By Richard L. Riseling for the Communications Team
Magic not of the hockey kind: Mike Kane writes, “The better part of my past year was consumed by the process of disengaging from Massachusetts (read: ‘selling house’) and taking up principal legal residency (read: ‘buying condominium’) in Florida. So I have enlisted in the Snowbird Army and at this writing am two weeks away from closing down our Maine house for the winter and heading south. Love to share the experience with any classmates contemplating a similar move. This will mean I no longer can work my magic at Yale hockey games where, as Oliver can attest, I inspired many a Yale victory by moving to the opponent’s goal side when Yale needed a goal.”
A wonderful a cappella experience from John Stewart: “Most of the a cappella groups have active alumni groups who attend periodic New Haven reunions. Get-togethers for Whiff and Whim groups vary, depending on the strength of the senior-year experience. Our ’62 Whiffs, minus Jack Brandt (recently deceased), have met every two or three years and met this year on September 23–26 in Cape May, at the home of Tom and Debbie Cutler. We practiced each day and at the end, sang for our wives and friends. It was a wonderful time!”
Multi-tasking sculptures. Dixie Carroll not only had a one-man show of his whimsical, colorful, imaginative sculptures in the nation’s capital last spring, but a bit later in the year he published a fantastical book featuring those sculptures as its illustrations. Welcome to the Neighborhood: Stories and Adventures is a tome Dixie first wrote in French as an “extended, six-year homework project,” in order to practice the language he’d recently learned. Then he translated it into English. It’s available through Poetry and Prose in DC.
Employing good science. Our classmate Alan Kapuler, science scholar, modern artist, and plant breeder, wrote to let us know what transpired following Yale. He went on to earn his PhD from Rockefeller University in ’68 (molecular biology, biochemistry, and nucleic acid science). Since then he’s been an organic public-domain plant breeder and cofounder of ‘Seeds of Change’ where he’s developed many new organically grown cultivars to improve the nutritional characteristics of our food plants. As a modern artist, he’s painted more than 1,500 artworks and has both a blog and many videos. He’s been one of our largely unseen, nationally significant problem-solvers in these difficult times. Find his work via Google and catch him at Cooking Up a Story and Seeds of Change or Peace Seeds, to find a huge variety of his trailblazing thinking, art, science, videos, and plant breeding.
The communications team encourages all classmates to share their thoughts, concerns, and projects!
Another new book. Steve Buck’s wife Hala Buck has written Bridge Between Worlds: A Lebanese Arab American Woman’s Journey, now available at Amazon.com. Interspersing her paintings and her paintings-inspired poetry, she reflects on her mixed Muslim and Christian family, her marriage to an American diplomat, their nomadic life between eight posts in the Arab world and North America, and navigating cultures. Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance and Radical Compassion, writes, “In this evocative depiction of her own journey, Hala Buck shows us how each of our lives can be an unfolding—from woundedness to healing, and from separation to belonging.”
At Yale62.org: We’ve featured a lot of classmate-connected news on our class website this year, and encourage you to visit to see the full complement of it. We’ve had reports and other news from classmates living in exceptionally challenged regions of the globe: Bill Stork in Hong Kong, George Cleary in Venezuela, and by the time you read this, we will likely have a story or two from Bill Stott in Chile. From the California blazes, we received word from Pearce Hurley, John Livingston, Phil Proctor, and Bill Wheeler, with a reminder from Chip Neville that he wrote a scholarly report on the climate crisis for our website a few years back. It’s still online for classmates to read.
We’ve begun classmate video interviews on the website, and special class couples interviews, to boot. John and Jolly Stewart were the inaugural couple interviewees, and there will be many more. If you and your spouse would like to participate, nominate yourselves, please! The more, the merrier—that’s for certain. There’s lots more on the website, but please don’t take our word for it. Visit the site and see for yourselves!
Finally, and with great sadness, we report the loss of the following classmates, whose obituaries will appear on our website in due course: Sir John Boyd, Tony Scoville, Richard Segel, Michael Uhlmann, and John Van Ness.