Tag: 1967

Classmates,

I did not make it to our 55th Reunion, but I sent a query out on the list serve to see who did, and what they could tell me about it. I did not get any emails about the reunion, so I conclude that either no one attended or that no one was willing to go public about the wild debauchery that took place. I did, however, get a cryptic email from Bob Dyer. For those of you unhappy where you are, and thinking of a nice place to retire, here is what Dyer wrote: “August issue of Kiplinger’s magazine lists Middletown, Connecticut, as one of seven great places to retire.”

Meanwhile, on the news front, I can tell you that Jim Kates, holed up in southwestern New Hampshire (“in idyllic seclusion”), published two books in the spring of 2022, one a translation of poems by the Russian poet Mikhail Yeryomin (Sixty Years: Black Widow Press), and the other a book of his own poems (Places of Permanent Shade: Accents).

And another Jim, Jim Cawse, wrote to tell me that he had retired at the beginning of 2022. He closed his consulting firm, Cawse and Effect (great name!). The company of 12 years worked with various other companies on a variety of problems, ranging, as Jim put it, “from plywood adhesives to passenger traffic through Gatwick Airport.” At the time he wrote (February 2022), he was waiting to have a knee replacement, but his local hospital was full of COVID patients, so he was not sure when he would be able to have the surgery. In fact, it took a while, but he now has had the knee replaced, and hopes to be cross-country skiing again soon.

George McKechnie, a retired clinical psychologist, has sold Axiom Home Tech in Monterey, California. Started 23 years ago, it specializes in custom audio and video design and installation (including home theaters). He now plans to devote his time to two new web-based businesses—one that helps consumers understand smart home technologies and how they can be custom-tailored to their needs, plus another business that matches people for friendship (not dating). He lives in Carmel with his wife Dee, who is also a retired clinical psychologist.

I saw the following in the Wesleyan Connection about Bill Klaber: “According to the Webby Awards, The MLK Tapes, a podcast written and hosted by William Klaber ’67, is the recipient of a 2022 Webby Award in the Best Limited Series category. For the past two years, Klaber has been working with Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Media on the podcast, which takes a deep dive into the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (May 1).”  I listened to this one-hour podcast. I recommend that you check it out. It is dynamite.

As those of you keeping close track are aware, in recent sets of class notes I have taken the liberty to write about some guys in the classes behind us (Bud Smith, Gary Conger, John Wilson, all ’66) and ahead of us (Brian Frosh ’68). The 1966 class secretary has accused me of poaching. Here I continue to poach by telling you that my wife (Lisa Young) and I spent four days at a beach in South Carolina with Rick Voigt ’68, and his wife Annemarie Riemer. Rick, now retired from practicing law, has been teaching classes at Wesleyan at the Wasch Center since 2015. Among the titles of the classes he has taught are The Effort to Build an Affordable American Middle Class Home: A Design and Social History, and Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Edsel Ford: Two Communists and a Titan of Capitalism Confront the Realities of the Modern Industrial Workplace and Make Great Art. Rick has published a novel, My Name on a Grain of Rice (Atmosphere Press, 2021), which draws among other things on his work as a labor lawyer who once worked for OSHA.

More poaching: Bill Dietz ’66 (aka Doctor Doctor Dietz) received an honorary degree from McGill University for his work on nutrition and obesity. You can see him on a YouTube video, decked out in fancy robes, giving his super honorary degree speech to the faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at McGill (his beaming family in the front row) if you Google “Dietz” and “McGill” (or go here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9V-LR9VxBy4).

And, finally, this just in from Ed Simmons: Ed, a resident of Yarmouth, Maine, became the new board chair of the Natural Resources Council of Maine. He succeeds Maria Gallace ’84, a resident of Yarmouth. Founded in 1959, the Natural Resources Council is the largest environmental advocacy organization in Maine, with more than 25,000 members and supporters. Its mission is to protect, restore and conserve the nature of Maine, now and for future generations.

Classmates,
In October 2021, Ted Smith emailed to ask if I had seen The New York Times obituary for former Wesleyan faculty member Dick Ohmann. Ohmann was in the English Department from 1961 until his retirement in 1996, and Ted wondered if I had taken a class from him. I wrote Ted that I had not (I copied my email to Larry Carver ’66, one of my two English major friends—the other, the late great Jim McEnteer, will have to read it from beyond).  I told Ted and Larry (and maybe Jim) that although I did not know Ohmann when I was an undergraduate, I did get to know him a bit four decades later when he asked me to write an article for a special issue he was editing for a lefty journal that he had helped to found in 1975.  The topic of the special issue was teaching about the socioeconomic class system in the USA, and I wrote a piece titled “Teaching an Interdisciplinary Course on the American Upper Class,” based on a course that I had taught periodically (the reading included Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, and more—the class was always fun to teach).  Ohmann was an excellent editor, a pleasure to work with, and we subsequently traded emails now and then, including a few in April 2021 about another article I had written (this one was titled “The Corporatization of the Liberal Arts College: Even the Class Notes!”).

Ted Smith, by the way, out there in San Jose, California, has survived earthquakes, droughts, fires, and some health issues, but he keeps on truckin’, fighting for social justice and environmental issues, sitting on the boards of some nonprofits.  Larry Carver, who is Class Secretary for 1966, has retired after a distinguished career as an English professor at the University of Texas, Austin, and now lives in Rico, Colorado, doing some teaching, some writing, a lot of hiking, and taking some amazing photographs of majestic views.

Our classmate Don Gerber has had two careers, one as a rabbi and the other as a furniture salesman.  He retired from his rabbinical career in 1999, though he still periodically sends out rabbinical email missives to a large, mostly Jewish, group of recipients. He has continued to sell furniture to retailers. For the past two years, unable to travel because of the pandemic, he has done so online.  He tells me that “Over the past two years, the housing industry has been booming, and ‘cocooning’ has become today’s ‘lifestyle.’  ‘Staycationing’ is more than a word, it is a macro-trend.”  So, stuck in his hardship home base in Newport Beach, California, with his wife Bonnie, Don continues to sell furniture (and to root for Syracuse teams).

My high school and Wesleyan friend, Brian Frosh ’68 (Walter Johnson High School, ’64) makes an early appearance (page 9) in Jamie Raskin’s riveting book, Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy.  When Raskin’s 25-year-old son, Tommy, committed suicide, just days before the seditionist January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, Brian, described by Raskin as “my friend, Brian Frosh, attorney general of Maryland,” helped expedite the process by which police shared with Raskin the heartbreaking suicide note that Tommy had left behind.  Another Wesleyan alum, Dar Williams ’89, makes a touching appearance later in the book.

A few sets of notes ago, in reporting on my decision to retire in the spring of 2020, I mentioned that Guilford College, the small, Quaker-affiliated, liberal arts college where I taught for 45 years, was struggling to survive the double whammy of economic woes and the pandemic.  A few months later the college’s administration and board were well on their way to eliminating most of the school’s liberal arts majors and firing a good portion of the faculty, but, amazingly, more than 3,000 alumni organized under the rubric of “Save Guilford College” and persuaded the board to reverse course.  Guilford College now has a new president, most of the former senior administrators have departed, there are some new members of the board, and the board has a new chair.  I have written about this, an article titled “Organizing during the Pandemic: The AAUP and ‘Save Guilford College,’” which now has been published in the journal Academe.

I hope you have survived delta and omicron, and that you are vaccinated and boostered for whatever comes next.

If you send me more stuff about you for the next set of notes, I’ll write less about me.  Stay safe.

One of the unanticipated benefits of being class secretary is that I periodically get emails from guys I have not seen, or even thought about, since I graduated, long, long, ago. Sometimes they are from people I barely knew, or didn’t know at all. About a month ago, I got one from Bud Smith, ’66, who I last saw in the spring of his senior year, when he was about to graduate. He was a waiter at the eating club at Eclectic. “Baby Bud,” some people called him. I had no idea what his major was, or very much about him, other than that he was a good-time presence at Eclectic.

Well, Baby Bud, it turns out, is a retired college professor of English and a writer. He wrote to ask me if I knew anything about the current whereabouts of our classmate, Benét McMillan. I told Bud that I last saw Benét in the fall of 1967 when he and I were at Columbia, me in a PhD program in social psychology, and Benét at the law school. Then 1968 happened, and I have had no contact with Benét. Interestingly, to me, and maybe to you, Bud included a link to an article that he wrote in 2011 about Benét and Benét’s family. It turns out that when Bud was in junior high school, living in Stratford, Connecticut, Benét’s family moved into the neighborhood Bud’s family lived in, and Bud and Benét went to the same high school, so Bud knew far more about Benét and his family than I ever did. For example: Benét’s father, a professor of history at the University of Bridgeport, was, as Bud puts it, “a personal acquaintance” of the poet, short story writer, and novelist, Stephen Vincent Benét, and named his son after him. Another example: his senior year of high school, Bud was the president of the student body, and Benét was the vice president. One more: Bud’s senior year at Wesleyan, Benét’s junior year, they roomed together at Eclectic, where Benét was the social chairman who brought the Chiffons (“Do lang do lang do lang . . . he’s so fine”) for a party at the house. I also learned that Bud was on Wesleyan’s golf team, which led me to ask myself, “Wesleyan had a golf team?”

Anyway, I can’t tell you much about Benét these days— he did become a lawyer—but I recommend Baby Bud’s 2011 article, “Lights in the Darkness,” published in the Tidal Basin Review.

In a recent set of class notes, I reported that Anthony Caprio retired as president of Western New England University after 24 years and I speculated that he must have done something right to have lasted in that position for so long, more than three times the average tenure for college presidents these days. I can now tell you more. He helped transform what was a small local college into a regional university with a national reputation. In the process, the school added graduate programs, including doctoral programs in behavior analysis, pharmacy, occupational therapy, and engineering management. This, in turn, meant that many major buildings were constructed (ten of the current 28 buildings). The school has received national rankings, including number five in the country, and number one in Massachusetts, for its graduates getting jobs. In a tribute to Anthony that appeared in the school’s alumni magazine, the author described him in the following way: “Cutting a distinguished figure whether walking through campus or leading the Commencement procession, he is famously approachable.” Before he retired, the school met and exceeded a $35 million fundraising campaign, its largest ever. The campaign included a $1 million “Caprio Challenge,” which also met and exceeded its target. Moreover, as part of a lasting tribute to his contributions to the school, the health and fitness center is now called the Anthony S. Caprio Alumni Healthful Living Center.

Anthony and his wife Dana continue to live in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, and spend much of the summer on the coastal Rhode Island beaches. Their son, Mark, is an associate professor of theoretical nuclear physics at Notre Dame.

Late in the game possible name change: Gary Conger ’66, tells me and other readers of his monthly art newsletter that he is considering changing the signature he uses on his paintings to “G. Branson Conger.” His classmate, J. French Wilson ’66, and his younger brother, E. Davis Conger ’68, seem to approve of the change. As I mentioned to him in an email, this nomenclature would put him in the company of three eminent sociologists who have studied the American power elite: C. Wright Mills, E. Digby Baltzell, and G. William Domhoff.