Class News
Pete Putzel '64, the Nov. NYC luncheon, and Wilbur Cross
December 21, 2019
Pete Putzel, who organizes a monthly classmate luncheon (except during the summer) at The Yale Club of NYC, reported: “A new record — seventeen classmates at the monthly luncheon on November 26, 2019.”
John Evans
Bill Galvin
Dan Gsovski
Harry Howell
Jay Huffard
Joe Lieberman
Ed Massey
Bob Meyers
John Postley
Pete Putzel
Paul Steiger
Tom Trowbridge
Ted Wagner
Robert Whitby
As it was close to Thanksgiving, John Evans shared “the 1936 Thanksgiving Proclamation of Wilbur Cross, Yale English Professor and Dean of the Graduate School and, at that moment, Governor of Connecticut. A stressful time, in the depths of the Great Depression and flooding of the Connecticut River that left 14,000 homeless and the Connecticut National Guard patrolling the streets of Hartford in rowboats.”
John continued: “We read this every year at Thanksgiving. My mother always loved the writing (she was an English teacher), particularly the bit about ‘the friendly evenings lengthening under the heel of Orion.’ Happy Thanksgiving to all.”
Joe Lieberman added: “Thanks, John, for sharing this wonderful proclamation, all the better because we can be confident that the Governor wrote it himself. And you have increased the number of people who now know that Wilbur Cross is not just the name of a highway. Happy Thanksgiving.”
Read the proclamation here, and watch Wilbur Cross deliver it below, the first time that a Connecticut governor appeared in a sound film.
