If you would all get your noses out of the latest Harry Potter book and write or e-mail me, I would greatly appreciate it. The cupboard is, like, bare. Although it will be less so, I hope, after a couple of fall events. The first, of course, is our mini-reunion Oct 25-28 in New York, a near sellout with almost 150 classmates signed up for a weekend of lectures, dancing, and sightseeing of quintessentially New York places. We begin with a guided tour of Ellis Island on Friday morning, continue on through a gala dinner that evening, pickup again Saturday with museum tours (and an optional football game Saturday afternoon–attendance is optional, the game is not), and wind up more or less with a boat cruise and dinner on Saturday night.
There have been various add-ons and emergencies dealt with. A dance band has been added to the dinner Friday night band; when the boat we had counted on became unavailable for Saturday, a new and better one was requisitioned by Ed Greenberg, our main man on this one as he is on the upcoming 50th reunion. The whole thing should be great, and threatens to be bigger than Santa Fe.
Even earlier, the Hallas/Piroumoff/Griffith/Barbara McLendon crowd will gather for the first of five Yale homes games in Parking Lot B Special, the Cornel game on Sept. 22 to be followed by Dartmouth on Oct. 6, Lehigh on Oct. 13, Brown on Nov. 3. The university provides a tent for the Harvard game on Nov. 17. I would like to see another Ivy championship and at this point they’re the favorites, which of course means little.
One other sports note. Like a lot of you, I saw the thrilling finish of the the Harvard-Yale boat race on YouTube. What I did not know until later, when I ran across a member of Yale’s 1956 Olympic crew at a party in New York, is that Yale’s victory was achieved in a shall named for John P. Cooke, a classmate and member of that Olympic crew who died last year. John devoted much of his free time and energy to encouraging the development of rowing in America.
Retirements include Tom Chadwick, who plans to downscale his mortgage business to 20 hours a week; Bruce Kover, who is or shortly will be “retired” by Brazil’s madatory-retirement-at-70 law from his teaching chemistry in Rio; and Ed Ghent, who will retire from active teaching at the University of Calgary but will return as a Faculty Professor, essentially a research post that allows him to do pretty much what he wants.
One sad note. Scott Wischmeyer died of unknown causes last spring at the West Woods Care Center in Bourbon, Mo. Scott suffered severe emotional reversals after leaving Yale and spent much of his life in the care of (and also helping) the clergy at the Center. In his biographical note in our reunion address book, he listed his occupation as Roman Catholic Layman. He would faithfully send me each Sunday’s printed order of service and he regularly sent Ben Gertz a small contribution to the Class Dues.