These are the last notes before our 60th Reunion, and, perforce, short. Those of you who have not signed up and who now, in a rush of good sense, wish to do so, may punch up alumni.yale.edu/reunions/class-1959-60th-reunion/welcome-1959 — and register right there. As I’ve said in earlier notes, you will be amply rewarded. A great program awaits.
Two people I hope to see are John Gennari and his wife Emily. We had some early marriages in our class but none so deliciously secretive as theirs. John and Emily eloped their senior year, and nobody knew except one friend of his at Yale, Don Cecchi, and one friend of Emily’s at Vassar. Only after both had graduated, and a second wedding in Norfolk, did their parents learn about the first. The guard at TD in those days was very lenient about Emily’s weekly visits in a car owned by John but domiciled at Vassar because the parking was cheaper.
Some previously unreported news: Dave Martin remains alive and active on Cape Cod, where he occasionally encounters Jim Hinkle and John Funkhouser at the newly-reborn Yale Club of Cape Cod. . He has retired from a long career at Gallaudet University in Washington, where his wife Sue was the University Library Director at Georgetown, but continues as an adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Witwatersand in South Africa. He also does all kinds of civic and educational stuff on Cape Cod, including organizing an academic symposium for 2020 on the early years of the Plimoth (cq) Colony.
Fred Cowles, who had a long career as an estate planner, writes that he “stubbornly maintains our home in tax-inefficient New York,” as well as a summer home on Nantucket, where a good many of our classmates seem to roam from time to time.
This month’s roll call:
Evan Weisman, who has made several appearances in this column over the years, and will make a posthumous one in Don Watson’s book of reminiscences at the reunion, died in December from multiple myeloma. He was a supersmart, funny man. Ron Magid, his Silliman college roommate and friend for 60 years, recalls Evan as an editor for the Yale Record and the proud recipient of the magazine’s Leo J. Sachs Award for Indolence, Lechery and Sloth. Following medical school at Emory, Evan settled in Atlanta, where he had a distinguished career as a cardiologist. Upon retirement, he did a stint as a stand-up comic in Atlanta and also acted in community theater productions. He is survived by his wife, Nancy, their three children, and four grand-daughters. Evan also played cupid, introducing Dick Riseberg to his wife Joyce, who was a classmate of Nancy’s at Vassar, class of 1962.
Occasionally word comes of the death of a classmate who went on to live such a glamorous life that surely I must have encountered him at Yale — but didn’t. Such is the case with Nick Embiricos, who died in November. Nick was born Stamati Nicholas Jacques Embiricos in London into a Greek shipping family in 1937. When his father was killed in a plane crash in 1939, his American mother, Anne, took her son on a cruise, and when the ship docked in Barbados, she decided to stay. Nick went to the Lodge School on the island, then to Groton, then Yale, where he played polo. After graduation, he was sent to London to work in the family shipping firm. He not only prospered but became entranced by the racing scene and ended up owning a stud and training operation that produced a long series of winners on flat and steeplechase courses, including the Grand National in 1981. He married twice; survivors include his second wife, Valda, and their daughter, Alexandra.
As for the rest of you fortunate enough to remain alive and well as we round the clubhouse turn — come on back!