YAM Notes: May/June 2022
By John Davis Hatch III, for the Communications Team. YAM@Yale62.org
We hope to see everyone at our 60th reunion, June 9–12, live and on campus!
Please send in your news! Our email address is listed above.
As we ease into our year of post-COVID-19 and its relatives, some of our classmates have begun to move and venture about a bit more. David and Ellen Ross report that they have relocated from Houston, Texas, and have joined an old friend in a continuing care retirement community (CCRC) in Lynchburg, Virginia. While distant from their Houston friends of 52 years, they are much closer to their family in the Washington, DC, area, and are now able to drive more comfortably to their longtime summer home on Nantucket. Dave said, “It seemed the right thing at the right time. We are not getting any younger and when we will eventually need some additional care, it may not be available unless we provide for it in advance. So far we are extremely happy with the decision.”
Dick Riseling and life partner Sonja Hedlund write that taking a winter vacation to escape the cold gives a great boost to physical and mental well-being. “It became irresistible to us when a friend offered a free house rental for two months in Gulfport, Florida. It was our first vacation lasting more than two days in the past 50 years!” Lessons in ballroom dancing, mahjong, bridge, Spanish, yoga, cooking, and new skills in computer and cell phone use occupied afternoons and evenings, along with meeting new friends. Mornings were spent reading and writing. Trips to farms, gardens, sacred lands of the Native American peoples, the Ringling Brothers Circus estate, and Thomas Edison’s fabulous museum all took place. Those, plus “a few trips to the beach, deep sea fishing, and sailing made for a splendid time that still-active farmers and renewable-energy activists like us seldom experience. Not anymore! Off we’ll go every winter, we hope—along with the reminder to all how marvelous this country is. Next winter, we’ll head to the southwest. In the meantime, wherever we are, let all of us redouble our efforts to improve the social and physical ecology of our union with each other and nature.”
Much farther south, Bill Stott writes of his and wife Irene’s first venture in two years from their home in Santiago, Chile: “Irene and I hadn’t been out of Santiago in 2020 and 2021, but . . . in celebration of her 71st birthday we went for two-plus days to a famous wine region 180kms to the south, in a taxi with rented driver. (Irene won’t let me drive in Chile, knowing I’d blow my stack.) We stayed at a hotel in a vineyard in Santa Cruz.” The pictures they sent of the area would make anyone who has had to deal with North American weather this winter want to head down there. See Bill’s photos at Yale62.org, linked in our This Just In section (accessible from the paper airplane at the top of the front page).
Are you finally venturing out? Let us know where you went, how it went, and what you learned/discovered!
Staying put in the L.A. area but doing a lot, Phil Proctor indicates, “I am now a regular panelist on the comedy quiz show Says You! as it celebrates its 25th year on NPR, and streaming live online! I am also the cohost of an ongoing podcast called Phil & Ted’s Sexy Boomer Show, interviewing celebrity friends like John Goodman, Penn Jillette, Thom Hartman, Weird Al Yankovic, Leonard Maltin, and many more. It’s all at www.SexyBoomer.com.”
In other pleasant news, we have two new members to the Y62 communications team: Tim Hall and me, John (Jay) Hatch. Hailing from the Boston area, Tim says, “I decided to join the communications team, after sitting in on a couple of meetings, because I have really been enjoying this way of getting to know more of my classmates, as well as to deepen my connections to those I already know. And the team made me feel very welcome!” For my part, I (Jay) joined because I had become an active reader of our website and participant in our Coffee Hour, had some reduced committee commitments time, and thought it might be a way to contribute where there was a need.
Sad to report, but we have been informed by YAA of the passing of R. David Arkush, Richard A. Ehrlich, Edward L. Frey, John Goldthwaite, Francis S. Hill Jr., Neil D. Kornzweig, David L. Page, Paul F. Rose, Robert C. Simmers, and Theodore W. Volkhausen. Their obituaries will be posted on our website in due course.