh. That means an excuse for us to travel there, which we’ve done twice in just over a year, including a September journey to the magical Isle of Mull on the west coast. I’d visited there in the summer after my first year at Wes and have wanted to return all my life. We’re also enjoying a new home after 20 years in Portland. We’ve joined the Adam’s Creek Cohousing Community just east of Portland in Hood River, at the east end of the amazing Columbia River Gorge and at the base of Mount Hood. Cohousing means our own condo but also shared facilities like a ‘common house’ for some meals and activities, and shared responsibilities for governance and life together in a multigenerational community of like-minded souls. It’s been a fabulous new way of life, another thing I can easily get used to. Sending my best wishes to all.”
Cheryl Alpert notes: “I remain a REALTOR® in the greater Boston area but have pivoted my focus to rightsizing—‘rightsizing a home does not define increasing or decreasing the size of your home. You are adjusting your home size to better fit your needs,’ meaning that I act as a consultant to help you better understand what you are seeking and why as well as prepare to move. I am still potting and have found an amazing ceramics instructor, community, and studio that I love. I see Rook Van Nest and Jeff Dunn ’75, both live in my town, and J. Mark Beamis ’77 on occasion.”
David Harmin and I are doing well. David just completed his first year of full retirement and is clearly very, very happy about not having to get up early to go to work. Being in complete command of your time—for the first time since, oh, 1958—is a fantastic experience. We try as often as possible to see Tom Kovar,Mike Greenberg,Nina (Rusinow) Rosenstein, and Marjorie (Allen) Dauster. Doesn’t happen as often as we’d like! David returned to campus in early October to sing Neely Bruce’s “The Bill of Rights”; Janet Brooks was part of the chorus. And we both went back to campus in late November for Neely’s performance of “The Songs of Richard Winslow.” We both have very fond memories of Dick; hearing his work performed was deeply affecting.
I’m sorry to share the very sad news that Lynette Vialet passed on in 2024. She had been an ob-gyn in Colorado for many years. A colleague wrote of her: “I wrote this speech on the day my mentor and the woman who delivered my daughters died. We all remember that special mentor in our lives. Lynette Vialet was the epitome of strength and resilience. She was a flight surgeon in the air force, one of the most respected physicians in our hospital, and a Jazzercise instructor. She knew just what to do in every situation. She took incredible ownership of patients, and it was my honor to work with her. She was one of us. One of the best of us. She was magical.”
As of this writing, I’ve heard from these folks that they’re planning/hoping to attend the reunion:
Andi Grubb Barthwell
Meredith Bergmann
Mel Blake
Jon Daniels
Talya Fishman
Fred Fuchs
Leslie Gabel-Brett
Oliver Griffith
Debra Haffner
David Harmin
Byron Haskins
Dan Herr
Doug Hurd
Joanne Lukitsh
Wendy Lustbader
Deborah Malamud
Martha Meade
Cathy Popkin
Bob Thompson
Rob Williams
Many of the people who have attended our Zoom sessions have indicated that they’re leaning toward attending, but I haven’t included their names because they haven’t definitively said “I’m coming!” I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth. . .
KAREN HARMIN | karen.harmin@gmail.com