1961

Responses to last month's poll are coming in rapidly. I'm going to wait until next month to tally up the results so as to give you all a chance to be included. If you haven't sent in your opinions on January's poll yet, hurry and do so. Right away. Now!

In the meantime, while awaiting your opinions on the "youth" issue, here's an interesting analysis from the N.Y. Times of a couple of weeks ago. What do you think, is this guy making sense or is he intellectualizing what is really a simple problem of normally changing mores? Are kids today really different or are they just exhibiting a normal amount of progress which the press has exaggerated into a "movement"? Here's the quote:

Until the sixties, no one cared much about what young people thought or felt one way or the other; teenagers were expected to be seen and not heard. Oh sure, they could sow wild oats and dip into freaky life styles, and older folks smiled tolerantly, knowing that the "kids" would soon get all the nonsense out of their systems and assume their rightful roles in the mature, secure, responsibility-focused adult society.

When an enormous bunch of war babies reached their mid-teens in the early sixties, all bets were off. The "kids" had numbers on their side; to make things worse, surging prosperity had given them a purchasing power that clearly represented too much of a commercial clout to overlook.

An impasse was inevitable, and as a result of it, the adult view changed. Teenagers were no longer seen as immature but basically decent young people who were struggling toward personal identity. All those fun-filled special qualities of youth suddenly began to give off a reflection as distorted as a mirror in a horror house. Young people's sometimes fitful attempts at independence, their intense hatred of a war for which they served (and serve) as cannon-fodder, their search for personal relationships free of the encrustation of traditional social hyprocrisy, their experiments with their own kind of drugs and stimulants, were transformed into visible projections of the hot, urgent and largely repressed currents of adult America's troubled unconscious.

That's a pretty heavy thought "repressed currents of adult America's troubled unconscious." Do you buy that? Write and speak your piece.

As promised, the end of the column will briefly cover the important events that are happening to you gentlemen. To wit: DavidRanney has published his first book, "Planning and Politics in the Metropolis." DavidZuckerman is chairman of the Communications Arts Department of "The Thirteenth Year," a new educational program in Boston. Dr. Ralph Spencer Jr. has been named manager of device engineering for the Viatron Computer System Corp. of Bedford, Mass. John Beckert is business development manager for the Union and New Haven Trust Co.

J.M. Houlahan and Miss Gail-Ann O'Brien were married last September in Washington, D.C. They will be living in Bucharest, Romania, where Mike is with the USIA. Miss Rena Ann Fraboni (sister of Ron Fraboni '63, by the way) and ArtBloom were wed last September. Both the Blooms teach in Nashville. Dr. John Hinsman is on active duty with the Army in Honolulu. With him are his wife Glenda and two pre-med sons. Amy and Paul Kaplan are in Cincinnati, where Paul teaches Sociology at UC. Hank Gerfen has been promoted to vice president of Warren, Muller, Dolobowsky Advertising here in N.Y. Huey and Kathy Eicke are at the University of Alabama teaching and getting more educational degrees. And on the other coast, Gerald R. Greenfield is president of his own computer programming firm in Santa Monica. Jerry reports that Curt Deckert has his Ph.D. in geology and is underground, mining in New Mexico. Jerry wishes all the '61's a good and prosperous 1970... sounds right to me.

Secretary, 156 W. 73rd St. New York, N.Y. 10023

Treasurer, Box 804, Wall St. Station New York, N.Y. 10005