Gentlemen of the Class of 1960:

Our Reunion celebrating our time at Yale 65 years after we left the place is in the offing: May 22 - 25, 2025. Registration is now open. To register, please go complete this form: Register Now.

Vignettes: If you haven’t yet sent me your 250- to 500-word, fun and easy-to-write (!), vignettes of something that you did, or happened to you, at Yale in the 1950’s, that was, in the words of John Blanpied in my last mail to you about our upcoming Reunion, “savory, notable, inspirational, disastrous, embarrassing, frightening, revealing, humorous, ludicrous, epiphanic, mind-blowing, heart-warming, future-forming, or spine-stiffening”, please do so (charles.schmitz@icloud.com).

If you have not finished your bit yet, YOU ARE NOT ALONE! To date, we have received a grand total of 6 contributions. Since we will not have a paper reunion book this year, we will gather contributions on-line on our Reunion and Class websites, and they will be retrievable by QR codes that will appear on our individual Reunion name tags. These vignettes are important to our Reunion because they help re-introduce ourselves to each other, help the rest of us recall the Yales [sic] of our day, and jump-start our Reunion conversations when we re-meet each other in person. Here’s a “future-forming” example:

“The most important and personally meaningful class I attended by at Yale was not presented by any Yale faculty member. It was by August Heckscher and delivered in Woolsey Hall in an one-time program, “Challenge.” We were, you will remember, at the tag-end of the “Silent Generation” which started after WWII and ended more or less with us and with the realization that the truculence of The Soviet Union was challenging our quintessential American expectation that the rest of the world was going to leave us alone while we got along, thank you very much, with our orderly pursuits of the post-war domestic life. Heckscher, of course, put a stick of dynamite under our seats by examples of political agitations and Communist advances in the rest of the world. Who knew? I was deeply affected by that speech, and I believe that it was seminal in my life-long involvement of various kinds in international and global affairs.”

For an example of something more meaningful and less portentous, see Matt Riddle’s exploding alarm clock story example in the last Reunion bulletin.


Yale Memorabilia [from John Bing, Class Memorialist]: Apart from meeting with each other and remembering together the nights and days of 65 years ago, our reunion planners hope that recovered artifacts of our Yale days will help span the years and bring our memories into sharper focus. For that purpose, we are setting up a display of things that were part of our lives from the Old Campus to classrooms, to our Resident Colleges, playing fields and laboratories, and we are depending upon each of you to bring contributions to the Reunion. We are hoping to view photos and pictures, objects that sat in the corner or your room, objects collected on trips and found in boxes you haven’t explored in years. Interesting manuscripts count. Letters you may have written explaining “your” campus life are welcome.

We will have an archivist from the Yale library looking everything over and deciding what might be a valuable addition to the Yale collections. Our early lives are fading into the shadows of history, and if we are learning anything from our present troubled times, history matters and the wisdom we can draw from history is THE necessary corrective to the shortsighted, hurried, blindness of the moment. Let an expert decide what should be preserved.

Find now and set aside your Yale scraps of all kinds, ticket stubs, programs, photos, movies, etc. and bring them with you to the Reunion.

Chuck Schmitz
Reunion Chairman