letter June 5

Dear Everyone,

I hope to get this letter written a bit early before I forget the details of my 25th Yale Reunion. My trip did not start off too well. Cindy did not help me pack, and when I put my luggage through the x-ray machine, the TSA screeners identified (horror!) an aerosol can of shaving cream. I opened my carry on, and they also found such terroristic items such as mouthwash, toothpaste and shampoo. Because these items had not been placed in a magical polyethylene Ziploc bombproof container, as detailed in the 3-1-1 program (http://www.tsa.gov/311/) brought to you by our ever-vigilant government, they were confiscated. Thus, I aided our government’s effort to increase consumer spending by buying a brand new 3 oz tube of toothpaste for the absurd price of $5 in the airport - - which tube I was forced to relinquish on my way home. Eternal vigilance (and oral hygiene) is the price of Liberty!

The next disappointment was that my plane was about an hour late. I flew into Providence, Rhode Island. This airport is about ninety miles from New Haven (close to the same distance as the New York airports) with less hassle. It has a few direct daily flights, and so is easier and cheaper then flying to Hartford, or to New Haven. I rented a car and drove straight south on I-95, reaching New Haven around 7:00. I was staying in a hotel on the Long Wharf, about a ten-minute drive from the campus. I checked in and left. I hadn’t realized how many out-of-towners stay on campus. I would have done this, but I was hoping until the very end that Cindy and/or Nicola would join me.

The 25th reunion at Yale is the big one, so we had a big party tent on the old campus, instead of a reunion in one of the colleges (dormitories, for the non-Yalies out there), where smaller reunion classes meet. I think we had a record number of participants, with over 1100 registered, including spouses and children. I parked on Chapel Street, and walked to Dwight Hall to register. I was met there by one of my old off-campus housemates, Nienke (Prins) Dosa (http://www.upstate.edu/peds/facultyclin.php?EmpID=KvMWRyIU ) . Nienke is a pediatrician specializing in neurodevelopmental disabilities. She also has a clinic for children that have survived to adulthood, and was just recently granted tenure at Syracuse. She was joined at the reunion by her husband Joe Dosa, Yale ’73, and their three children, Nadine (15) Jolene (13) and Martine (4). Joe is an ex-lawyer, who suffered heart failure around 15 years ago, and has since been the recipient of a heart transplant. He looks pretty healthy! Nienke was the only of my housemates who showed up – not coming were Tim Crump, a nurse administrator in Portland OR, currently president of the Pacific Coast College Health Association, and recently divorced; Leigh Sato, living at a community for neurologically disabled adults in Innisfree VA (http://www.innisfreevillage.org/whoweare.html); Betsy Kolbert, a staff writer for the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/contributors/elizabeth_kolbert ) ; and David Rabinowitz, a Yale astronomer - - he was observing stuff in Chile (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_L._Rabinowitz).

I lost track of Nienke as some other alum was greeting her while I was walking to the tent to get some food and drink. We sat and chatted for a while, and then I used my cell phone to call up one of my friends from Branford, Andy Lawton. Andy looks very different now then when we were students, as he used to have a bushy afro and a beard. Now he looks like Lex Luthor. There is a blurb about him here (http://www.be-in.com/be-in-16-speakers.htm) . Andy was an architecture major who went on to a degree in environmental science, and now he is some kind of IT consultant in San Francisco. Does this story sound a bit familiar? We talked, and found some of the people from Ezra Stiles. There was a big Branford/Stiles connection in my year because we shared an Old Campus dorm, Vanderbilt. People I saw that evening included John and Suzanne Greenawalt (they met freshman year and got married after graduation). John is a high school teacher in Connecticut; Mark Smith, who is a stay-at-home Dad; his wife is a bigwig MD administrator at Dartmouth Hitchcock; John Zinsser, son of William Zinsser, scion of Zinsser paints. I don’t know if he is also related to Hans Zinsser of typhus fame, but I always thought so. John has turned into an abstract expressionist painter in New York (http://www.johnzinsser.com/) . I stayed up pretty late – midnight or so, before returning back to the hotel, where I woke at around five and couldn’t sleep.

On Saturday I went back to the Campus, parking in the Sage-Pierson lot on the way Northern end of ‘Science Hill”, and walked down to the Old Campus. The amount of construction going on is amazing. The buildings feel so cloistered and insular, perhaps because the surrounding environs of New Haven are so uninviting. The nearby neighborhood is nicer than when I was there, with lots of new restaurants – Thai, Vietnamese, etc., but it is still sort of awful nearby. Apparently the town is trying yet another revitalization scheme. First they are trying to buy and tear down all the low-income housing (of course, a lot of the people who live in this housing are employed by Yale), next they are trying to make the downtown more livable for young adults with new clubs, entertainment. I guess they hope that the 20-somethings will like the party scene and move in. I don’t think this will work too well, what 20-somethings really want are high-paying, fulfilling jobs. Yale has opened up a big new Science Park (they bought the property from Bayer super cheap). The future will tell us if this works.

I had a breakfast of sustainable food under the tent and talked to another Stiles alum, Dave Tewksbery (http://www.chelseapiers.com/prdavid.htm) . Dave was a hockey player at Yale. He is one of the founders and principles of Chelsea Pier in New York, a big multi-entertainment venue. They film a lot of Law & Order there, apparently. Dave is married to a pediatrician. One of the recurring themes of this reunion was how many of us had become physicians, lawyers, finance or IT professionals.

After breakfast I caught up with Nienke, and we visited the Yale Library. They have converted one of the internal courtyards into an enclosed space, which now houses the music library. It is very impressive, but looks a bit like the lobby of a big high-end hotel. We also walked through the redone cross-campus library, now named after the Bass family, full of comfortable leather chairs and computers. What a privileged environment! Next I went to a lecture held in the Art Gallery on ‘Food in the Middle Ages’. The most shocking thing was that the lecturer had no PowerPoint presentation! I think this is the first lecture I have heard since Yale that didn’t have some sort of multimedia aspect. The lecture was interesting but seemed a bit off the cuff. In the Middle Ages people were more interested in combining different kinds of food. Food was also a symbol of wealth, so many preparations were to show off food artifice. They really liked food in aspic because it was technically difficult to make clear aspic, and it was shimmery, like gold. A seven-year-old girl with princess fantasies would have liked the food then. Like today, there were people who tried to devise nutritional meals based on purported philosophical aspects of food. Melons are cold and wet, so they needed to be eaten with something salty; hence melon with prosciutto. Of course, they knew nothing about biochemistry, nutrients, vitamins, etc. Still, it is interesting to see that many of the goofy ideas that people held then about food are still with us in some form.

This talk of food made us everyone hungry, so we had lunch at our different colleges (there were alumni from a variety of different years there). After my sustainable food lunch I walked around some more with Nienke’s family, and then I went to hear David Swensen’s talk. Yale’s endowment has increased 22X in the last 25 years, while tuition has increased around 5-6X. He advices non-full time non-professionals to but no-load uncorrelated index funds.

After his lecture I hung out. I saw another Branford alum, Brad Olsen, who is an architect in Connecticut. We got together with Andy Lawton and walked in the Branford basement. Nine of the twelve colleges have been refurbished, and it was good to see what they had done to the basement. There was a small theatre with a DVD, large TV and about 20 theatre seats. The buttery was redone, and the laundry room was very nice. They had expanded the Branford pottery studio.

Then we went back to the big tent for out big dinner. About 19M was raised for our class gift, mostly from 2-3 hedge fund guys. I met up with Michael Green, who was a physics major, and became an IT guy. He was on a two year outsourcing training contract in India, when midway through he was let go. His Chinese wife took the two kids back to Beijing. He is now divorced and has a new Chinese girlfriend. Michael Bellacosa, my freshman roommate finally showed up. Mike is one of the last men standing from Bears Sterns. He was in charge of a low risk subsidiary worth about 2-3B that still had money after the debacle. He is going to be working for JP Morgan until October to help transition the Morgan team. Then he and his wife may drive around the country. He might go on to get a teaching or some other degree at Yale. I also saw one of the smarter guys in my class, David Sanders (http://bilbo.bio.purdue.edu/~viruswww/Sanders_home/bio.html) , who is now a biochemistry professor at Purdue. I stayed at this party way too late, until about 1:30 AM. I had to keep up with Bellacosa, who had a reputation of a hard-partier when we were at school (I was ‘the roommate’, or the ‘sidekick’). I have to say that after 25 years I still feel like an outsider in a party, but I have become more comfortable with this status.

The next morning I drove around East Rock Park, and then met Nienke and family at the British museum, where we briefly looked at Constables and Turners. Later they went on to the Peabody museum, but I needed to drive back to Providence. Of course, my flight back was also delayed by an hour, so I could have stayed to see the museum with them.

Enough of this. Next week is the big move, so I am sure I will have more then enough to write about in ten days or so.

Love H.