Tag: 1967

Classmates, more sad news. Jim McEnteer died of colon cancer July 30 in Los Angeles. His wife, Tina, wrote to some of his old friends a few days before he died, telling us that Mac did not have much time, but he was still aware, and she encouraged us to send messages that she would read to him. Many of us did, and, a few days later, when she wrote to tell us that he had died, she reported that “I read him your e-mails as they came in, he smiled, and was touched, as was I, by the outpouring of love and appreciation and celebration that you shared.”

I have many vivid memories of Jim at Wesleyan, from taking an English class with him freshman year (taught by R. L. Greene) to (as seniors) playing charades against a faculty team that included Joe and Kit Reed, Paul Horgan, and Richard Wilbur (the judge was Willie Kerr). So, too, do I have memories of being with Mac in New Hope, Plymouth Meeting, D.C., West Hartford, Big Sur, and Oakland—as I wrote to Tina (and Jim), all of these memories are good ones.

He went on to earn an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia, and a PhD in communications from the University of Texas. He was a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He wrote four books and many articles (including, memorably to me at least, one about Alberto Ibargüen ’66 and another about John Perry Barlow ’69). He and Tina lived at various times, and for various lengths of time, in Florida, Veracruz, Oakland, Bolivia, South Africa, and Ecuador. They have two sons, Nico and Jake. A memorial service took place in Dedham, Mass., on Oct. 5.

I know it is a cliché, but it is true: you may never know what an impact you have had on someone’s life, or someone has had on yours. Sometimes you do not figure it out until many years later. The following is a moving e-mail I received from Jeff Marshall about E. Craig MacBean, who, as you might recall from a recent set of notes, died in October 2018. Jeff tells me that he is “mostly retired due in part to vision loss stemming from glaucoma,” though he is still associated with the law firm he founded. He is the author of a book on elder law (now in its fourth edition), and he continues to do some legal writing for his blog. He has been married for 48 years, has a daughter in Hawaii, and another daughter and two grandsons who live next door to him in Williamsport, Pa. Here is the e-mail he sent me:

“I noted your recent class notes reference to the death of our classmate Craig MacBean. Craig and I were acquaintances at Wesleyan but we were not friends. We had one very heated encounter involving a girl. After that, we just stayed away from each other.

“But I was to encounter Craig again after college and in very different circumstances. In the summer of 1969, I was a soldier reporting for duty at the Army’s Valley Forge General Hospital. I walked into the company clerk’s office and there was Craig MacBean. As company clerk Craig had a lot of authority over the lives of the soldiers in the company. So, my first reaction was concern that our negative encounter at Wesleyan might influence my fate.

“My concern was misplaced. Craig and I were comrades during a time of great trouble. It was difficult being a soldier in 1969 with the Vietnam War being very unpopular with people our age. If you wore your uniform in public you were likely to encounter vitriol. You were much more likely to have someone call you a baby-killer than thank you for your service. We knew our president and generals were lying to us. The entire world seemed to be unravelling.

“So, seeing a classmate from college represented some return to normalcy. And Craig and I became friends. Craig was able to watch out for me and find a position for me with the judge advocate. This was very desirable to me because I had a year of law school and intended to be a lawyer. It may well have also saved my life. The reality was that the Army didn’t need a lot of legal clerks in Vietnam. I was always prepared to go if ordered. But I felt at the time, and still do, that with my original combat classification and poor eyesight I would not have survived a tour of duty in Nam.

“A few months later Craig was transferred to another duty station. I never got to say goodbye and never saw him again. He was one of those people who intimately touch your life and then are gone.

“I am writing this note to say a final goodbye to my friend, Craig MacBean. And to thank him for his important positive impact on my life.”

Richie Zweigenhaft | rzweigen@guilford.edu

Classmates,

Not much news this time around. As the recent scandal unfolded based on bribes paid to get faux student-athletes into elite colleges, I found the following quote by Jerome Karabel to be worth pondering. Karabel, whose B.A. and Ph.D. degrees are from Harvard, now an emeritus professor of sociology at Berkeley, is the author of The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), a 700-page exposé of the ways that Ivy League colleges have quietly tinkered with their admissions formulas over many decades. In response to a question about the scandal, Karabel had this to say: “It shows the extraordinary weight given to athletic talent and the remarkable latitude given to coaches to select the people whom they want for their teams if they meet very minimal academic standards—including at elite colleges. And what I think is not well known is that the weight of preference given to athletes far surpasses the weight given to underrepresented minorities or, for that matter, legacies. It’s the weightiest preference of all the various preferences.”

Like I said at the end of my last set of class notes, which was about two classmates and John Perry Barlow ’69, all three of whom had died relatively recently, “Hang in there, and send me stuff.

Richie Zweigenhaft | rzweigen@guilford.edu

Classmates, Dave Cadbury died in February 2018. The obituary that was sent to me included the following information. After graduating from Wesleyan (and before that, from Germantown Friends), he earned a master’s in sculpture from the Maryland Institute of Art, and in the early 1980s he worked as a sculptor, “producing conceptual installations about natural and environmental systems” (among other places his work was exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.). He also established two construction businesses. In 1992 he and his family moved to Maine, where he continued to work as a sculptor and as a building consultant. He was the founder of Friends of Maine Coastal Islands NWR, an organization that worked to protect the seabird habitat on Maine islands. In Philadelphia he was active with the Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting and served on the board of the Friends Select School. In Maine he was active with the Midcoast Monthly Meeting of Friends and served as the clerk of the meeting for a number of years. He and his wife Karen were married for 49 years.

More recently, I received word that E. Craig MacBean died on Oct. 16. Craig was a graduate of the Haverford School (’63). At Wesleyan, he majored in English and played lacrosse. He subsequently attended the Union Presbyterian Seminary, from which he received an MAT in 2004. He was awarded an Army Commendation Medal for his service in the U.S. Army in the early 1970s. He is survived by four children.

While I am on the topic of Wesleyan alumni who have died recently, I recently watched Long Strange Trip, a four-hour documentary mercifully divided into six parts that featured, in a few of those parts, the late John Perry Barlow ’69. The film got very good reviews when it came out, but I was put off by the length, and did not go to a theater to see it. However, my wife and I stumbled upon it a month ago as we looked at streaming options on our TV and decided to watch it. We were glad we did (we watched it over three evenings). Barlow comes across as thoughtful and wise, the adult in the room (not, I’ll admit, as I remember him!). Those of you who are Deadheads have probably already seen it. Others of you might enjoy it, just to bring back some memories of the late 1960s and early 1970s (spoiler alert: it ends sadly, with the death of Jerry Garcia). And those of you who went on to earn MBAs might want to see how Garcia and Company (ironically?) created a brilliant entrepreneurship that made them more money than they knew what to do with.

As the obituary for Barlow in the New York Times noted, he was also a “coordinator” for the 1978 Congressional campaign of Dick Cheney (see my comments above about Barlow being wise). As part of my ongoing search for Wesleyan alumni in the media, I carefully watched the aptly titled movie about Cheney (Vice) and can confirm that there was no sign of Barlow.

Hang in there. Send me stuff.

Richie Zweigenhaft | rzweigen@guilford.edu

Classmates, thanks for the many thoughtful e-mails in response to my group missive to you about athletics at Wesleyan (“notes from the underground”). I “might could” (as we say down south) send you another group e-mail sharing these many, and varied, perspectives. Stay tuned.

As for the more traditional class notes news from classmates, I have a bit to share. In characteristic fashion, I did not hear from Mike Cronan about his having been honored by the bar association in Kentucky, but fortunately his longtime law partner, friend, and fellow Eclectic, Fred Joseph ’65 sent me an e-mail with a clipping about one Charles J. (Mike) Cronan IV. It turns out that the Louisville Bar Association honored Mike by naming him the recipient of the 2017 Judge Benjamin F. Shobe Civility and Professionalism Award. The award is given to “an attorney who demonstrates the highest standards of civility, honesty, and courtesy when dealing with clients, opposing parties and counsel, the courts, and the public.” That indeed is the Mike Cronan I remember.

Other news? Jim Kates keeps on keepin’ on, with a new translation of a book (I Have Invented Nothing, the selected poems of Jean-Pierre Rosnay). Jim also won a $1,000 prize, the Kapyla Translation Prize, for his translation of Paper-Thin Skin by Aigerim Tazhi, a Kazakhstani woman poet who writes in Russian. The judge for this prize had the following nice comment about Jim’s work: “J. Kates manages to skillfully translate the depth of Aigerim Tazhi’s poetry along with the words, a rare achievement; one hears the resonance of the original in the nuances of the translation.”

Tony Caprio is president of Western New England University, and has been in that position since 1996 (a real accomplishment, I can tell you—the average tenure for college presidents these days is six-and-a-half years, down from eight-and-a-half years a decade ago; since 1996, there have been four presidents at the college where I teach).

Steve Sellers, my old roomie, and his wife, Martha Julia, have made the move from most of the time in Boston and some of the time in Guatemala to most of the time in Guatemala with visits to Boston. They rented out their place in Lexington, Mass., and their primary residence is now the house they built in Antigua, Guatemala. Both their daughter (Sylvia) and their son (Oliver) still live in the Boston area, so they come back to visit. They didn’t exactly leave the country because of Trump’s election, but Steve does tell me that “the bellowing and blathering of the current administration is a little more bearable from a distance.”

Jim McEnteer lives in Quito, Ecuador, with his wife, Cristina, who teaches sociology at Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (the Latin American Social Sciences Institute), a graduate university, and their two sons. He continues to write. For those of you who don’t remember the late 1960s, his recent article in Salon might jostle a few brain cells. It is titled “My Long Strange Winter Trip with John Perry Barlow [‘69]” and published online on June 2, 2018, at salon.com.

I heard from Charlie Green, who caught me up with the following e-mail: “I am still practicing law at the firm I helped start in 1980. I am not working as hard, but still showing up. Nancy and I will have been married 50 years this August. One of our two sons graduated from Wes, as well as his wife. We have four grandchildren, three girls and a boy. We have lived in Fort Lauderdale for over 45 years.”

In addition to some thoughtful comments about athletics at Wesleyan, Steve Duck shared some information about his life since our 50th Reunion: “Since that wonderful weekend, I have retired. I enjoyed the suggestions of my classmates to ‘wait six to 12 months’ before deciding on a new direction. I am not there yet, but I know that ‘decide’ I will. I have completed an app [Apple Store] that focuses for persons with diabetes, how the state of medicine suggests they need more insulin if they consume a hearty amount of protein and fat in their diet. That felt good. I am believing that the best way to avoid despair regarding the current political environment is to get active in working for a progressive candidate for Illinois governor. I am also still growing and learning how to parent my 16-year-old daughter while at the same time enjoying my two grandchildren! I am grateful for my life and its journey. Hope to see you soon.”

Seems like good sentiments to end with (“grateful for my life and its journey”).

Richie Zweigenhaft | rzweigen@guilford.edu

Classmates, I have some sad news to report. Our classmate, Alan Thorndike, passed away. Here is the email that a few of us received from Karl Furstenberg a few days after Alan died: “I am writing with sad news. Our classmate, my roommate and brother-in-law, died on Jan. 8. I know we were all delighted to see Alan at our 50th Reunion which he very much enjoyed. Alan was a brilliant student, distinguished scientist, and exemplary teacher. He was devoted to Wesleyan, Alpha Delt and particularly to the track and cross-country teams. Alan had a long battle with Parkinson’s disease and other maladies which he fought valiantly. He was very active in his workshop and on his bike until the last few months. In the end, complications from pneumonia took his life. I am enclosing a full obituary.”

The full obituary can be read at fhnfuneralhome.com. As you can see if you read it, Alan lived a full and accomplished life.

More next time.

Richie Zweigenhaft | rzweigen@guilford.edu