Memorial for Bob Shapiro Nov. 16 at NYC Yale Club
As many readers know, our dear friend and classmate Bob Shapiro (TC) passed away on May 27. Although quite a few classmates were able to attend his funeral, the Class Council agreed that it would be appropriate to hold a class memorial service for Bob who played such an important role in the life of our class -- he co-founded the monthly class table at the NY Yale Club, led our efforts to support the Calvin Hill Day Care Center, and was active in the life of the Slifka Center.
Catherine Ross writes with details on the service:
Dear Classmates:
I am writing to confirm the date for the Shapiro Memorial: Sunday Nov. 16 at the Yale Club in NY. This is the same weekend as the AYA events and Princeton game in New Haven, so those of you who are travelling some distance can combine these events.
The doors will open Sunday morning at 10, with formalities beginning at 10:30. The memorial will be followed by a lunch, and should adjourn by around 2 or 2:30, though the room will be ours until 3:30. I hope this helps you book your travel arrangements. We will of course have to charge for lunch. The exact amount of the charge will follow, but will be in the range of $55 to $60 pp which will also cover the cost of the room, and lunch for Bob's immediate family who will be our guests. Bob's wife Connie is extremely appreciative and moved that we are doing this.
...
I will be writing separately to those who have volunteered to help. I am indebted to Mitch Garner for generously sharing his wisdom and files with me. We will need help with contacting classmates and those who know Bob from other Yale activities, as well as in contacting people who we hope will speak. There will be an open mike for people to share their memories and thoughts, but it would be good to have some people prepare comments in advance to get things going. We will also hope to raise some money for Bob's special projects at Yale, so you can volunteer for that work as well. If you are not on my list and want to help, please let me know. [NB: Catherine can be reached at cjross27 "at" gmail "dot" com.]
I hope you are all seizing the joys of summer.
Best, Catherine
For more, including details on block reservations at the Yale Club, visit the In Memoriam page (must be logged in to view).
Photos: Jim Kaplan NYC July 4 Walking Tour
Classmates, enjoy Jim Kaplan's 2008 pre-dawn walking tour of historical sites in lower Manhattan, courtesy of Rick Cech's atmospheric photos (must be logged in to view):
click here for the photo gallery
click here for Jim's Wall Street Journal article on this annual event
Kim Barkan: Thoughts of a Five Year B.A. Grad
I write to note that I was in the 5 Year B.A. class of '69-'70, and took that time to work on an agricultural scheme in the Copper Belt, growing vegetables for a truck farming project for a variety of different small farmers brought from hither and yon in Zambia, and then, for six months, to teach Math and Chemistry in French at a High School in the Center of what is now Congo-Kinshasa.
At the time, I "dropped out" for a year, to be able to then, "drop back in" to what Kingman Brewster typified as the "lock step" conundrum of spending one's time, dutifully earning the merit badges of our society, to become "productive" consumers, and affluent members of our American society: to earn enough to produce more fodder for the conveyor belt (and "Hamster Cage," if you will) to rise to the heights of material success and social approval of hardworking, intelligent Middle Class America.
Enamored of Sid Mintz, full of wanderlust, and curious, estranged by the politics of that moment, but reinvigorated from my 15 month interlude in Africa from Yale College, I finished Yale in Anthropology, and continued my escalator ride to law school, and work - with a short cut, I thought, at the time, to return to Africa, as a lawyer and entrepreneur, in Africa. Where I still am, now, 38 years later.
Nine years following graduation at Yale, which I did not attend, (as I was too busy learning the art of becoming a Hod Carrier in Columbus, Ohio), I, too, remembered the vague offers of the Five Year B.A. being able to return to Yale within 10 years of graduation, and, despite the total ignorance of the administration at Yale in 1979/1980, I did more than remember those promises, I invoked them to force my return to New Haven in 1979, and my way back to school, this time, to "drop in" and study, again, "subjects of interest" after a 9 year hiatus, chasing Conrad into "The Heart of Darkness."
I parked on the beach of East Haven, hooked up with "Sir Lawrence of Baluchistan," Larry Lifschultz, and proceeded to jump into the delightful, time honored experience of registering for classes, buying books, and looking for which classes to attend (and as my genes would prevail, not attend, in the great 1960's tradition of dropping out, which I learned so well).
Read more
Martin Rubin Reviews Herbert Gold Memoir
Here's a book that sounds as though it should be a comfort to many of us:
Friday, July 11, 2008 (SF Chronicle)
Memoir review: Herbert Gold looks back
Martin Rubin
Still Alive! A Temporary Condition By Herbert Gold
Arcade; 249 pages; $25
"'A most astonishing thing,' wrote W.B. Yeats in 1935. 'Seventy years have I lived.' But in the 21st century, with people going around saying that 60 is the new 40 and 70 the new 50, and so forth, few people nowadays feel, in the words of the young Simon and Garfunkel, 'how terribly strange to be seventy.' Born in 1924, Herbert Gold hasn't been 70 in a while, but judging by his unsentimental but moving memoir, he takes being old as a matter of fact, neither sugarcoating it nor wallowing in its miseries and depredations. 'Still Alive! A Temporary Condition' reveals a man who has had a lot to deal with in his long life but who has coped, in part by writing but mostly by just surviving - perhaps not triumphantly but with a certain measure of hard-won satisfaction. . . .
"Profoundly fond but still honest and clear-eyed, his portrait of Bellow is perhaps the truest and most insightful I have ever read. About this man he knew so well and whose writings he admired but did not worship, Gold in a couple of dozen pages comes closer to a definitive portrait of what he dubs Bellow's 'troubled and fortunate time on earth' than Bellow biographers have in their hundreds of pages. . . ."
For Martin's full review, click here or visit www.sfgate.com.
Martin Rubin on 'Thrumpton Hall' by Miranda Seymour
'Thrumpton Hall' by Miranda Seymour
A memoir of life in the Nottinghamshire manor house that had so captivated her father.
By Martin Rubin, Special to The (L.A.) Times
July 12, 2008
"This enthralling book is not just another tale of restoring -- and living in the decaying magnificence of -- an English country estate. The story that Miranda Seymour unfolds against the background of Thrumpton Hall has enough drama -- and psychodrama -- to give playwright Harold Pinter a run for his money. There is comedy in her father's house, but festering emotional wounds, slights and injuries invest it with the stuff of tragedy. . . .
"George Seymour fell in love with the Nottinghamshire house, where his diplomat parents parked him at the age of 2 when they were posted abroad. The handsome if somewhat dilapidated old pile, set in its own park, belonged to his aunt and uncle, Lord and Lady Byron (yes, the poet's family). These Byrons were childless, and eventually, after a lot of maneuvering, Seymour, newly married in his 20s, found himself the proud owner of his childhood paradise. But this was bleak postwar Britain, a time of punitive taxation and servant shortages, and so began a roller coaster of triumphs and disappointments that went on for nearly half a century until his death in 1994."
For Martin's full review, click here or visit www.latimes.com.
Jim Kaplan's July 4 Walking Tour of Lower Manhattan
Jim Kaplan writes in the July 1 Wall Street Journal:
Early American History: My 2 a.m. Walking Tour
By JAMES S. KAPLAN
NEW YORK---While many of you are snug in your beds in the wee hours of July 4, dreaming, perhaps, of your day to come at the beach, the golf club, or your home barbecue, I will be leading a 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. tour of Revolutionary War sites in Lower Manhattan.
Massachusetts and Virginia quickly come to mind as places rich in Revolutionary War history, but two of the most significant battles (of Long Island and of Saratoga) were fought in New York state. Furthermore, three of the most important Revolutionary War generals---Richard Montgomery (the Battle of Quebec), Alexander Hamilton (the Battle of Yorktown) and Horatio Gates (the Battle of Saratoga)---are buried in Lower Manhattan.
I begin the tour on the west side of City Hall Park, rich in July 4 tradition. Not only is it where George Washington on July 9, 1776, had the Declaration of Independence first read in the city, but it is where, on July 6, 1774, Hamilton, then a young student at King's College (now Columbia), gave a spellbinding speech in support of resistance to the king. In addition, it is the area where, in the 1790s, Revolutionary War veterans would hold elaborate July 4 ceremonies celebrating their victory and the Declaration of Independence. These ceremonies would become a form of protest against the increasingly aristocratic policies of Hamilton's ruling Federalist Party and lead to the formation of the Democratic Party. . . .
Why do we take our walk so early in the morning? The short answer is that the tour was begun by the 92nd Street YMHA more than a quarter-century ago, and when I took over the leader's duties in 1999, I inherited the 2 a.m. start time. When the Y discontinued its walking tour after 9/11, I asked the Fraunces Tavern Museum (whose mission is to foster interest in the American Revolution in New York City) to permit me to continue it under their auspices and with the same hours.
You wouldn't believe the number of participants who tell me that 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. is perfect for them because that is the only time they have nothing else scheduled. More important, however, is the fact that Lower Manhattan's revolutionary past is more easily accessible at that time. With the city's sodium -vapor lamps, there are no problems seeing monuments and statues that are obscured by traffic and pedestrians during the day. . . .
For tickets to the walking tour, call the Fraunces Tavern Museum at 212-425-1778 or visit the museum's website at www.frauncestavernmuseum.org.
To read the full article online, click here or visit www.wsj.com. For a pdf version, click this link: Early American History.
Photo Galleries Now Open on This Site!
Tim Powell writes:
Since we re-launched the class web site www.yale71.org in May 2007, response has been terrific. More than ten percent of our classmates are now registered users, which admits you to the restricted "class-only" areas of the site. There's no fee to register or use the site, and it takes about two minutes to register.
We've introduced several new features during the past year. I'm especially pleased to announce that the site "Photo Galleries" are now working. Our photo editor Rick Cech has worked diligently to get this feature ready. Not only can you see photos of Yale, your classmates, and yourself---but you can send us some too.
Click here to visit the Photo Galleries; and to send in photos for publication on the site, click here.
Martin Rubin Reviews 'The Forger's Spell'
BOOK REVIEW
'The Forger's Spell' by Edward Dolnick
The tale of the Dutch painter who fooled the Nazis and most of the art world with his fake Vermeers.
By Martin Rubin, Special to The (L.A.) Times
June 24, 2008
When it comes to forgery and its ability to fascinate, the bigger the better, and the greater the audacity the more compelling. In the story of a two-bit Dutch painter, Han Van Meegeren, who had the nerve to take on that most rarefied of his artistic compatriots, Johannes Vermeer, author Edward Dolnick has hit the mother lode. And as if this tale of unparalleled chutzpah were not good enough, it takes place amid the tumult of the Nazi occupation of Holland and the competitive plunder of its---and much of Europe's---art treasures by Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering. Dolnick more than does it justice, drawing on his knowledge of a wide range of subjects, including scientific process, politics and the gullibility and herd-instinct of the art market.
For Martin's complete review, click here or visit www.latimes.com.
NYC Class Lunch Fri. July 11
The monthly class lunches in NYC have been named in honor of our classmate Bob Shapiro. Jim Kaplan and Bill Primps write:
The Robert I. Shapiro Memorial Lunch of the Yale Class of 1971 at the Yale Club of New York will be held in the Tap Room on Friday, July 11, 2008 at 12:30 pm. Please contact the undersigned or Jim's secretary Lisa Mastropolo by email, lmastropolo at herzfeld-rubin dot com or by phone, 212-471-3229, to let us know if you will be attending by July 10, 2008. We look forward to seeing you there.
James S. Kaplan
William Primps
Lots of Pictures! from 6/13 NY Class Table
[singlepic=47,256,192,,left]The June 13 class lunch at the Yale Club of NYC was a special occasion as we mourned the loss of Bob Shapiro, co-founder and prime mover of the '71 lunch table tradition here in New York, and shared our fond memories of happy times in his company. Thirteen people attended, including Rick Cech, Alice Welt Cunningham, Ralph Dawson, Tom Erickson, Jim Kaplan, Peggy Marks, Tim Powell, Bill Primps, Philip Protter, Catherine Ross, Andy Sherman, Susan Yecies and Vera Wells (Vera and Ralph are in the photo above; click on the photo for a larger version).
For pictures of everyone around the table (with the exception of Rick Cech, who took the photos), visit our Photo Gallery (NB: you must be registered with the site and logged in to view this).