1960

There is alessonwe would all be advised to heed from the recent experience of Bob Boye: At our age, don't ignore "minor" heart conditions.

Fixing to go off to Africa, Bob agreed to undergo an angiogram on January 13. His cardiologist had told him well before he had a minor heart blockage, and might need a stent, but he wasn't alarmed. The night before the procedure, he and Nancy had 10 friends over to dinner.

The angiogram, in Bob's words, showed "all the past tests and nuclear stress test 'pretty pictures' were wrong. I had four major blockages, not a minor one."

His doctor told Bob: "Don't even think about going home." And in less than 24 hours, he underwent a quadruple bypass. Thank goodness, he's been making a fine recovery. The trip to Africa has been put off, and Bob seems quite cheerful.

Still, our dear classmate Jim Adler must have been kidding when in an e-mail he called the episode "another shameless grab for attention," and remarked: "See what happens when you don't drink enough red wine."

Meanwhile, there is the usual socializing to report. Eight classmates got together for lunch at the posh University Club in San Francisco: Bruce Hasenkamp, Hap Dunning, Axel Grabowsky, Bob Caulfield, Peter Farquhar, Rick Roesch, John Wheaton and me.

Axel brought up Iraq and a discussion ensued, with Axel and me backing the war plan and Bob and Hap expressing serious reservations. Peter was in between, and the rest did not speak.

Two weeks later, I had lunch with our classmate, criminal defense attorney Murray Janus, in Richmond, Virginia. He sagely remarked that that Texas woman who ran her husband over three times with their Mercedes for unfaithful behavior would probably have had an easier time escaping a murder conviction" had she only run him over once."

During the lunch Murray mentioned that the weather report called for eight inches of snow in Richmond that night. This was the beginning of the Blizzard of 2003. Murray later canceled plans to go that night to Charlottesville to see Duke play Virginia. My son, David, and I, however, naive Californians, blithely drove on to Appomattox, where we encountered an ice storm of memorable proportions, and had to drive back to the Virginia coast the next day rather slowly.

Jay Emery forwarded a list of the memorial books given to Baker Library in the name of the class of five of our classmates who died in the last two years. William Claxton's book, Photo-graphic Memory, was donated to the library in memory of Woody Fisher; Juan Rulfo's PedroParamo in memory of Bill Mattson, Suzaan Boettger's Earthworks: Art and Landscape of The Sixties in memory of Zoo Gazley, Karl Haglund's Inventing the Charles River in memory of Alex McGinnis and William Stapp's Portrait of the ArtWorld A Century of ART news Photographs in memory of Wes Roodhouse.

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