The Class Council held its third annual meeting in New York on May 1, with much of the discussion devoted to the 50th Birthday Mini-Reunion set for New York City October 15-17 (2010), and our 50th Reunion, date to be set – by Yale – either the last weekend in May or the first weekend in June (2012). Save these dates! Plans for both reunions are shaping up under Co-Chairs Bo Rodgers and Kirk McDonald (NY) and the 50th (Chair Bob Oliver). These guys are already putting a lot of thought into each event. Don’t have to wait for surveys asking what you want on the schedules – send me your thoughts/wishes and I will see they get to the right Chair-people.
There has been a growing consensus among the class leadership that email is a far superior way to communicate with the class than US Mail, and far cheaper. The problem is we have many more classmates with no email address on file than was previously thought. After accounting for classmates totally missing (21), deceased (130), and a few (7) who have requested no contact, our class stands at 849 living and recorded members. However we have emails for only 569 classmates (67%). We think the main cause of this is that many classmates have not appreciated the increasing importance of email and therefore haven’t bothered to put email addresses on annual class dues forms.
Secretary Jim White has endorsed a program in which volunteers will make a team effort to collect the missing emails by telephone. This approach was successfully done on small scale last summer by Jim himself (made calls in the DC area) and by Mike Kane (calls in Massachusetts). No respondents declined to provide their email addresses, and in many cases we had fun conversations by means of catching up and reminiscing. Volunteers to date are Wechsler, Weeden, Honneus, Danetz and Richard Davis, but another 20 or so are needed. Contact Jim at jameskwhite@me.com to offer your services- he has the master list of the missing and will cut off a small slice for you to start calling.
Chris Lydon (whose long-lost email address was sleuthed out last summer thanks to a classmate) has just published on his blog site a fascinating interview with an Indian man of letters named Amartya Sen (link to interview). Says Chris, in an email:
(He – Sen) is tuning up his warning that India could yet become “half California, half Sub-Saharan Africa.” To me he sounds “half Victorian gent, half liberal social critic.” I thank him for the pleasure of engaging with “an old-fashioned Indian wiseman.”
“Shame on you,” he says, laughing.
Did I get it wrong? I ask.
He says: “You got it exactly right.”
The pleasure will be yours, too.
Very best to you, with thanks,
Chris Lydon
Bill Weber, whose delightful mini-article appears here on our site, has reported that he met up again this year with old friends and classmates Tony Giamei and Chuck Post, at a residence Chuck keeps in Prescott, Arizona. This group has agreed to keep on with these annual mini-reunions until, well, indefinitely.
Ken Cascone has a new publication, this time a book review: “My book review of Washington’s Spies (by Alex Rose) is being published soon in New York History, a quarterly put out by the New York State Historical Association. For those interested in a copy see this link for a subscription form. The review appears in its spring edition this June.
And Murray Wheeler continues his long record of service to Yale in the Boston area by helping to find housing for student summer interns. At this writing Murray had successfully placed 100% of the interns with local families. Let the file show that your CorSec volunteered some space but was disqualified for specifying preference for an extremely attractive female student.
Earlier this Spring John Chapman found time from his rigorous semi retirement to spend a week in Nepal checking up on a school construction project that he raised money for. He has returned safe and sound now,as this email confirms: “Back from a pretty tiring but rewarding trip – saw a number of diplomatic and political types in Kathmandu I had met before (of course Nepal is still a mess) and trooped up for a dedication of “my” school in the middle hills north of Gorkha with my friend Dhruba Bhatta. Actually quite touching – a few pix for your viewing. I was sure you would want to know all about it, but no, no plans for a story for the Yale website.” Rather than pen the report we had asked for, the reclusive author has headed off to Costa Rica for some much needed rest. Maybe he will relent and contribute for our next posting.
John speaking with community members
The plaque awarded to John
Students and teachers outside their school
Steve Howard from LA confirms the passing of his 70th birthday, and thinks this experience is worth some further reflection by us all, in his words: “Mine (70th) was two weeks ago. I was feeling pretty cocky as the date approached — I’m pretty healthy, very active (two high altitude treks a year and lots of other travel), and I recently shed about 25 pounds — so I thought I was pretty cool. But, when the big 70 actually arrived, I was very subdued. Seventy is indisputably ‘old.’ No way you can kid yourself that you are just ‘middle aged.’ And that launched me onto thinking: What did I accomplish in my life, what can I (should I) still do with the time that remains. No easy answers.” We can all agree with Steve that this moment in our lives may trigger more than the usual birthday musings and I have some more to say about it in my CorSec column on this site. Please weigh in with your comments here.
Of course, one thing we can do with the “time that remains” is go to the 70th Birthday Party in New York in October!
Old friend Ed Kelly sent a very welcome letter full of news of his interesting pathways since the early 1970’s, when we last met in Harvard Square as he finished graduate work at Harvard. Ed has pursued very advanced areas of psychology research, as his own words tell it:
“I started working in experimental parapsychology at J.B. Rhine’s lab in Durham NC right out of grad school. Lasted about 15 months there and then moved to Electrical Engineering at Duke, where with several others I began developing a laboratory facility to study possible physiological correlates of success in controlled psi (ESP, PK) tasks of various kinds. Kept that going for about 12 years, the last 4 or so under the auspices of a non-profit research institute we set up for that purpose, but eventually had to abandon it for lack of resources. Partly in order to put food on the table for the two children of a disastrous first marriage, I went back into academia in 1989 as part of a big UNC-Chapel Hill neuroscience group studying mammalian somatosensory systems (touch, temperature, pain, ..), my main role being application of high-resolution EEG techniques of the sort we had been working on at Duke to visualize cortical adaptation to flutter-vibration stimulation of the hand in humans. Sounds pretty exotic, I’m sure, but actually plugs into a vast body of prior neurophysiological and psychophysical research in a very elegant way. Did that for another dozen years or so and then retired early at age 62 in order to resume working on parapsychology and allied subjects here at U. of Virginia, this time in the company of my second wife Emily, who was already a long-time member of the research group founded here by Ian Stevenson in 1969 specifically for the study of these subjects (see Information about the Division of Perceptual Studies).
Emily and I had commuted back and forth between Charlottesville and Chapel Hill for almost a decade, and at 4 hours a pop that was getting VERY tiresome. To make a long story short, we then spent almost 5 years putting together a huge book called Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century, published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2007, which is an all-out assault on the sorts of reductive physicalism that dominate contemporary psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind – basically, the view that “mind is what brain does, full stop”, as our chairman here in psychiatry never tires of saying. I’ll attach a brochure here, and will send you a copy of the book too if you’re interested (but I’ll need a snail-mail address). We’ve had a bunch of good reviews (plus a couple of nasty ones from persons who apparently felt no need to read the book first), and it’s recently come out in paperback at under half the original bite, which we hope will put it in the hands of lots of students. Since then I’ve mainly been involved in setting up another nonprofit research institute, a sister-organization for our Uva group, and getting it equipped to carry forward the work we started at Duke 35 years ago (and with many of the same people involved (!) – some now from considerable distances). See Cedar Creek Institute for lots more information about that. Those are the main professional & personal highlights, I guess, but I would be remiss if I didn’t also confess that like many of our classmates, no doubt, I am slowly growing deaf, blind, forgetful, flabby and weak – despite somewhat greater than normal efforts to prevent all these things from happening. Have some contact with fellow 62ers Steve Kaplan, Jim Keaten, and Marty Kaminsky, but that’s about it.”
