Class News
37 classmates recall the most memorable/influential Yale professor
April 20, 2022
Few questions posed in emails to all classmates in recent years have elicited such strong memories of our undergraduate years in the early sixties. Thirty-seven classmates replied to the question: “Who was the Yale professor who had the most influence on you during our years in Yale College?” They chose forty-five different teachers. Many of their memories were quite vivid. There is no cutoff on adding your selection to the list. We’ll capture additions as a work in progress.
Based on their acclaim over the years, we expected Harold Bloom, John Morton Blum, and Vincent Scully to appear on many lists, and they did. But there were many, many more teachers cited for their influence. In the order they were received, here are the selections:
Tony Thomson: Professor Robin Winks had a great influence on me — possibly because I was one of the first Yalies back from Vietnam, he spent a lot of time talking with me — when he realized that I didn't have a clue what to do with my life, he got me into an Oxford college — he also explained the workings of the GI Bill so I could pay for this jaunt — something the Yale financial admin totally failed to do — after Oxford I stayed in England, married an English woman, worked in investment, had three Anglo-American children — such was my working life. My encounter with Prof. Winks was as a member of the Class of ’67, having been thrown out in Sept ’63 for mischief on a glee-club tour — had I not met Winks I might well have gone back in the army as an officer — the Vietnam war was a folly but the army was honest compared to American civilian society, which I quickly despised upon my return — all of this is in Eat Your Heart Out, Ho Chi Minh.
Bam Alling: The story below is from a compilation I have written at the request of my kids. Not a Bloom, Scully, or Blum, none of whom I took, but certainly the most influential in my life to this day. I had entered Yale with the thought that if my chosen major (Mechanical Engineering) did not work out, the University was large enough so that I could switch to another major and graduate with my class. How prophetic for a 17-year-old! In the spring of my junior year, I was struggling in “Kinematics of Machines,” a course taught by Professor Morris Viedamen. He called me aside one day and said in his thick Eastern European accent “Mr. Alling, you have a decezion to make. You can be a mediocre engineer or a very good sumsing else, but you must decide because you are failing my class.” Not wanting to be “mediocre” I changed my major to Industrial Engineering, the closest thing Yale had then to a business major. It required a heavy concentration of Engineering courses, which I had already taken, and several electives which necessitated taking three courses at NYU during the summer. (I was in a class with John “Jay” Traynor, lead singer in Jay and the Americans, a fun guy who used to joke and sing softly in class.) I did graduate 11th (alphabetically) with my Yale class in 1964 and went on to the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth where I exempted most of the first-year classes due to my Yale major. This allowed me to take second-year classes for two years, earning my MBA in 1966. Professor Viedamen is one of only two professors from Yale whose name I remember. His courage in saying the uncomfortable changed my life for the better. Hopefully, this courage is still alive in today’s teachers. Thank you, Professor Viedamen!
James Park: Re your question about greatest influence, Harold Bloom in his Romantic Poets course jumps first to mind. But as I think about it, I believe I’d give the nod to John Hollander and his sophomore survey of English lit. For some reason I was allowed to skip freshman English and take the sophomore survey course in freshman year, which was terrifying at first but soon turned awe-inspiring over time with Prof. Hollander, and it gave me the push I needed to declare an Honors English major for the subsequent undergraduate years. In Grad School, where I earned a PhD in Medieval Studies, E. Talbot Donaldson's course in Chaucer was something I’ll never forget.
Ron Parlato: Harold Bloom no doubt. My Bloom story is this: I took his class in Romantic poetry and became more and more frustrated as he parsed each line of Blake, referring to the Bible, mythology, history, philosophy, and much more. The same was true of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron. Painful, torturous analysis. Why wasn’t he focusing on the romance of Romantic poetry, the magical moment as the traveler sees Mt. Blanc out of the mist and clouds? Many decades later when I began to teach literature, I realized that I was preparing my courses just like Bloom would have — careful analysis of the text, references, history, philosophy. Not a line, phrase, verse, or paragraph went without scrutiny. I decided to write to Bloom and tell him that better late than never. I finally got it, got him, and got what he was after. He wrote back with thanks and best wishes, and not an “I told you so” to be found.
Frank Kugler: James Tobin and John Blum. Tobin was on Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisors when the stimulus tax cut was proposed. In our Money and Banking class he discussed and outlined the negotiation process as well as the educational process with Congress. Blum taught an American Studies course on the 20th century. His access to the Roosevelt papers made his lectures on the Depression very insightful and more detailed than the written histories available at the time.
George Blackburn: Frank Bozyan, University Organist — loved his field and loved the students. Came from the Old Yale tradition of unceremonious gentility. Cleanth Brooks (Modern Poetry) — a quiet man of charming Southern grace, passionate about his field and about sharing it. One of the founders of the “New Criticism.”
Bill Kridel: Karl Deutsch and Brad Westerfield, professionally. Scully and Edgar Munhall for my four art collections. Osterweis for useful American history delivered amusingly and brilliantly. Teddy Mills for his grading of my challenge to his thesis of T-Group evolution.
Gene Van Loan: Vincent Scully — survey course entitled History of Art. Robin Winks — I don’t remember the name, but it was a history course about the British Commonwealth, with a particular focus on Southeast Asia. His was a unique perspective, especially in his comparisons of the differences between how the Dutch, the British, and the Japanese administered their colonial possessions in the region. Later Gene wrote: “I have to amend my selections. Mea culpa, but it came to me this morning as I was awakening (which is often when I get new thoughts) that my second choice should have been Harry Benda, not Robin Winks. Both taught non-US history. Winks did indeed teach a course on the British Commonwealth, which I took and enjoyed. However, it was Harry Benda, who taught a course on Southeast Asian history (Indonesia, Vietnam, Burma, etc.) that I found so unique, fascinating, and even useful.
Rick Hatton: Major Leon Utter, USMC, Professor of Naval Science for Marine NROTC midshipmen. Dynamic teacher of leadership, military history, and lessons applicable to contemporary geopolitical issues. Emphasized war as the final extension of diplomacy, a concept seemingly lost on many politicians since. He was ably assisted by GySgt. Majchrzak, who was killed in Vietnam.
Dan Northway: Brand Blanshard and Hans Frei certainly in philosophy and religion. Also, Alvin Novick and Ben Bouck in biology. I could go on.
Dick Berk: By and large, I thought the professors I had at Yale were disappointing. Great skill at delivery, but ultimately empty calories. One enormous exception was Neil Miller, a true giant in physiological psychology and an early pioneer in neuroscience. I worked in his lab my senior year and did a senior project under his guidance. It went so well that I decided not to go to law school or med school but to graduate school in psychology. Several years later, I graduated from the Johns Hopkins University with a Ph.D. and was to be a speaker at graduation. But shortly before graduation, I was placed under a restraining order prohibiting me from coming on campus because of my antiwar activities. My degree was mailed to me.
Syd Lea: I will nominate a certain James Boulger as my most important undergrad teacher. James who? He doesn’t trail the clouds of glory of a Bloom (whose graduate-school seminar I all but immediately dropped out of, appalled by the man’s condescension even to the most brilliant female classmates, which was flagrant), and as one who made a career as an English professor, I find that significant. You see, I did not KNOW that Professor Boulger was so good while I was taking that freshman AP English course (English 25) on poets from Chaucer to Eliot. I was busy being dazzled by Vincent Scully. But later along, both in graduate school and as a teacher myself, I came to reckon what I’d learned, and as it turned out, Boulger’s non-self-celebrating approach had lodged things in my mind far more surely than had the more theatrical faculty celebrities of the time. Though I’m not sure I succeeded more than most if the time, I concluded that I wanted to impart some thoughts and stimulate some discussion about the work of the poets and not about my own importance, such as it may ever have been. This is less a knock on the celebs than it is praise for a man who, like many others, I am sure, whom I never knew, walked a more humble path. In life as in Letters, a little humility never hurt anyone.
Jim Baxter: Vincent Scully, a passionate spellbinding lecturer, who introduced me to the history of art.
Charlie Thomson: Victor Brombert. Four languages. International star who became Princeton head of the French Department. Also, very kind and nice to a freshman who mistakenly took his advanced course in French novel. Most classmates either had a French parent or a French nanny.
Stephen Greenblatt: The teacher who wound up having the greatest effect upon me was not one of the celebrated superstar performers but rather the English Department’s rather quiet, saturnine Alvin Kernan. In my junior year I took Kernan’s seminar on British satire, in the course of which I read his book, The Cankered Muse. I was not particularly interested in the Renaissance satirists who were the subjects of his study, but I hugely admired the way the book was written, and I asked him to supervise my honors thesis on Huxley, Waugh, and Orwell. I do not think I can bear to look back on the thesis — I know it is full of blunders of many kinds, including a slavish imitation of Kernan’s style, and Kernan must certainly have known this as well. But — and I think this is greatly to his credit — he let me run along energetically without much in the way of intervention. Kernan once told me a story that encapsulated for me his peculiar combination of toughness and delicacy. During World War II, he lied about his age and enlisted in the navy. He was, he said, on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean, loading bombs onto planes. He looked around and as far as he could see on all sides and extending to the farthest point on the horizon there were other US ships; planes were flying overhead; he knew then that he was in the midst of an immense battle. (It was what became known as the Battle of Midway.) The bombs, he said, were stored at the very bottom of the ship; they were loaded onto a lift that would carry them up to the flight deck where he was standing. As he looked down, a shaft of sunlight penetrated into the depth of the ship and lit up three yellow bombs that had been loaded onto the lift. He told me that he said to himself, “I need to hold onto this single image, to possess it and never let it go. This will be for me the emblem of war that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.” I cannot adequately explain the effect that this anecdote had upon me, but in addition to illuminating something meaningful about him, it has stayed with me as a way to deepen my understanding of the way the writers I’ve spent my career studying — Raleigh, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the like — turned moments in their swirling, restless lives into poetic form.
Van Lanckton: In our senior year, I participated in a seminar of eight students with Rev. William Sloane Coffin and Rabbi Richard Israel. Four students were Christian and four were Jewish. I was one of the Christians. That seminar was my first conscious beginning of a path that led to my conversion to Judaism three years later, my active participation in Jewish life for all the years since then, and my ordination as a Rabbi in 2009 after six years of intensive study at Hebrew College, where I currently serve as Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees and Executive Vice President of the Hebrew College Clergy Alumni Association, which I founded in 2008. I regret I no longer have notes or a vivid memory of the discussions with Coffin and Israel and the other students, but I do know that the path I followed after that seminar has led to a vitally fulfilling life.
Rich Peck: Favorite professor(s): two Harrys — Harry Rudin and Harry Benda, both professors of history. Professor Rudin emphasized the importance of following world affairs, especially via daily reading of The New York Times, and noted (this was in 1960) that a key determinant of world affairs was oil, with developments to be followed closely. Professor Benda, professor of southeast Asian history, was notable both for his teaching style and one message in particular. His style was to begin the class very formally, neatly buttoned up and with his clipped Czech accent, then gradually winding up into his presentation until his coat was off, sleeves rolled up, and tie at half-mast, striding passionately back and forth. The message I recall particularly was that not everyone bought the US's idealistic rationale for what it did and always placed their own interests first.
Neil Hoffmann: Got my head spinning. Most memorable faculty Vince Scully, John Blum, RWB Lewis and senior-year painter Neil Welliver and sculptor Robert Engman. Both went to Penn in the Fall of 1964, as I did. I was encouraged to scroll through the photo collection.
Laurie Kleinberg (surviving spouse of Joel Kleinberg): Joel always talked about the greatest lesson he learned at Yale from I believe Professor Henry Moore. Not sure if this was undergrad or law school, but the lesson was “The answer is always both!” Joel used this motto not only in his practice as a trial lawyer, but in our family. It’s nice to be in touch with Joel’s class!
Bill Chandler: Far and away my favorite professor was Philosophy of Science teacher Norwood Hanson. Norwood, who had Ph.D.s in both Philosophy and Physics, taught a course called, simply, The Philosophy of Science. He was an engaging guy (stud) who rode his motorcycle to class, tromped into class with his boots on, and totally engaged us in the subject matter. He was brilliant, so fun and effective in his teaching style and made learning about the subject so entertaining and real. Norwood's background was equally fascinating. He flew fighter jets for the Marines in WW2. He was an amateur boxing champion. And he once buzzed the Yale Bowl during halftime, flying his private plane down out of the sky as if he was about to fly between the goal posts, but thankfully pulling up at the last second. I'm thinking that he may have died, possibly in a plane crash, but maybe I'm confusing him with Harry Chapin. I'll check it out. Anyway, I learned more useful stuff from him and had more fun doing it than in any other course. Served us wine during our final class.
Alan McFarland: Lewis Perry Curtiss and Joseph Toy Curtiss in History, the Arts, and Letters.
Tony Lavely: Harold Bloom and Vincent Scully were both memorable and influential for me, but for very different reasons. I adored Scully, and I feared Bloom. I majored in English Literature, and took three courses from Bloom: English 25, Romantic Poetry, and Modern Poetry. I never took an English course in prose. The thought never occurred to me to contact Harold Bloom again, but I did read every one of his books over the years. I was most touched by Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles which was published posthumously, and I read it shortly before my wife died in 2021. Scully was the extrovert to Bloom’s introvert. In 1977, when I was President of the Yale Club of Chicago, I organized a walking tour of Oak Park IL, arguably the greatest assemblage of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture on the planet. Scully accepted our invitation to keynote the event from Wright’s Unity Temple; then we had cocktails in Wright’s studio. I brought along my textbook of Modern Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright, which Scully wrote. He inscribed it to me: “For Tony, in Oak Park, September 1977. Vince.”
Andy Villalon: J. J. Pollitt with whom I had one of my favorite courses, the Introduction to Classical Civilization. I later sat in on his course on Classical Archaeology. And if I am correct, he was later a dean of Yale College. C. Bradford Welles, the grand old man of the Classics Department who played a major role in getting me accepted to Yale Graduate School. J. H. “Jack” Hexter who, while not my dissertation director, I look on as my principal academic mentor. We shared a fascination with Machiavelli, and we became friends late in his life. His wife was also a cool lady. John Boswell, who generously took over as my dissertation director long after I had fallen out of the Ph.D. program and made it possible to get my degree.
Dave Johnson: Although my major was history, my two most impressive and influential teachers were in literature. George Fayen gave a seminar which required many essays, and his comments on those essays improved my style of writing. He knew I was in the Glee Club. I remember especially one comment "Less tenor, more bass." Richard Sewall taught a class in tragedy. I still refer to his book The Vision of Tragedy. This summer I will teach a class on Arthur Miller’s tragedies, and I’m sure I will be passing on some of Professor Sewall’s thoughts on tragedy.
Roger Lewis: Every time I get up to introduce a speaker, teach a class, read in church (you get the idea), I am thankful for Rollin G. Osterweis whose History and Practice of American Oratory made a lasting impression on me.
Sam Francis: Professor of Philosophy Norwood Russell Hanson. I was forced by Yale’s distributional requirements to take a year of Philosophy in senior year. I consider Philosophy a waste of time, but you gotta do what you gotta do. I took a one-semester course titled “Philosophy of Science.” I don’t remember a single thing about the course, but the professor was remarkable. Here follows a passage from a web page which describes him. It was written by a Yalie in the Class of 1967 who characterized Hanson as “philosopher, scholar, and wildman.” Hanson died in 1967 when his Bearcat crashed in dense fog en route to Ithaca, New York.
Can we describe Professor Norwood Russell Hanson in a phrase or two? The answer is no; not remotely possible. I would like to call him a friend of mine. We flew places together, and he borrowed my airplane many times. I should have tried to coax some aviation stories out of him; I heard a few, but most of them came later, from other people. He was an academic and an aviator, and I only knew him as the latter. We shared the passion: while mine was nascent, his was full-blown, virulent, and contagious.
Born in 1924, Russ Hanson soloed in 1940 at the age of 16, and by the age of 19 he was a Marine fighter pilot flying off the carrier Franklin, closing in on Japan in the last year or two of World War II. He had 2500+ hours, mostly in Corsairs. Hanson told me that after one sortie he came back to the carrier and it wasn’t there, so he landed on another carrier. The deck was so full the crew pushed his airplane over the side. At one time he was assigned as a test pilot for a facility that repaired Navy fighter planes. It must have been in the San Francisco Bay area, because he got into trouble for looping the Golden Gate Bridge. He also told me that the test flying was mostly boring, so he buzzed a nearby Air Force base inverted. Trouble was he flew under a bomber that was landing and they read his numbers off the bottom of his airplane!
After the war Hanson earned degrees from Chicago, Columbia, Oxford, and Cambridge. He was a concert-class musician, rode a huge Harley, and had a disassembled Jaguar SS100 in his basement. His specialty was the philosophy of science, and if you google his name today you will find all kinds of incomprehensible stuff, but you won’t find what I’m going to tell you about right here. There were whisperings that he was lured to Yale with a $40,000 a year salary (which you can reasonably multiply by ten or more to get the equivalent dollars today. Tuition, room, and board was $2500 in the mid-1960s).
Beyond all the academic accolades Professor Hanson owned and flew a Grumman F8F-2 Bearcat, the fastest prop-driven fighter ever built. He delighted in buzzing the Yale Bowl during football games. It sounded like rolling thunder, and the hair on my arms still stands on end. Of course he got into trouble for this too. Professor Hanson felt that the Bearcat was the epitome of industrial art and when well-flown (by him, naturally), it was educational, and we should applaud his efforts on our behalf. I thought it was great! He had a streak of arrogance, but he wore it perfectly. Personally, I found him extraordinarily polite and humble. I guess he had a dual persona, and I only knew one of them.
I first became acquainted with the professor when his airplane caught fire at the New Haven airport. He was cranking the engine and raw gas was streaming down the sides of the airplane. When the engine fired the flames reached all the way to the tail. Hanson closed the canopy and kept cranking. The engine started fitfully and blew the fire out. Fire trucks came and there was a lot of excitement, but Russ behaved like this was no big deal; it happened quite frequently.
You don’t have to be much younger than me to have never seen a Bearcat fly, so I am going to describe what the hangar rats saw when Professor Hanson came to the airport to fly his airplane. Hanson would start up the Bearcat, usually without the histrionics of fire engulfing the airplane. With the engine barking and popping, he’d taxi deliberately to the first intersection on runway 19 (it was 19 at New Haven in those days), backtaxi to the very end, and swing around facing south. Set the power well above idle, and just sit there. He basically “took” the runway and nobody challenged him for it. Hanson told me once that the engine could easily drag the airplane with the brakes locked, so the power was usually set just below that threshold. He seemed to sit there interminably, but eventually everything must have been satisfactory because the brakes were released and the power came up quickly and smoothly. Today, fifty years later, I can see every movement like it was burned into my memory. The sound was magnificent! It swelled and assaulted the ears. I can’t imagine that anyone on or near the airport was not watching. Off the ground in 300-400 feet, maybe less. Gear up. Nose pushing over. I’d like to say the huge prop cleared the runway by no more than two feet all the way to the end, but it was probably more like four or five. By the end of the runway the plane was level and going really FAST. Pull to a forty-five degree angle, very short delay, and then left aileron rolls until the plane was out of sight, only a black smudge of cremated fuel marking its path. WOW! “The essence of exhilaration!” Russ would have said in his clipped British accent.
Of course everybody who watched that performance knew he’d be coming back pretty soon. A couple of whifferdills, an octoflugeron or two, and all workaday groundbound cares are erased. Not to mention the prodigious amount of fuel the ‘Cat could use up when flown the way Russ liked to fly. A black pinprick in the distance, gear down, a graceful nose-high arc to a carrier-style kerplunk on the numbers. Roll out, almost no brakes, taxi to the hardstand, bring it up to 1200 rpm for thirty seconds to scavenge the oil, idle-cut-off, prop spins to a stop. Now you can breathe normally again!
Ted Jones: Yikes — how to choose!!! Bloom, Martz, Scully, Turekian, so many others that challenged me, and were interesting lecturers to boot. I had Professor Turekian for Regional US Geology (with Holcombe), a graduate-level course. T. and I were the only undergrads. It was a fascinating course, and he was incredibly knowledgeable, but a brash, tough SOB. he would yell at the grad students if they were not on point, and he did not give us poor undergrads much leeway either. He might have thrown erasers. but we learned geology for sure. i think i still have my term paper on the Geology of the Laurentian Shield.
Patrick Caviness: It was a toss-up between John Morton Blum and Vincent Scully. Blum was an honorary member of Book & Snake. I loved calling him Professor Blum during classes and John at the Hall at our Thursday night dinners. Both men created my lifelong love and lifelong pursuit of knowledge about architecture and American history that has stayed with me my entire life. When I look back over what I read, what I care about, what stirred me, it is always those two subjects. To this day those two men speak to me. I recall their words, their views. They have shaped my thoughts about their fields, in my politics and in my appreciation of the design of buildings, towns, and cities. Their opinions formed the foundations of all my ideas, all my understandings.
Owen O’Donnell: My story about a professor at Yale involves Vincent Scully. My bursary job was in the audio/visual department and I was assigned to show the slides in Scully's famous History of Western Art course. Once, when I was too slow in showing the next slide, Scully grabbed an eraser from the lectern and threw it at the projection booth. The booth was a long way from the stage, so of course it didn't reach me in the booth. But it certainly got my attention, and I was never late again. One other time, Scully, who used a long pointer to identify the area he was talking about, turned from the class and thrashed the pointer at the screen very aggressively. In fact, so aggressively that the pointer went through the screen and tore a six- or seven-foot hole in the screen. He ignored the hole in the screen and completed his lecture. He was quite a showman, and I loved auditing his class and learning about Western Art. He was one exciting teacher, and I learned a lot from the booth.
Michelle Mead (surviving spouse of John Armor: I remember John telling me how much he enjoyed a course written by the legendary writer of All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren, who was a visiting professor at Yale in John’s senior year. The course title was, “The Theory and Practice of Fiction.” Student writing was evaluated via individual “private conferences” with the students. “Warren always arrived and departed on time,” John said. “Not very warm and fuzzy.”
Tony Lee: John Blum, American History. I had many teachers who turned on light bulbs in my head, but John Blum deserves special thanks. I took his course in our junior year which was too late for me to transfer to being a history major. But Blum started me on a lifelong interest in history. I start my days reading Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. She is a history professor at Boston College and always gives a historical perspective or connection for her topic of the day. I thoroughly enjoy her observations just like I did with John Blum.
Butch Hetherington: John Morton Blum was my favorite and most influential professor. He got me into Yale Law School.
John Howells: Professor Charles Prouty, in modern European Literature, took an interest in me and tried to help me.
Joe Wishcamper: My favorite professor was Bob Neville, who taught “19th Century American Philosophy.” He was a Methodist minister who married Carol and me in 1966 in the Harvard Chapel. He was only three years older than me and is still alive. Bob went on to become the first Protestant to be hired by the Philosophy Department at Fordham University (a Jesuit school), where he hired me to be the second Protestant teacher they hired.
Later, Joe emailed Bob Neville: “Hi Bob: So many years since we were in touch! I wanted you to know that a post on my class website reports on responses to the question, ‘Who was your favorite professor at Yale?’ Here is my response. I’d like also to congratulate you on your outstanding career. If you are in the Boston area, I would love to catch up over coffee the next time I am there, which is usually every two or three months. I think of you and Beth often and hope you are well. Recalling fond memories, Joe.”
Ed Gaffney: My favorite professor was definitely Horace Winchell, professor of Mineralogy. His informative and entertaining lectures saved me from a life of whatever PoliSci majors do and brought me down to earth. He had a large collection of neckties and began each lecture with a discourse on the symmetry aspects of the day’s selection. To this day, I can still find myself transfixed before filling a tumbler with cold water from the fridge — there are 24 flutes on the outside, 3 on the inside to make for ease in stacking, and 4 gaps in the rim around the bottom so water/air can move in or out from behind that rim. Maybe I'm OCD, maybe I’m just a mineralogist.
Francis Snyder: The Yale professor who had the most influence on my life was William J. (Bill) Foltz, professor of African studies and political science. A true innovator, he had a major effect on Yale in his areas of interest. In my junior year, I took his course on African literature, and he and his course changed my life. Not only had I found a topic for my senior thesis, but also I was awarded a Bates Fellowship in French and chose to do fieldwork in Senegal and Mali. Bill also kindly employed me as his research assistant, and we also had a one-on-one seminar my senior year. After Yale, I went to Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship, and after a detour via Harvard Law School back to Paris for a Ph.D. in African anthropology. Bill then suggested the Yale Law School program in Law and Modernization for me to try to make sense of my field notes from Senegal. A different discipline, but in location and contacts at least much influenced by Bill’s book about the Mali Federation. As I now know, having been a professor for more than 50 years, Bill was an ideal role model, advisor, and supervisor, a real bridge-builder who has inspired me throughout my life. But he was more: A few years ago I read the stunning, moving memoir and family history by Anne-Marie Foltz, titled Survival Skills: Norway, Anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust: A Family Story. She was a distinguished teacher and public health consultant who also taught at Yale, and I had the pleasure of meeting her twice. Her incredible book not only demonstrated her courage and determination but also revealed the family, outdoor, and adventurous side of Bill Foltz.
Dick duPont: Dick Gagliardi, our freshman-year hockey coach in 1961, was both my most memorable and influential mentor. The subject was "How to play winning hockey." We went 12 and 2 that season. Coach "Gags" was literally just beginning his college coaching career at Yale. And in 1960, we freshman were doing the same as players. That was a fierce bonding agent. Simply put, he was an outstanding coach. All of us saw that instantly, and we all gave our full measure of desire and effort in return. But it was he who drew that out of us. He had the resolve, the discipline — the leadership. And he never wavered. After his Yale debut with our team, Dick coached four more Yale freshman teams, then was named head coach of the Yale varsity hockey team. After that, Dick went on to teach high-school mathematics and coach Hamden High School’s Green Dragons varsity hockey team, winning the Connecticut State Championship in the 1988-1989 season. In 1993, he became athletic director at Sacred Heart Academy, and taught there as well. The following quote from Dick’s address at his final retirement from Sacred Heart Academy speaks volumes about his passion and leadership as a player, coach, and mentor:
“Success in sports is not measured by the scoreboard, the trophies on your shelf, or the news clippings in your scrapbook. Success means loving to play as much at 60 as you do at 16. This love will last when you respect yourself, your teammates, and your opponents.”
Bob Rands: Harold Bloom and Vincent Scully were both memorable and influential for me, but for very different reasons. I adored Scully, and I feared Bloom. I majored in English Literature, and took three courses from Bloom: English 25, Romantic Poetry, and Modern Poetry. I never took an English course in prose. The thought never occurred to me to contact Harold Bloom again, but I did read every one of his books over the years. I was most touched by Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles which was published posthumously, and I read it shortly before my wife died in 2021. Scully was the extrovert to Bloom’s introvert.
I was going to pick my senior economics discussion leader James Tobin, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, my major. Never got around to it. I came to Yale thinking I would be a math/science major. BUT — While I went to a small private boys school in Greenwich where about half the senior class still gets into top colleges, I was not well prepared for Yale. No calculus(!), limited writing classes — at least I was good at vocabulary!!! So I took a one year introductory calculus course, which I could have done in a month. My roommate Chuck and I took advanced calc sophomore year. We lasted about two weeks since we had never had intermediate calc. End of my math/science career.
At the end of sophomore year I had enough credits for Psych and Econ. Majored in economics, went to Wharton for my MBA and upon graduation got an investment job on Park Avenue NYC. I read a wide range of books: history, poetry, science, novels, mysteries. One book I picked up about 5-6 years ago, was Bloom's Western Canon. Took a few years to read since I used it as a source book for more reading. Probably read something by almost everyone he mentions. But never tried Proust.