As alert readers of this magazine know, Charley Ellis and Steve Adams are among five Yale graduates awarded the Yale Medal in 2009. Our congratulations to both and our thanks, again, to the great contributions that both have made to the University. The medal is the highest award given to Yale graduates. Our only previous winner was Harvey Applebaum.
Congratulations, for quite different reasons, are also due Kent Keller. There are 54 mountain peaks in Colorado that rise above 14,000 feet. Kent, a resident of Estes Park and a retired Presbyterian minister, has now climbed all 54. The most recent was Capitol Peak near Aspen, which he summited in July, not long after our reunion. Kent scaled his first peak when he was 13 years old, in 1950, and while he is not the only person to accomplish the feat, he says that he is “arguably the slowest”, since the entire 54-peak circuit took 59 years. Here’s the best part: Kent climbed the nine most difficult peaks after he reached 70. There’s lots more to this story, so check in with www.estesparknews.con.
No less adventurous, though a good deal less arduous (since he’ ll be sitting most of the time) is Ed Greenberg’s latest hobby, which is driving very long distances in very old cars. Next week (as a I write this) Ed hooks up with a bunch of California-based classic car types who, this year, will be driving old Route 66 from Chicago to California. The trip takes over a week, with overnight stops and visits along the way Any car older than a 1973 model is acceptable. Ed’s is a 1964 Buick Riviera that he bought three years ago on E-BAY.
Meanwhile, Ed who does not seem to have stopped moving since he retired from Bear Stearns (well before the fall), reports that he had a great time on a Yale Alumni Chorus trip to Guatemala and Mexico in August. Vertrees Hollingsworth and Dennis Corcoran were among the 140-odd singers, who played to a standing-room-only audience in San Miguel de Allende that include Tom and Anne Maxey and Sergio Nicolau.
Charley Hoyt reports that six classmates were in the stands for Yale’s opener at Georgetown in September. Charley went down on a whim at the last minute and for $10 got a ticket and a chance to catch up with Ned and Penny Henneman, who had missed the reunion because of illness; Ed Werner, Jim Tracey, Ed Norton (with his son) and Harvey Applebaum, spotted at a distance. The week afterwards, the usual suspects, sans yours truly (at a Yankee-Red Sox game) and Ed Greenberg (at Hotchkiss), gathered at the Bowl to watch Yale’s home opener:: George and Rose Piroumoff, Bobbi Griffith (Charles was in China with their two sons) Herb and Barbara Hallas and Herb’s younger brother, Hank, and his wife, Louise. Al Atherton dropped in for a while.
See you all there later this fall, if not before. And write or email when you can. The cupboard is pretty empty.