1960

Reed Browning sent a factoid, to wit, his father and mine were ’30 classmates of 85 years ago. That’s about 40 percent of the time the United States has been around.

Eric Sailer sent a pen-and-ink (remember that?) letter to report on last year’s Princeton football game. He and Joanne sat near Jim Adler, the other ’60 he could locate, to watch a “poorly played” first half metastasize into a cliff-hanger second half with a win and a chunk of the Ivy title. (Oddly, John Goyette reported, “I found a spontaneous, very animated class of 1960 rooting section consisting of Julie and Dudley Smith, Eric Anderson and Beth, Dick Chase, Roger Hanlon, Sailer and me. Bill Gundy dropped by for a moment, but seemed to be on a mission.”) Eric also lamented our lethargic cheer-persons and the seven-member street band, which, after watching a halftime show with the complete Princeton uniformed ensemble entertaining, disappeared after the victory of the best “D” team seen in years and so no parade through town. As my late father used to observe, “It ain’t like it used to be and it probably never was.”

You read about it here first: That’s George Liebmann’s book, The Fall of the House of Speyer, that received a rave review (except for the footnotes, I am not kidding) in The Wall Street Journal. The book silently asks the question, “Who will finance the next subway building venture when Bernie has taxed away the wealthy’s money?”

Bill Evans passed away. He reveled in the poetry of Shakespeare, Blake, Keats and Frost; pretty good company.

The kerfuffle over the Black Lives Matter caper last fall has produced a plethora of commentary over a wide spectrum of opinion, so I perused the class’s 50th reunion book and discovered the following on page 191: “Dickey, our president, announced to us we’d be given the opportunity to succeed by being given the chance to fail….The point of our education was to produce capable and civilized men who could think, solve problems and behave like civilized human beings.” I’d add women and leave it at that.

300 Grove St., Rutland, VT 05701; (802) 775-3716; jmm00033@comcast.net