Class Notes May/June 2005

Class Notes May/June 2005

Upcoming events. Class Dinner, October 28, Yale Club of New York City. Thanks to Peter Conze (filling in for Jeff Miller in Jeff’s absence) and Tony Dunn for organizing another successful Hockey Night. Tony wrote: “Forty classmates, spouses, offspring and significant others gathered for the annual Class Hockey Night in January as the Eli scholar-athletes hosted the Cantabs. For the pre-game dinner at Mory’s, Dan Bergfeld assembled a quintet of former Whiffs including Dennis Cross and Bill Pinney plus a couple of ringers from other classes. The group blended perfectly and their traditional repertoire and mellifluous tones triggered lots of nostalgia and a few moist eyes. Regrettably, the hockey game, while fast and furious, was replete with lots of penalties and was, for Yale, a period too long. Knotted at three goals apiece entering the third period, Harvard (with a dozen NHL draftees to Yale’s three!) scored two power-play goals to clinch the win. Nevertheless, this was a memorable evening with terrific music, succulent roast beef, exciting hockey and abundant camaraderie.” Bob Cook has a great new job as deputy program manager at a small company that supplies communications systems to naval aircraft. His older daughter, Sally, is an outstanding soccer player whose high school team won the state championship. Sally hopes to study engineering at Yale in the class of ’09. David Crockett delivered his son, David, Jr., ’08, to the campus in August and returned for Parents’ Weekend and the Penn game. New Haven looks cleaner and brighter, Pepe’s has the same great pizza, the Bowl is in need of repair, but the prime rib at Mory’s remains top notch, noted David. Having retired from the New York City law firm, Shearman & Sterling, after 35 years there, Casey Dwyer continues to volunteer in the Harlem public schools, working with “great” kids in the first and second grades. Perk Foss is the guest curator of an exhibition entitled “Where Gods and Mortals Meet: Continuity and Creativity in Urhobo Art.” His subject centers on the arts of the Urhobo, who live in the western Niger River Delta, Nigeria. The exhibition ran last summer at the Museum for African Art in New York, then moved to the Museum of Art in Columbia,SC, and for the period June-September, 2005, will run at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC. More information is available at http://www.africanart.org/html/traveling_exhibitions.html. The accompanying catalog, which has the same title as the exhibition, is available through Amazon.com. Bob Heil continues his good works for the Sierra Club as chair of its National Advisory Council but still travels 20 weeks a year. After 15 years of retirement from law practice, Bob says “Life’s good!” with Rosemary, his wife of 36 years. Jim Marshall’s daughter will graduate from M.I.T. this spring, one son is artistic director of The Brookline, MA Community Center for the Arts, and another son is a practicing neurologist with a clinical and research fellowship at U.C.L.A. Medical Center. Doug McPheters is still on the cutting edge. His company, Holotouch, Inc., and a partner developed a fully functional, touchless holographic interface, Bean One, which won a 2004 Control Engineering Editors’ Choice Award as “among the most significant innovations (among hundreds) featured in Control Engineering in the past year.” This technology allows operators to control equipment by simply passing a finger through holographic images of “keys” floating in the air, with potential applications in consumer electronics, gaming, industrial, kiosk, medical and other sectors. Fred Roberts, an investment banker and former NASD and NASDAQ chairman, now travels the world as a photographer. His recent exhibition in Santa Monica of photographs of South Asian peoples entitled “Humanitas” and book of the same name capture the richness of life and dignity of people who have no concept of worldly goods, according to one review. On hand at the Santa Monica book-signing were Bob Leich, Alan Dickson, and Fred’s Saybrook roommates, Steve Dorros and Henry Hacker, also eminent photographers whose works have been exhibited at Yale and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dick Ruffin’s Initiatives for Change has shifted its focus to U.S. relations with the Muslim world, including community-based dialogs between American Muslims and Christians and meetings of U.S., Israeli and Palestinian leaders. You can learn more at http://www.us.initiativesofchange.org/ or reach Dick at rwbruffin@aol.com. John Schenck, our Class Poet, has written a book The Millennial Pedestrian: Poems About Walking Around in Central Park and Other Places.  It was ranked #97 in early March on Amazon’s “Early Adopter Fiction & Literature” titles. Amazon describes this list as the “newest and coolest products?our customers are buying?based entirely on purchase patterns.”According to a review – and I agree – John “takes you to familiar places, then shows them to you in an entirely new way?(but the book) is more than a travelogue in verse. Memory, regret and moments of joy mingle in poems about love, death, and the relentless passage of time.” R.W.B. Lewis would have liked John’s poems. The book is also available at barnesandnoble.com and at your local bookstore ($10.95). Jerry Howard died December 11. After Yale, he earned an M.A. in journalism from Columbia and later a B.F.A. in photography from the Massachusetts School of Art. He served as a naval officer during two tours in Vietnam with Underwater Demolition Team 12 (precursor of the SEAL teams). His subsequent journey in journalism, photography and life is eloquently chronicled in our twenty-fifth Reunion class book, which merits re-reading. His interests included garden design, landscape architecture, parks, cemeteries and land use .Several years ago, Jerry donated part of his lung in an unsuccessful transplant to save the life of his cousin and our classmate, Charley Seymour. He was the father of two daughters and is survived by his former wife, Margarite Bradley, his partner, Gail Johnston, and three sisters.