All I really need to know,
I learned on the 1964 class website

April 8, 2021

Classmates and friends:

All I really need to know, I learned on the 1964 class website. Not really … but it’s fun to see what’s there. Sam Francis, our venerable webmaster (the “Publisher”) and Tony Lavely, your Class Secretary (the “Editor”), get many emails thanking us for what we post on the class website … and we appreciate those words of gratitude. But … it’s still frustrating how few classmates ever even look at the website. We know; we’re watching! Hardly a day goes by when one of us doesn’t get an email asking a question whose answer is on the website.

• Did Tim Bachmeyer die?
• Is Tom Lovejoy in our class?
• What’s the title of Edward Massey’s new book?
• Do you have Chas Freeman’s email address?
• Is the Yale Golf Course open?
• And many more …

In Memoriam is the most frequently visited section of our class website, a trend that will no doubt continue. There were 234 unique page visits to In Memoriam last week, not necessarily all from classmates. Sam and I are proudest of one fact. There are no departed 1964 classmates (247 right now) who are not remembered with an obituary or remembrance on our class website. Nobody is not remembered! If families do not send us an obituary or one is not published online, we write it ourselves. And many living classmates contribute with remembrances and/or Mory’s Memorial Bricks. There are 46 surviving spouses on our email list, and often they are the first to thank us.

It’s not like this is “homework.” It’s just fun keeping up with the many things that 1964 classmates are doing. I find it inspiring. There are many, many websites that I navigate every day, just to keep up with things. Yet, there are five that I routinely check on Sunday (arbitrary day), so I can head into the next week with certain “boxes” checked. Make our class website a weekly habit for yourself and share it with other classmates.

The 1964 class website is the envy of many Yale classes. In fact, Sam has coached three or four of them on how to set up a class website just like ours. Here’s our joint presentation to other class officers at a YAA Assembly in 2019. We called it “How the sausage gets made.”

Before I finish this, I call your attention to the News section on the website, which has 26 new articles and stories on it in the past two months. These articles and stories are too long to include in Class Notes, but they still shed light on what classmates are doing. You can read about: Bob Buchanan, Chas Freeman, Owen O’Donnell, Dennis Upper, John Wylie, Terry Holcombe, Jon McBride, Tim Breen, Steve Klingelhofer, Tony Lavely, Kai Lassen, Edward Massey, Jan Truebner, Chris Getman, Stephen Greenblatt, Pat Caviness, Tim Bachmeyer, Handsome Dan XIX (aka Kingman), Rick Kaminsky, and Bruce Warner, to name just a few.

Lastly, I want to remind you that the pilot event of our new “1964 Authors Book Club” will launch via Zoom on May 27, with Edward Massey and Jan Truebner. Register here if you haven’t already done so. It’s not in his book, but Massey had an actuarial itch he wanted to scratch. Recently, he told me:

• 77% of our matriculating class born in 1942 are still alive
• 57% of U.S. males born in 1942 are still alive
• Bulldogs win again!

Nick Danforth sent along the following New Yorker cartoon and commented: “You're welcome to use this classic in your column, or in your tireless quest for '64 stories. I found it in my dad's old Class of '28 files. It might well have been published in the New Yorker, where James Stevenson was extremely popular.”

Cheers,