Given deadline pressures, I was unable to report in my last notes in this space on the Harvard game in November, and its immensely satisfying outcome, not to mention Yale’s thrilling performance in the national playoffs that followed—but I credit these happy moments at least in part to the loyal presence of the Griffiths, Charles and Bobbi, and their marvelously welcoming pre-game tailgates. My superstitious nature prays that they continue next year.
Onward to less happy business, the roll call of departures. This month’s includes just one classmate I knew personally from encounters at the Yale Club in New York: John Daly, a cheerful and welcoming guy who died in Greenwich in November. John followed me by a year at Andover, joined the Marines after Yale, then embarked on a long and successful Wall Street career, alighting at (among other places) E. F. Hutton, Salomon Brothers, and Prudential, before building his own firm specializing in managed accounts. He was active in various civic enterprises in Greenwich, and for two decades owned a home in Harbour Island in the Bahamas. One special joy later in life was his association, as trustee and adviser, with the Culinary Institute of America, the preeminent cooking school in this country. He leaves his wife, Barbara, and two children.
An obit in the January 4 New York Times summarized Larry Krakoff’s luminous career in medicine—beginning, post-Yale, with a degree from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, and including senior posts on the Mt. Sinai faculty and chief of medicine at Englewood Hospital across the river in New Jersey. A specialist in hypertension, he was an administrator and the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed papers. A skier and world traveler, he was also a dedicated Yale man—he attended our reunions, and with his wife Roberta sent two children and one grandson to New Haven: Jonathan ’85, Sarah ’86, and Ben ’17.
Our all-seeing class secretary, Ed Greenberg, knew both gentlemen. (Olympian vision seems to be a requirement for the job. Tom Maxey, Ed’s predecessor as secretary, seemed to know everyone; Ed likewise.) At one point Daly invited Ed to have dinner with his father, John Charles Daly, who had arrived in town at the summit of his career as a nationally known journalist and ABC anchorman. Ed can’t recall the restaurant, or what he ate, but what he distinctly remembers is that Mr. Daly proceeded to read out the entire menu, item by item, in his rich baritone voice, leaving Ed with an indelible image of a roomful of surprised and silenced diners. As for Krakoff, Ed and Larry, a fine tenor, were companions in the post-Yale universe of traveling songbirds as members of the Yale Alumni Chorus, the New York–based University Glee Club, and a smaller a cappella group, the Crickets. In retirement, both were invited to join the Whiffs to replace members who had passed on, an honor also bestowed on Jim Cowperthwait and Larry Buchanan. As Ed writes: “All great fun and great memories.”
Jim Smith died in Philadelphia in August. An industrial engineering student at Yale, with a talent for design and an ability to fix almost anything, Jim was something of a pioneer in early corporate computer systems at a time when rudimentary computers filled entire rooms. The machines gradually shrunk as Jim’s career grew, first with Hartford Insurance and later with Cigna and Chubb, where he retired as vice president for global financial systems in 2005. He is survived by Margaret, his wife of 64 years, and three children.
Ralph Miner, who came to Yale from Ohio and Western Reserve Academy, passed away in December in Norfolk, Virginia, after a lifelong career as a city planner—just about all of it in Norfolk, where he helped redesign and upgrade inner-city neighborhoods. Ralph is survived by Judith, his wife of 66 years, three children, and many friends on Monhegan Island in Maine, where he supervised family reunions.
Our class contributed more people than I had thought to organized religion and the country’s spiritual institutions, though some of them did not start that way. Case in point is Merritt Morehouse, known to his family as Terry and Dutton to his friends, who died in November in Athens, Georgia. A native of Lake Forest and a Choate graduate, he embarked first on a career in public relations in Chicago, then pivoted to the church when he and his wife Joyce moved to Michigan, where he was ordained deacon and then archdeacon of the Detroit Diocese of the Episcopal Church. He also served as a chaplain at Children’s Hospital of Michigan. He later moved to Washington Island, Wisconsin, and still later to Athens, serving in various ministries in both places. He is survived by Joyce and four sons.
An even more dramatic example is Franklin “Chris” Gamwell, whose passing two years ago at the age of 85 has only now come to our attention. An economics major at Yale, Chris earned a bachelor’s degree in divinity from Union Theological Seminary four years later, when he was also ordained as a Presbyterian minister. Then followed a move to Chicago, first as a young pastor at Chicago’s West Side Christian Parish, followed by a long, productive, and celebrated career as a teacher, scholar, administrator, and ultimately dean of the University of Chicago’s divinity school. While a pastor at West Side, Chris drove to Selma, Alabama, where he joined Martin Luther King’s third attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Thereafter and for the rest of his life, Chris preached a moral message that, in the words of one colleague, combined a commitment to a higher authority with an equally deep commitment to “democratic ideals in the service of racial and economic justice.”
That’s a good note to end on in these uncertain times. Chris was predeceased by his wife and daughter, and is survived by a son.