Class News
Angus Gillespie ’64 reflects on our 60th Reunion
June 6, 2024
Angus Gillespie ’64 attended our 60th Reunion with his wife Rowena and wrote the following memoir of that reunion.
Angus is a Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. His web page characterizes him as “a folklorist who has studied myths, legends, tales, and ballads found in the United States. His courses in folklore range from historic figures such as Buffalo Bill, Casey Jones, Calamity Jane, and Molly Pitcher to contemporary issues such as urban legends and conspiracy theories.”
Yale Reunion, May 2024
by Angus Gillespie ’64
In January of 2023, I got an email request from Yale classmate Jerry Flannelly asking for help in recruiting my classmates from Jonathan Edwards Residential College (JE) to attend the 60th Yale Reunion for the Class of 1964, scheduled for the week of May 23-26, 2024. Over the years, I had been in the habit of attending most all of the class reunions including the landmark ones of the 25th reunion and the 50th reunion, but this was the first time I had been asked to help with recruitment. I readily agreed, and I was named Captain for Jonathan Edwards Residential College (JE) recruiting.
By way of background, I should explain the idea behind Yale’s system of residential colleges. The idea was to take an incoming class of some 1,000 students, and for the first year the class would be lodged in dormitories on the Old Campus. Upon completion of the first year, they would be sent to twelve different residential colleges. This meant that each residential college would get about eighty sophomores added to about eighty juniors and eighty seniors for a total student population of about 240. Thus, the students would have something like a small college experience within a major research university. Typically, each residential college was built with a box of dormitory buildings surrounding an interior courtyard. The surrounding buildings were not just dormitories. They also housed a home for the faculty head of the residential college as well as a dining hall, a library, and a lounge. Typically, a student would form close friendships with the others within that residential college.
Shortly after agreeing to become the JE reunion captain, I got an email from Bill Galvin who was in charge of assembling the 60th Reunion Book. He urged me to update my contact information and basic biographical information. He then asked for a short personal essay of 500 words or less on a subject important to me. I realized that I could not possibly summarize my life in that short word count. Instead, I would have to seize upon a strictly limited and timely topic. I decided to focus on my memoir writing. I told of how my eightieth birthday was a wake-up call to get started. I told of my effort to find the time and the self-discipline to get started. Implied in my brief essay was the suggestion that my classmates might choose to do the same thing.
I began my recruitment assignment with cheerful willingness. I was given a list of some thirty-five classmates. I remembered most all of them. There was a chart listing name, email address, landline telephone number, cell phone number, and address. The chart also had space for those few who had already responded to a number of questions—Coming to reunion? Spouse coming? Essay submitted? Attended 55th reunion? Attended 50th reunion? As the Reunion Captain for JE, I sent out a series of blast emails urging classmates to submit their personal essays for the Reunion Book. I also urged them to register for the event. After each email blast, I would follow up with individual telephone calls.
I soon learned that this recruitment business would not be easy. Some classmates had no listed email addresses. Other classmates had no listed landlines or cell phone numbers. Of those who did have email addresses, few responded. There were many setbacks. I began calling the landlines of those classmates that I knew best in September of 2023. I remember calling the landline of my good friend William C. “Bill” Hogue. His daughter picked up the phone. I asked for Bill. She told me that he had died a few days before. Imagine my shock and fear. Clearly, he had been alive when my list was compiled. This death was a recent event. That was my worst experience, but there were many other setbacks.
One of my classmates , who was perfectly healthy and friendly, told me that his life was full and that he was just too busy to take time out to attend the reunion. Two of my classmates, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, said that they were not attending because Yale had become “too woke,” by which I took them to mean that Yale was too liberal and too politically correct. Another classmate said that he could not attend because his wife was too ill. In yet another case the classmate’s wife told me that her husband had been hospitalized for memory care. In a similar case, the wife told me that her husband had been hooked up to oxygen and could not travel.
It was a long haul. Every month, the recruitment chairman would post a list of the number of recruits for each residential college. In the end, my residential college, Jonathan Edward, with five attendees, came in last place. It was an embarrassing defeat. I was not used to losing. But the recruitment chairman never blamed me. He knew that I had really tried. Perhaps there was a lesson here. Men in their eighties, and that includes me, have difficulty traveling.
Finally, the time for the reunion arrived. On Thursday, May 23, 2024, Rowena and I set out for New Haven. Rowena kindly took charge of the driving. The trip was only 130 miles in length, but the weekday traffic was very heavy. However, the Yale Reunion was, as we knew, very well organized. We parked at the Pierson-Sage Garage, and we took the shuttle to the Timothy Dwight Residential College (TD), the headquarters for our class reunion. We checked in and received our reunion schedules, wristbands, name tags, class access cards, and class souvenirs. Early on, we had decided to book our lodging right there in one of the dorm rooms at TD. The accommodations were basic with bunk beds and a shared bathroom. But we knew from experience that this was the way to go. The class activities, cocktails, and buffets were under huge tents set up in the TD courtyard. We could just walk out from our room and participate. No need to find transportation to and from nearby expensive hotels.
The next morning, on Friday, we took the tour of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It serves as repository for archives, manuscripts, and rare books. I had long admired the architecture of the building from the outside. It is a six-story steel building with “windows” of translucent Vermont marble panels, clad in granite on the exterior. But this was the first time I had actually visited the interior. I was immediately struck by the effectiveness of those marble panels. Only an inch and half thick, they allowed the sun to produce a soft glow on the inside. There was an interesting special exhibition of the documents of the renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Perhaps the most memorable moment was to see an actual copy of the Gutenberg Bible.
Next, we went to the Yale University Art Gallery lecture hall to hear the talk on “The Purposes of a Liberal Education” by Dean Pericles Lewis. It was a clever talk organized around four words, all starting with the letter “C.” The concept was officially described in the announcement as “conversation with others on intellectual matters, development of personal character, participation in the community, and preparation for citizenship.” As a professor myself, I was especially interested in what he had to say about conversation. Over the years, I have increasingly realized that it is not enough to go into the classroom and lecture. It is also important, from time to time, to pause, to listen, to question, and to promote conversation on the topic at hand.
That afternoon was a rather high point for me. I participated in the “Personal Writing and Publishing Workshop” organized by classmate Edward Massey at the William L. Harkness Hall. Ed had recruited five classmates, each with a different angle, to talk about their writing and publishing history. It was a diverse panel with examples of poetry, fiction, history, blog writing, and memoir. Ed realized that those in the audience were not so much interested in our writing as they were in our publishing. The underlying theme was “How do I get published?”
When it was my turn to speak, I told the audience that it is easy to brag about publishing. If I want to brag, I can talk about publishing a half-dozen books with a major university press, one of which became a New York Times bestseller. But I said, “Let’s be honest. Getting published has a lot to do with luck and random events.” I went on to explain that, early in my career, I was desperate to get my dissertation published. It was a biography of folklorist George Korson, who had collected the songs and stories of the American coal miners. I had been turned down about seventy times, and I had just about given up. Then a friend suggested that I approach Penn State University Press. That was my lucky break. The director of the Penn State Press was John M. Pickering. As it turned out, his father, M.J. Pickering, had worked with George Korson to put on the second National Folk Festival in Chattanooga, Tennessee, back in 1935. In other words, this was a lucky break. The editor had first-hand knowledge about the importance of my topic.
The next morning on Saturday, Rowena and I attended the talk on “Exquisite Loneliness” by Richard Deming, a poet and senior lecturer in English for Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. It was held at Linsly-Chittenden Hall on the Old Campus. The talk was based on his new book, This Exquisite Loneliness (Viking, 2023). Deming spoke openly and honestly about his own struggles with loneliness, and then shared brief passages from his six human sources. These included the Austrian painter Egon Schiele, the American screenwriter and television producer Rod Serling, the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, the celebrated black female writer Zora Neal Hurston, the philosopher Walter Benjamin, and the photojournalist Walker Evans. I was especially interested in the thoughts of Walker Evans because I was familiar with his work documenting the effects of the Great Depression in rural America. Deming gave his audience much to think about. I had at least one comforting takeaway… Yes, loneliness can be very painful. But there is a positive side to all this. It is called solitude. There are times when it is okay to be alone, especially for those of us who want to write.
Later that morning, we attended the talk on “Architecture, Memory, and the City” by Professor Elihu Rubin in the same room at Linsly-Chittenden Hall. It was a popular topic, and the room was packed with an attentive audience. Rubin focused on the City of New Haven, Connecticut. He addressed the main question posed by the printed program, “What forces give shape to the built environment?” He basically showed how city planning has adapted to the widespread use of the automobile. Planners at New Haven were keen on linking the city to the nearby superhighways. Urban freeways re-shaped the city grid and created an urgent need for parking garages. I certainly related to the talk because I have seen the same forces at work in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Finally, Rubin touched upon the currently unused Goffe Street Armory built in New Haven in 1930. He discussed the possibility of adaptive reuse of the facility. For example, it could be used for affordable housing or perhaps as a shelter for the homeless.
That afternoon, Rowena and I attended the workshop “Retirement Community: Pros, Cons, and Issues.” It took place at the William L. Harkness Hall, and the discussion was led by classmate Jon McBride, who had written about the difficulties of downsizing and the exhausting work of looking for a retirement community in the Reunion Book. We learned a lot of new information and new terminology at this workshop. Most of the discussion in this workshop was about the CCRCs or Continuing Care Retirement Communities. These are also known as LPCs or Life Plan Communities. Basically, these places offer a continuum. You can start out with independent living. Then, as your needs change, you can move on to assisted living. If conditions worsen, you can move on to skilled nursing care. The advantage of these communities is that you never have to move if your needs change. We learned that these communities provide peace of mind about health care, but they are very expensive.
Our takeaway from this workshop was that a better choice for us might well be Independent Senior Living Communities, also known as Retirement Communities. These are far more affordable that those CCRCs. These are places for adults 55 years of age and older who do not require assistance with daily activities. Typically, they come with a small, manufactured home. They also come with a number of attractive amenities such as a clubhouse, a swimming pool, and a gym. The salespeople are quick to point out that you no longer have to mow the lawn or shovel the snow. But there are downsides. They are typically small in terms of square footage. And the lots tend to be small. Also, they do not come with a garage. We both came away from this workshop with quite a bit of new information. We did not make any decisions, but we began the process of researching the alternatives in earnest.
Perhaps the most important takeaway from the Yale reunion workshop on retirement was the realization that, before moving anywhere, one must first deal with downsizing. When I got home, I sent off for the book Thoreau’s Downsize Planning for Seniors by Philip Baker. The author wisely quoted Henry David Thoreau as saying, “With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.” I began to realize that it was likely that I would pre-decease Rowena, and that it would be unfair to her and my two sons to leave them with a lifetime of unsorted stuff. The book gave me some practical suggestions such as making separate lists for what to keep, what to give away, what to throw away, and what to put in storage. I realized that I should soon give my two sons important keepsakes such as the military commissions and medals of my ancestors. None of this is easy, but it must be done.
The Yale 60th Reunion for the Class of 1964 came to its formal end with the class dinner buffet on Saturday evening of May 25, 2024. There were dozens of tables with white tablecloths and bottles of wines underneath large tents in the Timothy Dwight Residential College courtyard. Rowena and I shared a table with classmate Ted Wagner and his wife Eileen from Ridgewood, New Jersey. Ted shared with us that he was a retired lawyer. He dealt with trusts and estates, and he still is consulted by his clients from time to time. However, he is legally unable to charge for his advice because he is retired. He said this with a bit of humor rather than resentment. There were speeches acknowledging those classmates who had made sizable donations to offset the cost of the reunion. The evening moved on with a dance party with the Bales-Gitlin band, a five-piece group with a background at the Yale School of Music.
On Sunday morning, Rowena and I took the shuttle to St. Thomas More Chapel for the 10:00am mass. Historically, Yale was affiliated with the Congregational Church, but in 2005 it became non-denominational. But St. Thomas More is an active chapel for those who identify as Roman Catholics. After the Mass, we were invited to a brunch where we met up with classmate Soren West and his wife Bonnie, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. This was a happy coincidence since Soren had been a presenter at that earlier book-publishing workshop, where he discussed his book Northbound with Theo. This is his published account of his hike along the Appalachian trail back in 2016 with his golden retriever Theo.
Shortly afterwards, we hit the road for the return trip to our home in East Brunswick. Rowena did the driving. We stopped once to charge the Tesla and continued southward. We had some very good luck with light traffic. We were prepared to deal with the usual bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway and the George Washington Bridge. Imagine our surprise when all of that went smoothly. Perhaps it was because this was the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. We were lucky not to have driven home on Monday.
All in all, the Yale Reunion weekend was a rewarding experience. Later I learned from Class Secretary Tony Lavely that our class set some kind of a record. He wrote, “For our 60th Reunion, all roads led to Timothy Dwight College. Attending were 163 classmates accompanied by 121 spouses and friends, 284 in all, traveling from 3 countries, 28 states, and the District of Columbia for four days of camaraderie and learning.”