Class Notes

February 2003

by Tony Lee

Strachan Donnelley left The Hastings Center after 20 years in various roles. His work with the Humans and Nature Program, which is dedicated to long-term moral and civic responsibilities to human communities and natural ecosystems, will continue in several regions around Chicago, New York, and South Carolina.

Al Rossiter writes from Buckingham Brown & Nichols school in Cambridge, MA: "Am still teaching high-school English, which I have been doing since the fall of 1964. I've stopped being anxious about teaching children of my former students! Happily, I still find it stimulating to be in a classroom with a group of 15- and 16-year-olds. I'm not planning to retire any time soon."

John Ryan from Lexington, Mass: "I am leading an experimental medicine group at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals attempting to use gene expression monitoring to predict outcomes in drug development. The idea is to increase the benefit/risk ratio for drugs in this world where pharmaceuticals are consuming an increasing proportion of the health care systems budget. My oldest son Yale '89 received his PhD from MIT in city planning and is now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. My oldest daughter Yale '92 is currently working in the environmental science area and applying to graduate schools in environmental studies. I still visit New Haven regularly as my mother lives in Branford."

John Hanold wrote: "After 14 years in Albuquerque and 36 years with Honeywell, I am starting a new phase of life in western Massachusetts. People assume I am retired but I think of myself as temporarily unemployed. In the next 6 months I will find something else to do, but for the time being Pam and I are addressing the upgrade needs of the 125-year-old house we bought in Turner Falls. We were delighted that Mimi and Jon McBride stopped by briefly on their way to Vermont and hope others will do the same. It was ironic that our mini reunion in Santa Fe occurred 2 months after we moved away."

After having served as President of Gatner Consulting and CEO of Snickelways Interactive and Opcenter, Hank Satterthwaite has joined his wife Anne in her very successful French antique store Mirrors on Madison at 83rd and Madison in NYC.

Kent van den Berg moved from Seattle to St. Louis in 2000 to join the faculty of the St. Louis University Law School. His wife Sara chairs the English Dept there. Their son is a reporter for a newspaper near St. Louis. They've enjoyed getting together with Sarah and Bob Dunn and Peggy and Fran Oates.

Jim Turchik toured China this fall with his wife Evelyn and son. They visited their daughter Rebecca who is teaching at the Shanghai American School. Jim also enjoyed making rounds at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai with an infective disease team of physicians.

Syd Lea's most recent poetry volume, Pursuit of a Wound, was one of three finalists for last year's Pulitzer Prize.

Todd Mueller sent the following email: "Greetings from Ft. Lauderdale. SYZYGY and I are about to head across the Gulf Stream for the Abacos. I left Camden, Maine in mid-Sept and slowly worked my way down here. We plan to sail and fly-fish until the end of Jan, when I plan to return to Sugarloaf for the rest of the ski season. Also plan to join the ski club for a trip to Austria. I will go a week earlier to visit with family in the Munich area. It looks like it is going to be a great year for skiing. My health is good but SYZYGY and crew are slightly battered from a long hard trip down here. I may leave the boat down here for the summer, so it will be positioned and ready to go next fall. I hit the big 6-0 this summer and gave myself a maroon Porsche Boxster for a birthday present. It is far and away the best of the four Porsches I have owned in my life. A real sweetheart of a machine."

I'm always interested in hearing about the creative ways that classmates ways get together. At the Santa Fe Mini John Wilbur mentioned how he and Coley Burke (Yale '63) hunt for dinosaur bones in Argentina. Closer to home, David Plimpton, Strachan Donnelley, and a somewhat seasick Pete Putzel participated in the First Class of 1964 Montauk Yom Kippur Fishing Outing with an all-day fly-fishing excursion off of Montauk Point.

Fourteen of our classmates currently have children at Yale: Fred Buell, Strachan Donnelley, Dick Goodyear, John Heintz, Butch Hetherington, Rick Kroon, Bob Myers, John Nathan, David Plimpton, Gerry Shea, Tom Susman, James W. Thompson, Neil Thompson, and John Tully.