Had a good email exchange and phone talk with Dave Willis, who this year celebrated not only his 70th birthday but also his 43d wedding anniversary with wife Lillian. He generously credits MKane with introducing the couple, and goes on to say that his kids are giving him for his birthday a) an outing to Formula 1 races in Montreal and b) a ride in a Texan AT6 antique trainer. Dave is uncomfortably straddling two houses at the moment, one in Vermont (future home) and one in Connecticut (for sale). A keen hockey fan, he has agreed to join Oliver, Lipsher, Kane and Hedlund at rinkside for next season’s campaign at Ingalls Rink.
H Lee Rust writes that he has spent the last 25 years as a sole proprietor corporate finance consultant in Orlando, Florida, where he has just written a new book with a companion website. The book is titled Is This Any Way to Run a Company, and can be located, with its website, at Just 60 Days. Lee and his wife Karilyn of 20 years have many kids and grandchildren.
Jerome Yurow retired from the US Dept of Energy last year and continues living in the DC area (Rockville, Md). He has a son working in the NY area and a daughter working in Georgetown, both in technology related fields.
(Prof) Lew Spratlan, whose opera Life Is a Dream, unseen since written 32 years ago when it earned Lew a Pulitzer Prize in music composition, will have its world premier and four additional performances at the prestigious Santa Fe Opera beginning July 24, and on July 28, August 6,12, and 19. Says Lew: “All old friends will be warmly welcomed.” (Not clear if this means comp tickets.) Lew’s milestone achievement was the subject of a big NY Times Arts section feature on April 12th. Lew and his wife Melinda (also a Prof) live in Amherst (Ma), where he retired from the Amherst College faculty in 2006 and Melinda from the Mt Holyoke faculty this year. Their three kids are all working or in graduate school, and two married daughters have recently had baby girls, so Lew joins our growing grandfathers club. He continues composing and producing, currently working on a song for the 150th Yale Glee Club celebration next February, and has a CD out on the Navona label.
Recently heard from but without much news attached: Don Banks (Decatur, Ga) and Philip de Chabert (France). Philip says he is retired. We will pursue them for more info!
Yale’s alumni records office has only recently notified us of the deaths of Charles Gantz (1999), Henry Adams (2001), and Paul R. Johnson (1996), but obituaries have not been written pending Bob Oliver’s receipt of additional information.
The family of Boyd Brown (Maine) has notified us that, with a developing Alzheimer’s condition, he has moved into a residential care facility and no longer can participate in class communications. We are honoring the family’s wishes.
From Henry Childs, this gracefully composed report of his recent (2d) marriage and recent literary achievements:
“I have been asked to inform you of my recent marriage to Helen Elizabeth Mercier, having been divorced from Mary Adams now for some 15 years. My name is Henry Clay Childs, BA ‘62. I don’t know if you are interested in the fact that I have just had two books published – novels, one entitled H – An Urchin’s Tale, and the second (about to come out in a matter of weeks) entitled The Pyrite Years. The latter is narrated by a member of my class (fictional, of course) who is married to an English Lit major from Vasser (sic). They flee the suburbs of New Jersey for the wilds of the Adirondacks. Very funny, with an increasing dose of mind-expanding experiences only partially brought on by the bi-products of an Athabaskan woman’s chickens and hogs, fed ‘natural substances’. A must read for all Yalies and their spouses, Vasserites (sic) or no. “H” is a bit more esoteric, involving a young orphan from Bermuda who is kidnapped aboard a splendid sloop and winds up in the Amazon rainforest helping a Scots lady salvaging the wealth of knowledge the rainforest holds for natural healing. Magic, romance, the Bermuda Triangle, pirates, disinterested Harvard medical establishment, this has it all for most of us, though not necessarily all. Respectfully submitted, Henry C. Childs. (Ed note: Careful readers of the May-June YAM Class Notes will notice a close resemblance to this entry. This is not a sign of CorSec’s Alzheimer’s, but rather because at different dates Mr. Childs had submitted two similar but not identical notices to Alumni Records, and the above version seemed to include a little more information and therefore worth printing here.)
Steve Buck, who wrote the other article on this site, returned to his career turf earlier this year as a guest of the US Army and sent in this brief report: “This spring, in January, February and March, I spent a week each month in Saudi Arabia advising a U.S. military team negotiating with Saudi generals on a review of the country’s land forces and had the opportunity to talk with Saudis at all levels. While Saudis and other Arabs were pleased by the Obama administration’s reaching out to the Islamic world and strong stance on Israeli settlements, they were concerned about the U.S. administration’s inability to stop them and how this provides fodder for recruiting terrorists.”
Bill Stott from Austin, Texas (wstott@mail.utex.edu) has reported in, happily claiming now two families, one in Santiago, Chile involving his wife’s daughter by her first marriage, and the other in the US involving his ex-wife Jane and their two children. In addition to his family news, Bill sent a fascinating reminiscence about Victor Brombert of the Directed Studies faculty of our day:
“The teacher who most influenced my career choice was my freshman Directed Studies literature teacher, Victor Brombert, who taught many years at Yale and then even more years at Princeton. I think I have the following facts right. He was born in Berlin in 1923 to Russian Jewish parents who had fled the Revolution; when Hitler came to power, the family moved again, to Paris. In 1941 they moved again, to New York. Picture three shows him in his French phase, the aspiring writer. In 1943 he was drafted into the US Army, where he was trained to be an interrogator of prisoners of war and, I think, trainer of spies. He and nine other men who did this work are interviewed in the wonderful documentary film The Ritchie Boys (2005), which was shortlisted for an Academy Award. (The fourth photo shows him in the movie. I point out that he was 22 when, as you learn in the film, he and a Jeep of co-workers liberated Paris before De Gaulle.) Camp Ritchie trained 10,000 foreign-language speakers for WWII work, among them (though not interviewed in the film because they are long dead) were Klaus Mann, Hans Habe, and David Seymour (Chim); the camp, which trained soldiers for other intelligence work, referred to these 10,000 as the “Psycho Boys.” To my amazement, The Ritchie Boys, which I have bought a DVD of that is waiting for me in Austin, can now be seen for free on YouTube here. It’s a film with touching, surprising, and amusing moments. And it will show you Victor Brombert, a teacher-conversationalist of genius. He has an autobiography, Trains of Thought: Paris to Omaha Beach, Memories of a Wartime Youth, that I bought and immediately loaned to a friend who keeps promising to return it; I imagine it’s being a second Speak, Memory. Brombert is very much alive; his email can be found in Princeton’s webdirectory.”
Speaking of John Chapman (as we were on Page 1 of our This Just In column), he has passed on to me an opinion column spotted in the Minneapolis Star Tribune by his old friend Les Michaels (Yale ‘60). In it the author has fun making light of Yale’s “Sex Week”, apparently held every other year since 2002. (It seems the author did not attend but claims her facts are from an eye-witness account appearing in The National Review online version). Knowing we all like sex or at least like thinking about it, and once in a while it is healthy to see the lighter side of Yale, I reproduce excerpts from the article here:
KATHERINE KERSTEN, Minneapolis Star Tribune – March 6, 2010
These days, you see, Yale is gaining fame for stimulation of a different kind. In classrooms where lectures on moral philosophy once got students’ intellectual juices flowing, Yalies recently poured in by the hundreds to hear the likes of transsexual porn star Buck Angel, and porn icon Sasha Grey, winner of seven Adult Video News Awards, including “best group sex scene.”
It was all part of last month’s “Sex Week at Yale” (SWAY) — a nine-day series of lectures and demonstrations that has been a biennial campus tradition since 2002. This year, SWAY featured a star-studded line-up of how-to-do-it experts — the “it,” of course, being everything any human being has ever found remotely sexually arousing, from erotic piercings to sadomasochism.
This being Yale, the week started with a veneer of academic respectability: a lecture by museum curator Katharine Gates (Yale ‘85). Gates has served as a curator — not at the Smithsonian, but at the Museum of Sex in New York City. The author of “Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex,” she presented a “video-and-slide-illustrated talk” on the Kinkmap — “her ongoing project to collect and organize the world of sexual subcultures from Adult Babies to Body Inflation, Cannibal Play to Zoophilia,” according to the Sex Week schedule. Nathan Harden, a 2009 Yale graduate who reported on Sex Week for National Review Online, explained that Adult Babies include “men dressing up like babies (complete with diapers).” . . .
Yalies eager to learn more could follow up with a workshop on masturbation, a “sex toy demonstration,” a lecture entitled “Beyond Monogamy” or a seminar on sexual fantasies by Dr. Susan Block (Yale ‘77). There, Block handed out a video she said contained footage of an orgy she had held in celebration of President Obama’s election victory, according to Harden. Or students could attend “an interactive workshop on sexual self-realization,” led by Diana Adams (Yale ‘01) — a “sexual civil rights lawyer, polyamory activist, and national jiu-jitsu champion.”
You might suspect that Yale’s focus on sex is entirely student-driven. Not so. The university’s administration is doing its best to ensure that the subject becomes a year-round preoccupation. In February, the Yale College Dean’s Office announced a new “sex@yale” initiative. The project will be led by a 22-person advisory board of faculty and administrators. It will solicit essays for the Dean’s website from students — almost 100 so far — who will “reflect anonymously on their sexual experiences at Yale and their impressions of the sexual culture here.”
No doubt these student essayists will draw inspiration from Sex Week’s other events. These included an “Erotic Bondage Suspension Performance” (moved off-campus at the last minute, according to Harden) and a “fetish fashion show.” The fashion show — held in Yale’s dining hall — featured erotic lingerie designed and modeled by Yale students. “The outfits evoked various role-play themes, including devil and angel, boss and secretary, and one that I can only describe as girls in leather with chains,” according to Harden.
Sex Week’s grand finale was a lecture by the 21-year-old Grey, described by the SWAY schedule as “one of the biggest names in porn.” Grey is known for her on-screen performances of “consensual degradation,” according to Los Angeles Magazine.
Is there any dissent at Yale? Any countercultural types, any rebels? There was one. His name was David Schaengold, and the Sex Week schedule described his speech as “a philosophical defense of the institutions of marriage and the family,” based on “a Thomist-Aristotelian argument about natural ends. “Natural ends? Philosophy? Marriage? How did this weirdo crash the party?
Schaengold is in the minority for now. Only a dozen students showed up for his talk, according to Harden. But who knows? After a few more years of men dressing like babies, and after sneeze fetishes have lost their erotic glow, more folks may give him a listen.”
Katherine Kersten is at kakersten@gmail.com.
