My celebration in the last class notes of our collective vigor and longevity was, I’m afraid, a tad premature, as I have little but departures to record this time around. Still, it is worth noting here—and you can note as well by Googling our class website—a lively class Zoom call in March featuring Charley Ellis talking about his new book, Rethinking Investment, which summarizes a lifetime of experience as an investor, writer, and key advisor to Yale’s endowment whiz, the late and legendary David Swensen. A bunch of us tuned in to hear his thoughts about the perils of stock picking, the virtues of index funds, and a well-aimed barb or two at the new administration’s careless assault on federal support vital to Yale’s scientific and medical research.
As to criticisms of the Trump/Musk budgetary chainsaw, which are abundant and surprisingly bipartisan, should note again Alex Boyle’s energetic and noble campaign to modernize and strengthen the Internal Revenue Service, thereby collecting untold billions in avoided tax dollars and lessening the prospect of what Alex fears will be a colossal fiscal crisis in the next few years. Alex has beaten this drum in various venues, most recently in an eloquent letter to the Times in early March. In a note to classmates, he also calls attention to a like-minded essay in the Washington Post written by Natasha Sarin of Yale Law School, who, like Alex, argues that the proposed cuts to the IRS are ill-timed and self-defeating—in short, beyond stupid.
Given how we all spent our Yale careers in different colleges and in various silos, whether fraternal or extracurricular, it should surprise no one that I actually knew relatively few of the people I have ended up writing about. In that sense this job has been a voyage of discovery. Even the obituaries, sad on their face, contain happy surprises. Imagine my delight, therefore, in learning of Davis Wells Finch, for no classmate that I knew then or have known of since was more aptly named. Davis lived most of his life in New Hampshire, where as a child he began keeping meticulous records of the birdlife in the fields and woods around his home in East Kingston. Having prepped at Exeter, he lived in Berkeley, got a BA and MA in French literature and briefly taught the subject at Yale and Vassar before returning, as befits someone named Finch, to his true love, ornithology, In this he was encouraged by Yale’s esteemed professor of ornithology, S. Dillon Ripley, and by the 1970s Davis had founded one bird touring company and cofounded Wings, one of the three largest bird touring outfits in the US. Davis died last October in Exeter after a brief illness. His survivors include a nephew, Roderick Topping.
One person I did know was Steve Renkert, my second-in-command at the Yale Daily News as vice chairman, wonderfully opinionated, sometimes curmudgeonly, whip-smart, a loyal Yale guy, MBA from Harvard, a civic stalwart and conservationist who served on the national board of Trout Unlimited. After a brief detour at Corning Glass, he returned to Canton, Ohio, his hometown , and joined his father and brother at the family brickworks, which he turned into a successful and innovative maker of tile. Following his retirement, he devoted a decade to caring for his wife Rachel through her long journey with dementia. Steve died in January and is survived by three children.
Lawrence Maxwell Levy, aka Larry, came to Yale from Buffalo, and like a lot of our classmates went on to Harvard for an advanced degree, in his case an LLB. He stayed in Boston for a 40-plus-year career in a firm that grew from a small local office to a 200-lawyer international player, with a branch in London that Larry developed and ran. He lived there and in Nantucket, in addition to Boston, and on the side helped grow another small outfit—Facing History and Ourselves—into a global organization that promotes learning about the Holocaust. Larry liked to travel, ski, and listen to Pete Seeger, and leaves his wife Peggy and two married daughters.
Owen Philip “Phil” Reid Jr. died in January in San Francisco. A bachelor and truly generous person, at Yale a resident of Silliman and member of Chi Phi, Phil moved west from his boyhood home in Providence, and stayed there, working for Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He was a lifelong Red Sox fan (you cannot, when all is said and done, lose your New England roots altogether), as well as an avid tennis player, a member of San Francisco’s prestigious Olympic Club, and, by his own admission, sort of a nut about fire departments. He volunteered at his local station and served as president of the Phoenix Society, a firemen’s fraternal outfit and support group in San Francisco. During his annual summertime road trips to his native Rhode Island, he would stop along the way to visit major league ballparks (he got to most of them) and, of course, local fire stations. He is survived by a younger brother, John Thomas Reid.
I do not think I have fully absorbed the many lives of Davis Porter Bibb III. Suffice it to say that Porter was a busy man, bouncing from glamorous task to task, a journey perhaps best summarized by his third wife, Sandra Bibb, in a comment to a local paper on Long Island after Porter died of fourth-stage prostate cancer at Weill Cornell Medical Center in January. “I just see Porter as this Renaissance man, because he really did a lot of different things—I think he was interested in everything.” Porter came to New Haven from Louisville, where he claimed a friendship with Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, and at Yale lived in Silliman, hung out at Fence, and helped start Ivy magazine before embarking on various graduate degrees. He later touched many bases, especially in the media world, as an early executive at Rolling Stone, producer for the Maysles brothers, a reporter for Newsweek. But his real love was the East End of Long Island, having summered in Amagansett for much of his childhood, and living in Southampton for much of his adult life. There he became a civic warrior, friend of local public radio, and committed conservationist. He is survived by Sandra and three daughters.
Summer is coming: news runs thin, the fall issue always needs stuff, and this year we have no reunion. So write me a line or two, however immodest.