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Table of Contents

Page Page 1 - Contents 2 - Preface 3 - Ackerman 4 - Ansbacher 5 - Bassett 7 - Bennett 8 - Bischof 10 - M. Brown 12 - R. Brown 14 - Burton 16 - Carr 17 - Chase 17 - Chisholm 18 - Clark 20 - Danielson 21 - Davenport 22 - Dove 24 - Franck 26 - Gideonse 28 - Gold 29 - Haught 31 - Hecht 32 - Helmreich 34 - Higinbotham 36 - Hopkins 38 - Leftwich 40 - Luria 41 - Lyne 43 - Magid

44 - Megargee46 - Morris48 - Most49 - Niehuss51 - P. Parker52 - Pendleton54 - Porter56 - Powell58 - Price60 - Rapson61 - Rugh62 - Saltman64 - Schaenen65 - Schwartz66 - Sheinin68 - Simon69 - W. Smith71 - Spero72 - Strauss74 - Suzuki77 – Vester78 - Walker80 - Wieland82 - Wolf84 - Zinner86 - Organizers’ Session Comments86 - W. M. Brown87 - H. D. Gideonse88 - A. G. Powell90 - Colophon

Preface

When serious planning for 1958's 60th Reunion began, the assemblage that gathered at Homecoming, October 2017, agreed that sharing reflections on both our Amherst experience and our lives since might be worth undertaking. With the approval of Class President John Bischof and Reunion Chair Sam Chase, the three of us agreed to organize and pursue the project.

invitations were sent out to everyone in late Fall to submit written comments on two themes. One was a personal reflection on our four-year experience at Amherst. Or maybe there was something that our Amherst education should have addressed but did not?

The second prompt was more expansive. We asked respondents to address the subsequent unfolding of their adult lives subsequent to Amherst. We provided a few prompts. Does Amherst look better (or not) to you now than it did in 1958? How are you handling the inevitable downsizing, disposing of “stuff,” putting our histories in order? Did your career change over the years? Have your views about sexuality, marriage, and/or parenthood changed as you’ve aged? What advice would you give to a current Amherst undergraduate? Would you change aspects of your life if given the chance? What makes you happiest? How have your ideas and concerns changed as you've reached this point in your life?

We recognized that for some of us, two pages might seem a real reach. To others, it might seem a totally unreasonable constraint. We urged classmates to do the best they could.

This compendium is the final product of our collective efforts. The three of us co-conspirators met our self-imposed deadlines. We extended them when we needed to or could. Web based copy was distributed well in advance of Reunion and through the gracious support of Sandy Riley and Alumni Affairs hard copy of the initial forty-eight submissions were available for everyone at the beginning of our Amherst time together. (Four more came when we extended the initially announced deadlines two more times to June 20 after Reunion.)

The discussion was extremely well attended and energetically engaged in not only by the '58 classmates in attendance but by acquaintances and friends who preceded and followed us at Amherst.

This printed and bound copy gratis of the “proceedings” has been sponsored by selected classmates so that everyone, including widows and widowers, for whom the College has contact information, can receive a copy. We printed a few more copies in the event that one or more of you wants additional copies. We are deeply grateful to Alumni Affairs for ponying up for mailing and distribution. For some time Hendrik has had a press imprimatur which he's used now for the fourth time in completing the capsulization of this 60th Reunion project.

Miller Brown Hendrik Gideonse Art Powell

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Paul Ackerman

Years ago, a gifted patient frequently shared her own poetry and poetry published by others. I was pleased and surprised that the metaphors and symbols, heretofore cryptic, were now decipherable in rich and meaningful ways. In an American literature course at Amherst, reading poetry was not my forte. It often seemed like translating Sanskrit. I was amazed when the professor exposed layers of meaning beneath the words and verses. Was I now being blessed by wisdom and enlightenment as a consequence of aging and life experience?

Something else had occurred. Psychoanalysis had opened unconscious doors to meaning, connections, experiences, and emotions. Understanding poetry was akin to Freud's 'royal road' to dreams, fantasies, and behavior. My appreciation of art increased and resistances decreased in my own painting.

Amherst education emphasized left brain problem solving. Unquestionably invaluable. My 'right brain' learning occurred years later. Fortunately.

I share a favorite poem that I discovered during my work with the aforementioned patient.

THE ABNORMAL IS NOT COURAGE by Jack Gilbert

The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the Germantanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers,A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.And yet this poem would lessen that day. Questionthe bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.Would say courage isn't that. Not at its best.It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight.Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.It is too near the whore's heart: the beauty of impulse,and the failure to sustain even small kindness.Not the marvelous act but the evident conclusion of being.Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.Not the Prodigal son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beautythat is of many days. Steady and clear.It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.

Ben Ansbacher

I was not a typical Amherst student. Although one brother went to Exeter and another went to Deerfield, I graduated from Burlington (VT) High School. My father was a professor at the University of Vermont which entitled him to a tuition exchange program. I think being from Vermont gave me an edge based on geographic diversity. I was admitted tuition-free to Amherst, Dartmouth, and Harvard. My vague recall is that I chose Amherst because Hanover was too remote and Cambridge too crowded. In those days, we did not think it necessary to visit college campuses (campi?)

Having grown up in a professor’s modest household, I was awed by the luxuries at Amherst, e.g. freshly laundered socks and jock strap for each visit to the gym. A disappointment was that as a tennis beginner I found no mechanism for lessons during phys ed. I enjoyed eating at Valentine Hall, with the unlimited pitchers of milk and good food on steel trays. I thought it was wonderful l that our fraternities generously permitted students from other schools to join our parties and drink our beer.

I had wanted a “liberal arts” education. I already was accustomed to classical music and could speak pretty good German. The study of literature turned me off. One day of class for a Shakespeare play or a novel did not justify all time spent on the reading. So, I drifted into math and science. As part of an experiment, I was invited to take organic chemistry in my sophomore year. That led to chemistry honors in my junior year, and I was done. It took one more semester to earn enough credits in gut courses to graduate in January.

I came to Amherst with a vague career objective of a job in which I could fix things or processes. At graduation, I knew little about careers. Amherst had no career counseling. It was assumed that we would all go to graduate school. Had I been at a school that offered engineering, I might have followed that path, but I thought engineers spent all their time sitting at drafting tables.

I wanted to get a job, in preference to graduate school. I learned that was not easy in 1958, a recession year. Finally, after I reminded DuPont that I had spent two summers in their employ, I was hired for their Richmond, Virginia cellophane plant. The Amherst degree was not a door-opener. In Virginia no one had heard of Amherst. One of my co-hires was from Clemson, of which I had never heard. Two years later I was admitted to Harvard Business School, and I suspect the Amherst name helped me there.

From HBS I took a job at IBM with the objective of learning about computers. I stayed for ten years, but I don't think my educational credentials helped me there. IBM was a meritocracy, where one's career depended on job performance. From IBM, I was recruited by the start-up that became Laboratory Corporation of America. I think my credentials impressed the three brothers who founded that company. Three brothers were hard to please, leading me to spend the rest of my career as a self-employed computer specialist.

I always had confidence in myself, but I would say that Amherst and Harvard Business School strengthened my self-confidence.

I have not followed Amherst closely. I think it suffered after admitting women but has now adjusted. I am impressed by what I read about the faculty and the energy efficient dorms. Two of my three children visited Amherst on their college tours. We did not encounter students gushing with appreciation of being there. My daughter had an interview with an admissions officer who told her that she was qualified but that they had ten times more, equally qualified, than they could accept. Alumni connections carried no weight. My daughter did not apply. She went to Wellesley.

Ross Bassett

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The events that stand out in my freshman year at Amherst are mixed. On the positive side, I managed to secure a starting position on the freshman soccer team and keep it for the entire season. Soccer took me outside during the magnificent fall weather and brought me into excellent physical shape which facilitated productive study habits. Life at Amherst seemed good.

The main social event at the college during the winter of 1954-1955 was fraternity rushing. It turned out that I was the next to last man selected by my fraternity in the rushing process. As a result, I spent too much time thinking about why this was so and not enough time thinking about how to study more effectively. This pattern of thinking continued throughout much of my remaining undergraduate years. I eventually figured out that Amherst College is an academic institution, not a social club. There were also many bright spots. Professor Craig's course on the 19th Century English Novel was one of these. He would repeatedly ask his class "What is really going on here?" as we delved deeper and deeper into the plot of a novel. There was also Professor Salmon describing a series of "mighty barrel-chested warriors" in his lectures.

When I think of my experience at Amherst, I think of the many excellent, colorful professors who we were blessed to know in our four years of learning. I am also enormously impressed by the many and varied accomplishments of my fellow classmates as described in the Amherst 1958 50th Reunion Classbook.

In turning to my thoughts on my adult life, I graduated from Columbia School of Dental and Oral Surgery in 1962 and completed a one-year dental internship at Philadelphia General Hospital. I still did not feel ready to enter private practice, so in 1964 I entered the US Army Dental Corps with the aim of obtaining more clinical experience. In the fall of 1964 when I was stationed at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, I received orders to report to Fort Carson, Colorado, and then to South Vietnam, a totally unexpectedly development. This was my first exposure to the culture of a third world country - truly an eye-opening experience. Our dental detachment was situated mainly in Nha Trang, a very secure location near the South China Sea, so I was never worried about my personal security. However, I never had an opportunity to gain the types of clinical experience in South Vietnam that I had hoped to obtain by serving in the United States.

During my brief military service in Arizona, I worked with a few dentists who trained in California and Washington State. From them I learned some new clinical techniques related to treating child patients more effectively. This made me decide to apply to a post-graduate program in pediatric dentistry and dentistry for the disabled at Columbia University, a program that I completed in 1968. This was the year I married Karen Childers and began a private practice of pediatric dentistry in Westwood, New Jersey. By 1979 I had completed the requirements to become a Diplomate of the American Board of Pediatric Dentistry. During this time, we started our family, Brian (1970 and class of 1992), Rebecca (1972), Thomas (1976) and William (1977).

Now that I was board certified in my specialty, I decided to take the Colorado State Dental Board examination in Denver. My interest in Colorado came from the fact that my only brother had been practicing dentistry in the Denver area for over fifteen years. I passed the examination and our family moved to Arvada, Colorado, in the spring of 1980.

There seems to have been a greater emphasis on outdoor living in Colorado than there was in New Jersey, and our children responded to that emphasis. Brian's Boy Scout troop's most popular annual event was a 12-mile hike around the Air Force Academy with family members invited to participate. All four children learned to ski and went frequently with me.

Our family's love of Colorado outdoor life was a great blessing to Karen and me. Unfortunately, my pediatric dental practice was not thriving the way I had hoped it would, a situation for which I take full responsibility. I did not promote my practice as effectively as was necessary because I was very uncomfortable doing so, something that I can only see in retrospect. I did not utilize the most contemporary business practices which would have made the work of my staff more efficient. This situation not only cost me my practice; it also cost me my marriage. After selling my dental practice, I held a series of temporary jobs and finally held a very satisfying and remunerative permanent job with the Denver Bulk Mail

Center of the US Postal Service for ten years. Since that time, I have retired and moved to Western Massachusetts to be closer to my children.

As I grow older I focus more and more on the lives of my children and grandchildren. The latter range in age from one to seventeen. The three grandchildren that I know the best live farther away from me than the others – in Swansea, Wales. I visit them once a year, but each time I visit I stay for a week. Each grandchild behaves so differently from the others which I consider to be a great blessing. I hope that I can act to enrich their lives so that they will always have a sense of curiosity and wonder about the world around them.

The major changes in Amherst College from what I experienced as an undergraduate are (1) the admission of women as students and (2) the absence of fraternities. I regard both of these changes as very positive. The presence of female undergraduates may present some problems of which I am unaware, but I suspect that their presence is very positive for the morale of everyone. The absence of fraternities seems to clearly be a major improvement. The fraternities did not appear to have the money to properly maintain their buildings. When our class stayed at Hamilton House in 2008 for our 50th Reunion, I observed many improvements in the building which were paid for by the college. I assume that similar improvements have been made in the other former fraternity houses.

If given the chance, I probably would change the dental school I attended to study pediatric dentistry or I would have entered another field altogether as a teacher. The reason I mention studying pediatric dentistry at a different dental school is that the head of our department at Columbia was quite old and, in my opinion, not up to date in many areas. Because I was in South Vietnam in 1965-1966 I was unable to evaluate any pediatric dental programs other than the program where I earned my DDS in 1962. I believe that I could have done well teaching math or history to high school students. I think of teaching as a truly noble profession that would give me a lot of personal satisfaction.

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Peter Bennett

I grew up in the very small town of Barrington, RI. Just at that time, however, the population was beginning to grow faster than the schools could handle, so I ended up going to 4 different schools in my first 5 years. That was pleasant “schooling”, but not very demanding. But then we moved to Providence, a city with many schools . . . but not near us. I ended up taking a public bus through Providence and East Providence out to the private, very small Providence Country Day School (PCDS), where two of my parents' friends had long taught.

In PCDS there were only 6 students in my 1st grade class (I did graduate in a class of 24!). It was a very good school for me: good teaching; lots of individual attention; and many special academic opportunities (such as 5 years of Latin). In grade 12 I applied to only two colleges: Amherst and Wesleyan. Accepted by both, Amherst was my choice (But I did follow that up by later studying for an MAT degree at Wesleyan.)

Because I had gone to such small schools K-12, to me Amherst always seemed like a much larger college than it was. Partially because of that, I found the first semester there very challenging - especially the Physics work! Fortunately, after that I was able to make my way much more successfully. I ended up with a double major in History and Latin, particularly enjoying working with Prof. John Halsted and Prof. Wendell Clausen. For my senior thesis I was able to combine both majors by researching and writing about Tacitus, a Roman historian.

Outside of the classroom, I did enjoy being part of the freshman teams in basketball and golf. Unfortunately, a knee injury in the fall of my sophomore year ended my eligibility for any formal athletic involvement during the rest of my time at Amherst. But, also, in my first year I appreciated my musical involvement in the Freshman Chorus and the “Ten Pins” (a group of 10 freshmen created that year).

Once past my first year, a great deal of time was spent with “dishes”- washing and drying - so there was little-to-no non-academic involvement after that. Even so, overall my time at Amherst was positively challenging and well beyond what I'd expected the college experience to be.

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John Bischof

The Amherst experience? I guess my first question is, compared to what? Would my life have been appreciably different had I attended Swarthmore, Colgate, or Hamilton? I don’t know. How can one tell?

They say the “proof of the pudding is in the eating.” I can say that I think that Amherst gave me the foundation for a successful career and a good life. I was able to get into a good law school, where I did well, and thence went on to good jobs. My legal career, though nothing spectacular, was a good, challenging, and satisfactory one.

While I have no doubt that I grew intellectually at Amherst, there is no particular thing in the college experience that I can point to and say, “That made all the difference.” Unlike some of my classmates, I can’t say that the English 1-2 experience gave me any great insights. On the other hand, the Amherst experience taught me something about myself and my talents. My honors thesis in the History Department was rejected – and, on reflection, rightfully so. However, my experience in the department taught me that my abilities did not lie in historical research or historical analysis, though I continue to have a love studying history. I did pretty well in freshman physics and found it to be challenging and interesting. Chemistry in my sophomore year was a different story. My talents certainly didn’t lie in the field of science.

The Core Curriculum? Whether such a curriculum is the right thing for the second decade of the 21st Century, I don’t know. But I think that it was a very good thing for the 1950’s. It exposed me to many things that I wouldn’t have known otherwise and broadened my understanding of life and the world I live in. Humanities and American Studies are two examples.

Some courses that have been meaningful in my subsequent life experience:

Introduction to the New Testament: I found how the gospels were put together to be extremely interesting, and I gained a foundation for further Bible study, which continues to be a hobby of mine.

Introductory Economics with Professor Nelson: I found this to be intriguing and became convinced of the basic good sense of the ideas of Keynes and Professor Samuelson. Would that present-day Republicans had gotten the word. Instead of deficit spending in recession and paying down debt in times of full employment and growth, the Republicans have gotten it the other way around.

Introduction to Fine Arts: This senior-year course made my trip to Europe the summer after graduation all the more interesting, especially while visiting Rome. I kept on seeing things and saying to myself that I had learned about them in that course.

Marriage and the Family: One thing I learned was not to expect too much from marriage and that romantic love can wither. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised when I finally did marry.

Political Science with Professor Latham awakened my interest in the law as a career possibility.

Socially, I must say that I came to Amherst somewhat out of it. I think that I graduated less so. While my freshman fraternity rushing experience wasn't all that great, the fraternity experience itself was a good one.

Looking back: The Amherst of today is very different from the one of our day – coeducational and far more diverse. I think that that is good, and I hope that Amherst can be an agent for helping economic and social mobility. From my vantage point, I think that the Amherst of today is a better one than the one that I knew.

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Life since Amherst has been a blessing. My work years were interesting and challenging, and I particularly enjoyed working with people on projects, and my goal was always to make it a win-win situation for all involved. I worked hard, however, and was glad to get the chance to retire early.

It was interesting to see how office life changed over the years. When I first started working, it was a big deal to get a photo copy of something. Now there are copy machines around the corner in every office. Remember carbon paper and typewriter erasers? Getting a fax was a big deal, and the telex was for international communications. Now we e-mail documents across the oceans. The law has changed too. Antitrust was the big thing in my day. Now we have, among other things, environmental law, product liability law, and anti-discrimination law.

The retirement years have been good. Early on, I was heavily involved in administering my deceased brother’s estate, caring for my elderly father, and being a church treasurer for ten years (converting an old-fashioned accounting system to a computer based one). Later years, saw bridge playing, reading, sailing, and family life as important elements.

Eight years ago saw a move to Maine, and in downsizing much of the physical stuff of life went into the dumpster, including various framed diplomas, degrees, and awards. Yes, I tossed my Amherst degree into the garbage. The physical things are not what matter.

At 81, I am more tolerant, more forgiving, and more easy-going than I was years ago. I am blessed with a wonderful family. Though I miss my late wife, Helen, who died four years ago, I am content and take satisfaction in the little things, such as having my divorced daughter and her kids over every Sunday for dinner.

Three quotes reveal a little bit about who I am and what I have strived to be:

A company headshrinker: “You’re not all that smart, but you know when and where to get any help that you need. You make a weak first impression, but you wear well.”

The negotiator for the other side after I remarked that our session had gone much easier than I had feared: “My boss said to me, ‘Agree with whatever John Bischof proposes. He is the fairest man I ever met.’”

My daughter Constance at Helen’s memorial service: “The thing that my mother loved most of all was my father . . . The thing that made my family atypical was the unquestionable commitment that my parents had to each other and to our family. . . . Their 50-year love affair serves as a model for me and my siblings of how we should treat others and expect to be treated.”

My advice to my grandchildren if requested: Cherish honesty, integrity, fairness, and the Golden Rule.

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Miller Brown

I was born at Amherst. After 17 years of gestation, I got my first gasping breaths in Physics 1-2, my first look at confused scamming in English 1-2. Arons’ great project (my first science course) was my first inkling of the processes of empirical inquiry and reflection; Ben Ziegler in his American Studies section demanded relentless questioning of my attitudes and beliefs; Bill Kennick showed me both the sweep of Western Philosophy and how to think anew about art and language; Henry Yost (a special hero of mine) showed the start of the new world of biology, struggling and groping to understand the sources of organic life. And finally, Joe Epstein pushed me to understand the development of modern logic and its impact on our understanding of mathematics and science.

But it was only in graduate school that I came of age after a lovely, lonely, and existentially different year in Paris. The philosophy department at Harvard was competitive, isolating, and dominated by one mind, that of W. V. Quine, the greatest logical positivist, as his colleague Hilary Putnam called him. I found it stultifying. But I came alive teaching for Leonard Nash who with James Conant and Thomas Kuhn had created shortly after WWII an extraordinary course, Natural Sciences 4, the backbone of Harvard’s general education program.

I had taught French for a year or two at BU and assisted in a couple of philosophy courses, but everything I learned about teaching (and a great deal about science) I learned from Nash. One incident I remember vividly. We had just completed a segment of the course on planetary astronomy leading up to Newtonian physics. Nash played out the struggle between the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. The balance of qualities of the systems was exquisite, delicate, technical. Nash reviewed the two cases we had dissected so thoroughly for the 350 undergraduates in a large lecture hall and then said that he knew why Copernicus had chosen his heliocentric system. He paused. The auditorium was absolutely quiet. This was the moment the students had been waiting for. Nash looked around and then said softly, “He chose it because it was prettier.” And then he walked out. No one stirred. There was no rush to go to the next class or lunch. We TAs were equally enthralled even though we had an inkling of what was coming. That, I said to myself, is what I want to be able to do when I become a college teacher.

In the meantime, I spent summers on Cape Cod, got married, wrote most of a dissertation on John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of science, showing, I hoped, that Mill had in some ways anticipated the Vienna Circle and Quine’s late attack on them. And then I started looking for a job. If I had been born at Amherst, intellectually I was still in my late teens, struggling with a nascent academic identity and a difficult role as a husband. One day the department secretary, who largely ran the department for the distracted and indifferent faculty, mentioned that she knew I was looking for a job. She had received an inquiry from Trinity College. Was I interested? Indeed: it was Amherst lite and I jumped at the chance.

And there I was, back at a four-year liberal arts college down the river from my start at Amherst, but now on the other side of the dais. I had scarcely started when along came a visiting committee for our decennial accreditation review. Bill Kinnick was on the committee and came to review my Introduction to Philosophy class, and, in my mind, to see whether I had matured into an adequate philosophy professor. I now understood existentialist angst. Despite our many conversations later, he never mentioned what his judgment was. (But we did get re-accredited.)

I loved the teaching: the Socratic drama of the classroom, the continual swarm of new ideas, my gradual deeper understanding of older attempts to pose questions about ourselves and our world. I was able to develop courses on almost any theme I came to see as important: utopian schemes (in the 70s), nuclear weapons and arms control (in the 80s), medical ethics (in the 90s), and various more traditional courses in philosophy of science, art, logic, evolution, and seminars on Hume, Kant, Quine, Wittgenstein, and Dennett. It was, as I was

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later to remind my colleagues, one of the great jobs in the world. Where else could you get paid (even if not much) to do what you loved: write, teach, study, and learn. It was a legacy I inherited from our early years at Amherst.

Then at the turn of the century, I moved into the administration for a fascinating sojourn as Dean of Faculty. At Amherst I had been led to believe that administrators were the lowest form of academic life and had accordingly avoided it for many years. But a new college president and new prospects convinced me to give it a try. I never regretted it; indeed, I only wished I had begun at an earlier age. Contrary to rumor, the job involved many intellectually challenging puzzles about budgets, curriculum choices, and college life, as well as sometimes troubling moral dilemmas. Above all it was an opportunity to enhance the academic lives of colleagues, to share in promoting a long tradition of scholarship and research that could enrich the lives of our students.

There were times, nevertheless, when I questioned the choices I had made. Watching my father’s distinguished career in law and recalling the efforts of our family doctor years ago to lure me into medicine (he enrolled me in a pathology course in a local hospital and took me to autopsies), I have often wondered how my life could have been different. But I have no doubts that it was my encounter with academic life at Amherst that directed my course. Would it have happened similarly at another college? Probably. But I suspect if I had gone to Kansas University, as I had originally, but briefly, contemplated, my life would have been very different.

I wasn't really born at Amherst. Many years lay behind that period. I look back on it now as a moment as if during a long run through the countryside, the miles flowing swiftly by, passing through the hills and along stretches of level ground. Occasionally the trail narrows with unsure footing or steep slopes only to level out again. Sometimes I pick up the pace for the sheer joy of the running; or slow to a jog to look across the hills toward home. I find the pace slowing now; I may even walk the last few miles.

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Ridley J. Brown

“Brevity is the soul of elegance.”

I thoroughly enjoyed my 4-year experience at Amherst and would not hesitate to do it again. I should note for the record that I spent part of my time at Amherst living at 19 Hitchcock Road to care for my mother and her schizophrenia, when my father was teaching his classes. My highlights at Amherst apart from the excellent class schedule we enjoyed was singing in the Zumbyes and participating in the efforts of the Amherst track and field team, where I became good friends with Dwight Cowan and Chris Horton, both of whom unfortunately have preceded us to whatever is next.

Does Amherst look better (worse) to you now than it did in 1958?

Amherst looks very much the same to me today as it did when I was growing up there and attending Amherst College. As a boy, I used to walk every day to school with my friend Maury McKeon (Princeton 1958) from Hitchcock Road up over Chapel Hill down by what was then the Converse Library and through town to the Town Hall and down the hill to school.

I must admit I am a bit surprised by the diversity of color in the present student population of our fair College.

How are you handling the inevitable downsizing, cleaning of attics and storage spaces or discarding of old files and records, putting your history in order?

Fortunately, my move from Madison CT to Locquémeau, France, entailed a significant downsizing of my libraries and records. Some of my Amherst memorabilia, I left with John Bischof, who was then residing in Madison with his wife. Many of the other things were given away or thrown away before our move. I must admit that my present wife Helga was a significant help in my downsizing effort. Our present location is currently packed with memorabilia and records of all sorts which we will leave to my children to settle.

How has your career/professional life changed over the years? Is the field of your work still recognizable?

After graduating from INSEAD (Institut Eropéen d'Administration des Affaires) in 1963, I started working with the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company in New York. From there I went to White Weld and to a number of subsequent brokerage firms trying to maintain my residence in Paris. I assume the brokerage community is much the same today as when I left it, but there have been continuous mergers and acquisitions concerning its structure.

What changes have you noticed in your views about sexuality, marriage, and/or parenthood as you aged?

I continue to have a very strong feelings about marriage and parenthood as I have aged. I am delighted that the medical advances have permitted women to give birth at a more advanced age, considering my daughter giving birth to a son at the age of 48.

What advice would you give to a current Amherst undergraduate?

My response is easy but much harder to do than talk about: find something you really like to do and then get someone to pay you for doing it.

What aspects of your life would you change if given the chance?

I would never have enlisted in the US Army had I realized the difference between being a simple soldier and being an officer.

What makes you happiest?

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Living life.

What ideas and concerns do you find yourself focusing on more and more as you grow older?

Apart from staying alive, I have developed a keen interest in our civilization and the evolution of mankind. I would recommend to all of you the lecture of my current read, Civilization – The Six Killer Apps of Western Power” by Niall Ferguson.

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Richard Burton

Amherst’s role in my educational journey:

My time at Amherst was part of a continuum in my education. The 5th grade actually had the most profound educational impact on my life. The other transformative educational years were my first year at Harvard Medical School, my first year as a surgical resident, my first year as a surgeon in the military, and my first year in practice as a surgeon in 1971, in charge of Hand Surgery at the Cleveland Clinic. Amherst was a key part of my educational journey, but I think it best to reflect on it in the context of the journey I describe below.

Amherst was a valued central 4-year experience. The most valuable lessons from my Amherst experience came from fellow students – our class, and also members of the class of ’59 – not from course work. What where these lessons? 1) the truly brilliant individuals are often the most humble, and this was true of my fellow students, and surprising to me also for many of our professors at Amherst; 2) true diversity has to do with visions of thought and open-minded dialogue of diverse opinions, unrelated to country of origin or color of skin; 3) “safe space” means that the student is so insecure in self and ideas that he/she cannot tolerate factual debate and exchange of ideas - objective debate can be uncomfortable and yet leads to growth; 4) emotional intelligence is really essential for a happy life, and for a successful career.

Amherst’s major gift to me was an education in an environment without “safe space”, where I had to struggle and solve situations by calling on internal strengths, thereby growing and appreciating:

The importance to keep focused on big-picture goals.

Ideas and facts have value; be confident in engaging in discussions on the value of ideas and ideals. Learn to say and believe, “I really like you – but I cannot agree/tolerate your ideas and here is why.” This realization proved enormously important throughout my education and subsequent personal and professional life.

Keep a balance in life amongst professional growth, family, personal self-care (e.g., “mindfulness”), physical fitness, and interpersonal relations.

The importance of the awareness of, and awe in, The Greater Being.

Life’s educational journey after Amherst:

Before I started medical school, my Dad gave me sage advice: "Life is what happens while you are making other plans," and “A lot can be accomplished if you don’t care who gets the credit.” How true each of those has been! My life has been replete with unexpected opportunities and turns in both personal and professional life, and all my cumulative educational experiences have been key. To name a few professional items: a fulfilling career since 1974, all at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC), with many roles of responsibility including Wehle Professor and Chair of Orthopaedics, and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. National activities have included presidency of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand (ASSH), and director of the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery for 10 years. In 2017 I was honored by the International Federation of Societies for Surgery of the Hand as a pioneer in hand surgery. Recognition at URMC has included a Special Lifetime Mentoring award.

Although my 81st birthday is in the rearview mirror, I am blessed to still have a meaningful role at URMC, based upon my successful book on leadership in academic health centers. Currently I mentor selected chairs one-on-one, co-direct a leadership-training program for chairs and center directors, and co-direct a leadership development program for aspiring leaders/chairs.

Changes in my chosen professional field and how should it further change

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Our health care systems have changed and will continue to. Health care delivery systems have been another longstanding interest of mine. In fact, my presidential address to the ASSH in 1993 was entitled, "The Rationing of Health Care -- How and by Whom?" Some of the key points: a) if you think health care is expensive, try the cost to society of sickness; b) money spent on research is a great financial return on investment dollars (i.e., think of the dollars saved in patient care by the development of the effective polio vaccine); c) the consumer of clinical health care resources must in some way be connected to the payer -- i.e., for many this might be health saving account programs: d) if health care insurance should be portable, tax deductible whether via employer or the individual, and sold across state lines; e) tort reform is key; f) the federal government is not necessarily the best answer (i.e., look at VA situation).

Advice you would give to a current Amherst undergraduate

Appreciate that Amherst is preparing you for life in the big wide world. In the reality of what you will face, there will be little or no “safe spaces.” Recognize your ideas have value and have the confidence to listen intently to the ideas of others. Emotional raised voices and interruptions have no place in productive debates. Do not be so insecure in your ideas that you cannot tolerate honest factual debate and objective exchange of ideas. Intense factual debate can be uncomfortable and yet leads to personal growth and evolving wisdom.

Recognize you can appreciate, and even like, another person, and yet disagree. So, forget “safe space.” Life is tough. Get tough. Those that stormed the beaches on D-day or Iwo Jima had to follow a higher purpose and be tough. Be honest and fair.

What ideas or concerns do you find yourself focusing on more and more as you grow older?

I have a firm belief in a “Greater Being,” a “Presence.” I have seen evidence for this in my life’s professional and personal experiences, and these experiences have been truly life changing for me.

Throughout all the above educational, professional, and personal journeys with twists and turns, family has been central. The rock of our family is my wife, Peggy. We have been blessed with two wonderful sons, and they in turn two fabulous daughters in law, and 4 phenomenal grandchildren. Life goes on!

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Norman Carr

We went through college at the pinnacle of America’s post World War II economic boom and global dominance. The United States under Eisenhower was a much more stable world than what currently exists. The admissions standards were then much less rigorous. We have a very strong class, but it’s questionable how many of us would be admitted if we applied today.

I received a first-rate education at Amherst, but I have never regarded it as transformative. I had no problems coping with the New Curriculum. I attended a very good high school and arrived with a strong math and physics background. I graduated cum laude, as did half of the class. My senior thesis, “The Political Effects of Truman’s Firing of General Douglas Macarthur,” was critical because it taught me to be skeptical.

My personal, social development was as important as my education, since I started as a shy and introspective teenager. I met my wife, then Carolyn Kinder, at Smith.

My perception was that the fraternity system before the college was co-educational worked well, although it was fragile. There was no hazing and 100% rushing was a good idea.

I was the social chairman at Psi U, which was a drinking fraternity. The line between drinking and consent is always a complex one, but it was not discussed or monitored at the time. It is remarkable how few accidents occurred during the driving excursions where alcohol use was substantial. We must have been very lucky.

I became a trial attorney who tried jury cases to verdict in dozens of states. My perception now is I used the skill successfully, in part as a device to cope with and manage anxiety. If one is trying a case hundreds of miles from home before a strict federal judge, it is necessary to plan for everything that might go wrong. For example, an expert witness missing a plane.

In reflecting on Amherst over a sixty-year period, I proffer that it may be useful to start with the historical context of Amherst in the 1950s.

The world today is a much harder place than it was in the 1950s. Without ruminating on either politics or the status of our democratic institutions, I choose to observe the development of our five very attractive and bright granddaughters who have not started college. I will not be around to see the end result, but my perception is that even with new, much tougher standards, they will do just fine.

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Sam Chase

My Amherst education provided a good basis for my subsequent life though not through direct use of that learned in specific courses.

My work position was eliminated 26 years ago, and I was fortunate to have a good retirement package that included good health insurance. I walked out the door and have had little contact with the Company since. It was purchased by an English company, which changed things even more. I might have ended up working with Fred Greenman as the company he worked for was also purchased by this same company.

Once retired, we made the decision to move to our vacation home in northern New Hampshire so that much of our downsizing was accomplished at that time. We are now trying to distribute china, utensils, furniture, etc. to children and grandchildren so they won’t have to do it when we’re gone. We have found that there is little of interest to 20-year-old boys, so items are going to auction or to the local second-hand stores.

My main emphasis now is to enjoy life.

Alan Chisholm

Being 80+ confronts most of us with loss: of health, of loved ones and friends, and with a sense of our days being numbered, of living on an uncertain countdown. I have just returned from the funeral of my brother-in-law. He was a successful judge who some years ago hit bottom with a DWI, resigned from the bench, joined AA and began 32 years of sobriety and significant service to others in recovery. His family has shared in a journey of pain, loss and triumph.

I feel fortunate to have functioning limbs, lungs, heart, etc., but I’m coping with hearing loss, and the reality that the high frequency dimension of consonants means that you don’t hear what a loved one says to you from another room, just her voice. And her saying, as Prof. Arons in Science 1-2, “I cast my pearls but once.”

Three mini-strokes have left me with some significant memory loss, both short and long-term. I had the good fortune to be an accompanying spouse on some wonderful world travels with my wife, but don’t remember today many details of the people and places we visited. Ditto sometimes about plans and decisions made. So, I have to learn anew how to pay attention.

Today I was searching in vain through my papers for notes on the forthcoming Amherst 60th Memorial. That was frustrating, but I came across a file of notes from my daughters on my 80th birthday, which brought forth a grateful smile.

Where are we headed? I believe our destiny is towards some sort of community of love, peace, rest, and healing. Pick your own metaphor; mine is resurrection of the body and life everlasting.

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Allen Clark

Amherst taught us how to analyze history as historians, see physics through the lens of a physicist, and carefully choose words with the eye of a wordsmith. But I am not so sure I can pin down the impact of my four-year experience at Amherst on my subsequent life.

Some of the problem is that my development has been a continuum, and I believe that my five years of schooling at Kent School perhaps had the greatest impact on me. (Oddly enough, I have not taken anywhere as much interest in Kent as I have taken in Amherst since graduating. So why is that? Perhaps it’s because of the “impact.”)

The three areas in which Amherst had its particular “impact” on me, that (to use the verb de jour) impacted my continuing interest in and appreciation for Amherst, were the curriculum, the teachers, and the social/school environment.

We as a class have expressed concern over matters of Amherst’s altered curriculum in some volume for the past 20 years. Some of that is the proclivity of old age, but most of it is the conviction most of us have that the structured curriculum we went through not only represented what liberal arts should be, it gave us a certain structure in our lives. That’s not what we think the current a la carte approach delivers.

Our curriculum taught us how to question, how to reason, how to think on our own - believing that we could sift through alternatives to arrive at our own, reasoned point of view. What we thought was important; how we thought was more so. I was fortunate to do well in freshman Physics. What strikes me now as I look back is the fact that I remember almost none of the content. In fact, I don’t believe I remembered much as each new week came and went back then. What I did, though, was learn how to do the formulas, how to think like a physicist (well, at least on a freshman level). I learned process. The same was true of English 1-2. This was the best example. There were no right answers. The course was a progression of analyze, articulate, adjust. Then, do it all over again. The two courses had much in common. No wonder Arons said he wished he could teach English 1-2 sometime.

I ended up in advertising (yes, the “Mad Men” era) where one needed the ability to find opportunity in complex situations, some apparently hopelessly negative. It helped being a natural optimist. But I believe the Amherst experience was one of optimism. We learned that we could study, interpret, evaluate and then have the personal conviction to stand on our own two feet.

Secondly, a good curriculum demands a good faculty. It’s worth stopping for a moment to think about the fact that first meaning of “faculty” is “an inherent mental or physical power.” It’s an aptitude or talent for doing something, which is what I think I have been talking about. So, what I think Amherst gave us and what influenced my subsequent life was a faculty that cared about my personal faculties.

Each of us had favorite teachers. But it was the collective faculty that honed my problem-solving abilities. And that influence was a matter of how they taught maybe even more than what they taught.

Thirdly, Amherst was of a size, shape and spirit that was conducive to building lifelong bonds. There was a certain ethos that influenced me throughout my life that wouldn’t have been possible in a different part of the country or large college or simply not Amherst. And it’s worth noting that just writing this, for a 60th reunion, where we will have return rates other colleges could never get near means that our experience at Amherst and our Grand Cru Classe itself are evidence of Amherst’s impact on my subsequent life.

I will end repeating what I have mentioned twice before in our reunion books. I am pretty certain that Amherst helped me try to follow the advice Professor Cesar Barber gave, “to keep a place apart.” Amherst taught us

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perspective. Perspective in terms of our place in the world, real and imaginary, past and present, as well as a sort of inner perspective. Perhaps it was easier to learn perspective in the 1950s then today, but it, along with honesty and integrity – and love – is all the more “what the world needs now.”

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Dick Danielson

PART ONE: I think the biggest impact Amherst had on me was that other people, other societies and other countries often had different ideas than I had. Alfred Kazin showed me how closed my mind was. He personally met with me to point out that under my immigration plan his parents would still be in Europe! I never forgot that meeting. I think Amherst would have been a much better experience if it had been coed.

PART TWO: In high school I could learn it all. At Amherst there was no "right" answer and I could not get it all. At Penn Dental School it was impossible to master everything. In the Army my horizons were vastly expanded by living for three years in France. Many times, the French view was different from ours and sometimes better. During Vietnam I no longer accepted everything our politicians and generals said. In private practice (51 years) I learned a lot about people and their feelings and thoughts. Today dentistry is much more production oriented than patient oriented.

I would tell current Amherst undergraduates to explore their thoughts and take courses they like. There is plenty of time for the "real" world. As far as retirement goes, there is always much to do. That was a surprise. Phoebe and I have not downsized yet, but we are weeding things out. I think I am happiest just relaxing with Phoebe and maybe not doing much of anything. Our biggest concern and joy are our children and grandchildren. They are all doing well. Our two grandsons are students at Davidson College in North Carolina, a fine liberal arts school like Amherst, but with much better weather. Our two granddaughters, age 11 and 14, are students at Lake Highland Prep School in Orlando. Finally, we watch our health and so far, we are fine. Life is good!

John Davenport

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Like Allen Clark and Charlie Patterson, I came to Amherst from Kent School, an Episcopal boarding school for boys on the Housatonic River in Kent, Connecticut. In those days and in that quite waspy environment, athletic prowess was valued among the student body more than nearly everything else, including academic performance, so, despite being without athletic talent, I went out for the junior varsity hockey and baseball teams each year starting in the tenth grade, only to be unceremoniously cut, throwing me into a month-long state of depression and sapping my self-confidence. The odd little things I was reasonably good at, like parsing the Latin dactylic hexameter of the Aeneid or playing the organ in Chapel, garnered only mild approval and recognition and did little to boost my self-esteem.

That all changed with my arrival at Amherst. Somehow, in that much more free and liberal, less convention-bound, small college environment, surrounded by classmates with wildly different backgrounds, talents and experiences, I felt appreciated for who I was and began to feel more comfortable in my own skin. I was in awe of the richness and intensity of the core freshman and sophomore year curriculum (although I still don’t have a clue as to what English 1 was all about) and was blown away by the quality of the student dramatics, the Chapel choir, Zumbye and DQ performances, and the athletic teams. I would say that Amherst’s impact on me, in addition to many invaluable friendships, was to stimulate my enjoyment of the liberal arts, thereby making life that much more enjoyable. Last but not least, it also prepared me well, - probably as much as law school did, - for a satisfying law career. (None of the above should be read as derogatory of Kent School; the best teacher I ever had, - from Kindergarten to law school, - was my junior year literature teacher there).

Although I can’t say with any certainty that it’s a product of my Amherst experience (Amherst in our time there, seems in hindsight to have been shockingly uninvolved politically), I have become increasingly liberal politically and culturally in my old age. We are very worried for our children and grandchildren about the anti-intellectualism and disdain for knowledge and expertise that prevails in our current administration and the damage it is doing to the country’s core institutions and reputation. I hate having to apologize to our French friends, whom we travel to France quite often to visit.

These days I’m filling most of my time volunteering three or four days a week at the Conservation Law Foundation, an environmental advocacy non-profit focusing on New England issues (I’ve been there almost 18 years), practicing the piano and taking lessons, and trying to stay in shape playing tennis and going twice a week to a physical trainer (kind of like eating kale).

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Bill Dove

To Amherst 1958 and our faculty, with thanks for our shared experiences and the loyalty they have generated.

I am an experimental researcher. Often, I learn how a system works by the “Minus One” principle: observe its behavior when one element is altered. My story emerges from the fact that I entered Amherst in the Sophomore year, after my classmates had completed most of Amherst’s Core Curriculum. Consequently, my connection to the Amherst experience unfolded long after graduation. In the end, I have honored the power of “peer-to-peer” experience in working with faculty colleagues to create the doctoral program in genetics at Wisconsin.

In their roles as class correspondent, our class Co-Secretaries Gideonse and Saltman have served to connect me with the activities of Amherst 58. Beyond that, Hank's voice from Maine resonates with my affinity for the Maine seaside – where my family enjoys periodic summer reunions. My profession has brought me into contact with three other Amherst contemporaries: with Dave Suzuki, during the time our research overlapped in experimental genetics; with Dave Mayhew, after we were each elected to the National Academy of Sciences; and finally, with Barry Bloom when my research moved toward public health issues surrounding colon cancer. In particular, my current research with colleagues at Wisconsin investigates the detection of early stages in colon cancer, and the effects of vitamin D supplementation on these stages. Though enriched by our shared Amherst history, the substance of these belated encounters has involved the power of a shared experience between peers – by chance long after college days.

Beyond these belated connections, I have enjoyed others with younger Amherst graduates. Here too, the substance comes from addressing a new shared issue, not from a challenge posed to the two of us in the Core Curriculum. Briefly, what are these shared issues?

The research of Ted Jones (a postdoctoral fellow with me) and Art Landy (on the faculty at Brown) intersected with my interests in the regulation of gene expression and recombination. Richard Braun (on the faculty at Berne Switzerland) shared an interest in cell replication. Gerry Fink (on the faculty at MIT) has had a leadership role in the Genetics Society of America (GSA); I have edited a monthly column for the GSA with my colleague, James Crow to which Gerry has been an important contributor (GENETICS 203: 1011-1022, 2016). Tom Benjamin, Harold Varmus, and Doug Lowy have been actively studying the genetics of cancer, sharing with me the challenges of exploring this human disease with the laboratory mouse. Finally, Mark Reichelderfer (a physician at Wisconsin who shares with me both a suburban Chicago and an Amherst background) is the key link in the research with which I am currently involved: to connect results from animal models for colon cancer with the challenge of detecting the disease early in people. Science evolves, as must scientists.

Most of these interactions have arisen randomly. Their shared Amherst nature has then served as a bond. My connection with Tom Benjamin provides an informative anecdote. One day while on sabbatical at the Pasteur Institute, I was sitting in the Metro, deep in thought. As I looked up to check the time there was Tom Benjamin (Amherst 1959), whom I had known briefly on the squash court at Amherst and in graduate school at Caltech. While our three children were in French school, my wife Alexandra and I then met up with Tom over lunch. We had a lively discussion of mouse genetics. This chance encounter in the Pasteur Metro followed by a discussion of mouse genetics over lunch epitomizes the pattern by which I come belatedly to the peer-to-peer power of Amherst’s education.

I shall end my story by describing an effort that I have engaged with colleagues on the Genetics faculty at Wisconsin. Each year, around 10 doctoral students come to Wisconsin to become professionals in this multi-faceted field. A doctoral research program requires around five years, so that around 50 Genetics doctoral students are on campus at any time. Wisconsin’s campus is also multi-faceted: beyond the Department of

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Genetics and Medical Genetics, there are faculty in 21 other departments who include the science of genetics in their research. Therefore the 50 doctoral students become scattered across a broad array of laboratories!

During the time that I directed this doctoral program (1987-2002), the faculty developed a program that created a community from this diversity. Its Core Curriculum started in the first year with three didactic courses on the central elements of the discipline. It then joined into the campus-wide weekly Genetics Colloquium in a way that enhances the peer-to-peer experience. In the Spring semester of both the first and second years, the doctoral students engage the Colloquium Speaker – first, in advance (by raising questions from reading an article by the Speaker); and after the lecture by discussing in roundtable format the issues raised by the questions posed by students and by the Speaker’s lecture. The presence of both first- and second-year students in post-Colloquium roundtable discussions creates an expanded peer-to-peer opportunity to learn from one another. One of my faculty colleagues quips: “On the campus you can tell a doctoral student in the Genetics Program – by the smile on his or her face!”

Our Amherst experience involves more than its Core Curriculum. Indeed, I have been impressed by the fact that two of the distinguished scientists with whom I have mentioned connecting later did not major in science at Amherst: Doug Lowy in Art History and Harold Varmus in English. As we 1958 alumni gather, in person or in spirit, we can wonder how our experiences in the Core Curriculum and other facets of our liberal arts education at Amherst translates to ways to meet the challenges of today’s society – local, national, and global. My lifelong response to coming late to Amherst’s Core Curriculum is reflected in a simple phrase:

JUST CONNECT!

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Dick Franck

Reflections on the occasion of my 60th reunion year.

Impact-positives:

I) being near Smith where I met Polly at a 1954 fall “mixer” and married in August 1958. Despite our different childhood religious upbringings, we came from similar working-class backgrounds and were both open to the opportunities to expand our horizons. We both experienced “culture shock” when we were freshman.

ii) Physics 1-2 with Arnold Arons where I learned that understanding “how do you know that?” was the basic question in science, not “have you memorized facts and equations.” His course influenced my teaching of organic chemistry. When I explained how a mechanism or concept was first proven or discovered, many of the students asked, “Is this on the exam?” Eventually, some students did learn to think as scientists, not as exam takers.

iii) the several required classes that we all had in common were good. We suffered and learned to learn from each other. Beyond the requirements, however, the freedom to be a “butterfly” and wander among the liberal arts with no particular focus enhanced my dilettante tendencies.

Life skills:

i) learned to tap a keg

i) learned to play Frisbee with metal beer trays which required our “borrowing” the trays from local bars.

Negatives:

i) inadequacy of chemistry instruction, as I learned when I entered graduate school

ii) absence of firm direction to study some biology. I was allowed to take a non-science course (no recollection of what it was) in its place. Consequently, I was missing an area of knowledge important for me as a practicing organic chemist

iii) encouragement to skip German 1-2, but instead to enroll in an advanced level German for which I received a courtesy D from Murray Peppard so I could graduate

iv) a pervasive judgmental attitude toward people by which college they attended, by their dress, by their religion. I still feel regret for the snobbish outlook I had toward people who did not present as the “ideal” (fill in the blank) ______- man (Amherst, Ivy league, preppy, casually sophisticated). Although I did not really meet these criteria, somehow I must have absorbed this set of norms. In retrospect, I feel that Amherst was key in providing “snob” guidance. My attitude changed when I taught in the world outside “the bubble,” schools where the students and faculty were smart, interesting, motivated, successful and couldn't pronounce Amherst with a silent H.

Adult Life - Learning that our son Peter was mentally challenged was a major influence. We and our local agency (Abilis) have helped Peter achieve a nearly independent life. As a result, we have learned that every person has value and enjoys achievements, however limited, when given the chance. We also realized that when a family is focused on the member who has challenges, typical siblings can feel somewhat neglected at times. Because the Greenwich school system could do good things for Peter, we chose to live there, where a significant proportion of its population filled in the right blanks (see above). We live in a modest neighborhood. It has the Greenwich school system, parks, beaches, waters for boating etc. Access to NYC and its cultural life has been a plus.

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We have lived in both Cambridges, Firenze, Padova and Hamburg due to collaborations, sabbaticals etc. and enjoyed good friendships through this, as well as the valuable experience of non-East Coast American life style.

Early in my graduate work at U. of Wisconsin, my mentor resigned his position to become chair of Chemistry at Stanford. A serendipitous result of his job change was that his research group was asked to relocate from Madison to Palo Alto and we were given a month off to make the move. The outcome was a camping adventure where Polly and I discovered the American west and had wonderful experiences. Suffice to say that we have continued our adventures in the region from 1960 onwards. There were Amherst links through our participation in the alumni “college” of geology and ecology in Red Lodge, Montana and in our visits to Capitol Reef National Park.

Polly and I are pleased that the College is evolving, that the Connecticut river valley is still beautiful, and that the Mt. Holyoke range skyline is many things to many people.

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Hendrik Gideonse

Arriving as a 6'3” 142-pound “rail,” Amherst was my first exposure to athletics of any kind. It totally transformed my self-image. Following a bout of mono Fall, 1955, I was urged to swim ten easy laps twice a week. Coach Dunbar plucked me from that 'prescription' as a possible fourth for the varsity 400-yard freestyle relay. Thus began an athletic experience of fifty years duration.

Amherst's New Curriculum, however, determined my career choice. It led to deep convictions about the moral responsibilities of educators to both their students and a free society. Seeds were planted that became the understanding that the particular “office” of teacher in our society must be seen by them as the continuous reinvention of the republic. I was not wholly aware of its transformation of me at the time. But over time it matured in my consciousness and became the fundamental benchmark for lifelong learning that included its mindful reworking over all the decades since as to its meaning.

Physics/Math, English, and Am Studs were the principal engines of the Amherst faculty's commitment to us. The two-century unfolding of physics from Isaac Newton to Bohr's atomic theory grounded my later observation of the parallel but much more rapid revolution in biology that unfolded within our own lifetime. While nominally immersed in science/math, language, and the nature of argument, Amherst's effect on me was deeply epistemological. All of it shaped my inclination to explore education as a profession. A Master’s program at Harvard continued through to a doctorate. Those deep moral convictions made me an easy mark for Lyndon Johnson's new Education Commissioner, Francis Keppel, my Dean while a student at Harvard: Would I come work with him on Johnson's many education initiatives? Keppel, remembering from Harvard my reservations regarding the U.S. Office of Education as a place to work, drove a bargain: would I come, see how it went for six months, and then decide? I ended up staying seven years!

D.C. was a fascinating “post-doc” experience. I applied my philosophical preparation to the articulation of policy to improve American education. Acquired skills in historiography were applied 180 degrees in the opposite direction aimed at understanding the present as the past of a projected future! Growing out of the awareness of epistemologies first emerging at Amherst, grappling with how knowledge – and in what forms – might undergird public policy led me to also identify with the academic specialty of policy science.

Following that came a fifteen-year deanship in education, university-wide academic planning, coordinating a teacher education program through its development, and a post-career aimed at educating the Maine public and its legislators on environmental, energy and related policy, the primary motivation being deep fear for my grandkids’ futures.

A Few Thoughts on the Eventual “It's a Wrap!” of My Life.

Determined that I would not subject my sons to the emotional upheaval of weeding through the detritus of my life (a task I had experienced for my parents in '85 and then later for my brother in '98), I got rid of two-thirds of what I had accumulated when I took retirement 22 years ago. Still, I brought 14 four-drawer files of “stuff” with me to Maine. Last fall I began what Swede's call “death cleaning.” I was astounded at the emotional smorgasbord the process laid out before me. I'm not fully to terms with it just yet; at this writing I've pitched more than half of what I brought, but there's now the more difficult reckoning to be done.

Some decisions were easy. Pitching a single full file drawer from an excruciatingly frustrating trustee experience for a local private school was instant relief. Many accumulated folders of other people's work were also easy, maybe a slight bit of regret at never using them again. A slew of files associated with possible career opportunities – “pathways not taken” -- were easy, too. All turned into electricity following deposit at the local transfer station!

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And what of all the folders of outlines, notes, and successive drafts of articles, chapters, essays, books, book reviews, the draft of my dissertation (the embarrassing detailed red-inked record of how Professor Fred Rudolph [yes, Williams College – long story!] politely but insistently hammered at me until I could more predictably generate at least passable historical prose)?? All these have yet to make the “electrifying journey.” Something about the struggle – and the achievements – they represent, the milestones they constitute for a life one of whose mantras has been to “Leave Tracks.” Likewise, the copies of my Reading File of the outflow from my Dean's Office and the even more complete file of my three-year coordination of the development of a highly innovative – and now gone – secondary teacher preparation program whose outstanding success was not enough to keep it in place. The bond with this “stuff” of my professional and service life has so far proved a barrier to my trashing it. Writing about it now yields some inkling that disposal may soon be easier.

My personal life has not been without its bumps. There were files associated with that. Personal loss, depression, temporary disability have disrupted relationships but not caused me to give up on them altogether. True, I can't say I've been very smart about some I've pursued. What can I say? Affaire de coeur! One large compilation from just after the time my second marriage came to an end and my brother died quickly from cancer I had printed out from my e-mail files to better come to terms – with professional help – with what had led me to such injudiciousness. I was surprised by the intensity of the temptation to look at it one more time. The emotional upheaval I'd experienced at that time had quieted over time, but its resurgence was so swift, so forceful, tempted though I was, wisdom said get rid of it, and NOW! Wisdom won!

A thought or two on being alone. I do not look forward to my remaining time absent the comfort of continuing intimacy in my life. Half a lifetime ago I remember being incredulous on reading of some well-known philosopher (identity now lost to me!) expressing relief at no longer being driven by such claims on him. I remember wondering whether that could ever happen to me. I've never arrived at that place, nor from my conversations with you have many of the rest of us, and that makes our generation quite different from our parents'. For me, now, even the hope that I might yet experience something like that again still accompanies my life. It is, in its own particular way, a sustaining one, even if it should, in the end, prove unrequited.

And what's made me happiest since just last Halloween?? Successfully conducting entirely in whispers a 5:30 AM March morning breakfast with my three-year-old granddaughter, Maggie. Steering her older sister, Lucia, through mastery of a dozen knots, their proper names, and purposes in time for her seventh birthday. Completing eighteen-plus policy analyses for Maine legislators. Taking down, exactly where and how I intended, single-handed and without error, eight 60/80-foot-tall too-aggressively-branching star blocker-trees affording me once again an unimpeded Maine view of stars I built that bedroom in part to observe.

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Martin Gold

I have been an extremely lucky person throughout my life. I feel as if I hit the lottery because I have always been surrounded with love, by wonderful parents, one wife (for 52 years), two sons and their wives, and four marvelous grandchildren. I still live where I was born, mid-town Manhattan, where the fast pace, the culture and the diversity seem just right for me.

Before Amherst, I graduated from an excellent high school, the Bronx High School of Science. I had been a good student, and I thought of becoming a physician, or perhaps a scientist of some kind. Academically, I was challenged at Amherst; I was quite advanced in math and science, but behind in other subjects. My real problem, however, was my age. The prevailing educational theory, at least in New York, had been to advance students beyond their class if they were doing well, so I was only 16 when I graduated from Bronx Science and arrived at Amherst. Many of my classmates at Bronx Science were my age, but I was the youngest member of our class at Amherst, and I was not very mature.

By the time I really adjusted to life at Amherst, I was a Junior. Fortunately, I was guided and strongly influenced by several members of the marvelous Amherst faculty, and I was particularly affected by the great historian and Constitutional scholar, Henry Steele Commager. He suggested that I should consider law school, and he wrote a letter recommending me to the Dean of Columbia Law School, which seems to have carried the day.

I have enjoyed being a lawyer for 57 years, and I continue to practice, though only about half-time. I have always been a litigator, and I have handled major cases, often for well-known clients. Now, I spend more of my time as a lawyer on pro bono matters, and as a court-appointed referee. In recent years, my wife and I have traveled a good deal. We were in Iceland in May (which explains my absence from our class reunion).

I think of my four years at Amherst as one of the many blessings I have enjoyed. A demanding liberal education in an idyllic setting, with wonderful classmates and a superb faculty, expanded my thinking for life.

I think that the many changes at Amherst over the last 60 years have been very positive. The addition of women, and the broadening of both the curriculum and the student body, have made a wonderful place even better.

Education in America is obviously in trouble. Our nation must strive to provide everyone with at least a basic understanding of the sciences, an appreciation of the arts, and general knowledge of economics and history. These are necessary to enable people to distinguish fact from fiction, and to make good decisions for themselves, and as citizens. Education should be more than preparation for the job market. Amherst, and other institutions like it, must help to promote this goal.

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Alan Haught

Amherst taught me new and reinforced previously encountered life's lessons and provided a framework to recognize the further lessons that were presented by the years that followed. The foundation for all of this was the ability to reason, the primary lesson of our shared freshman and sophomore years in the core curriculum, sadly now missing from the college experience. We learned to think in an orderly and clearly reasoned manner, to articulate our thoughts both orally and especially in written form, and to recognize our audience and convey our arguments in a manner intelligible to them. We encountered many areas of expression in our four years, among them art, literature, mathematics, science, music, athletics, theatre, history, and philosophy. Each of these had their own vocabulary, mode of expression, and logic, and we learned to see them as different but also valid ways to address the world. We gained enough specific information to take tentative steps into and discover some of the richness in each. Most important of all, however, was that we learned how to approach and the courage to enter such new arenas we encountered as our lives developed along their own individual paths.

From the rich skill sets of our entering freshman class I quickly learned that there were those better than I in virtually any area, but I also learned that I could contribute in these areas as well, both important lessons for life whether viewing from the top or from within the pack. I had the enviable position of enjoying my work throughout my working career, first in physics research and later as high school science/math teacher. All was not rosy at every turn, but I can say that I looked forward to going into work every single day.

There were choices I made that were career limiting: not transitioning into research management or later into school administration, but neither then nor now do I regret those choices as they would have greatly diminished the pleasure I derived from the work I was engaged in. I had the distinct good fortune to be involved in interesting and active areas of research, and to be in a position to make significant, not Nobel Prize winning but significant, contributions to them. The initial investigation of laser produced plasmas, still an active area of research; the first comparative analysis on a common basis of quantum and thermal solar energy conversion, still a guiding framework for solar power development; and the analysis of flywheel energy storage which identifies the materials requirements for a given storage density. For anyone interested, I would be proud to provide copies of any of these even now, some 30 years later. Life lesson: Find work that you can enjoy, it is much more important than money, and you can look back on your career with satisfaction.

For my teaching career, the measure of my work is the influence I was able to have on my students. I am obviously proud of those who chose to pursue careers in technical fields, but I am equally if not more so proud of those who discovered that they could master difficult material and with this enhanced view of themselves went on to successful careers in other fields. I taught in an inner-city school populated by students for whom much of society held rather low expectations. As a “white guy from the suburbs” I am proud that I was accepted by my students throughout the turbulent 90’s and even more that they said “from their demanding English teacher they were taught how to read, from their equally demanding history teacher they were taught how to take notes, and from me, their demanding science teacher, they were taught how to think.” As a teacher, for me there is no higher accolade. Life lesson: Give back to the generation that follows, it is rewarding for you, is of benefit to those that receive it, and is pay-back for what was earlier provided to you.

My personal life was illuminated twice by the joys of marriage and darkened, also twice, by the misfortune of death. My first wife, Carol, over 50 years was my partner in the voyage of family, mother to our four children, loyal helpmate throughout my working career, and grandmother to the thirteen grandchildren our children provided. She was educated as a geologist and mathematician and used her computer skills (this in the early 60’s) to facilitate my graduate thesis and to provide income during the graduate school years. Her math and home management skills gleaned savings as my career developed over the years, and the savings blossomed

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under her nurture to become a comfortable foundation for retirement as my working career drew to a close. Alzheimer’s Disease was the unfortunate fate that life presented to her, but I was able to care for her at home throughout the five years of her decline and those five years in their own way were as valuable to us as the earlier ones had been. A venture into online dating (one uses the resources of one’s time) kindled a new relationship and returned the delights of companionship, affection, love, and intimacy into my life, leading again to the pleasure (and occasional travails) of marriage. Life once more cast a shadow, and Stephanie was diagnosed with a fatal brain glioblastoma. I was also able to care for her at home, but the tumor was relentless, and our marriage was cut to a much too short 14 months. At this writing it is only an additional 14 months later, and I am still addressing what my future holds. Life lesson: Revel in the joys of the present, treasure the relationships you have, nurture and feed them well for you do not know how long you will be able to share in them. A partner in life is important, do everything you can to make life better with that special someone; life is capricious and cannot be foretold, avoid possible regret by extending your best right now.

It has been evident to me throughout my life that Amherst was important in the development of the me that I have become, not because of a particular class or special teacher, although there were both excellent classes and exceptional teachers, but because it was at Amherst that I was taught to think clearly, reason well, articulate effectively, and to apply those skills to all that I do. I cannot identify what it was about Amherst that gave that result although I am sure that the core curriculum was an important part: the dedication of the combined faculty and the all but universal perplexity of our fellow students providing an immersion in an experience that opened our minds to capabilities that we might not otherwise have assimilated. However it happened, the result has been by far the most important outcome of my college years for me, and I believe for others as well. I cannot think of any other outcome more worthy of a college or the program it provides its students.

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Harvey Hecht

I have fond memories of Amherst. The Freshman & Sophomore core curriculum was difficult but exciting. Physics 1-2 taught me how important, assumptions and definitions are in analyzing a problem. Years later when auditing an astronomy class at Hunter College, the concepts of Newton's Laws reappeared. To me they seemed like old friends. English 1-2 made me aware that definitions of words depend upon the context in which they are used and words themselves are not the reality. Years later when teaching medical students and residents in Radiology how to recognize the outline of the heart on a chest x-ray and the disappearance of the outline when there is Pneumonia next to the heart, reminded me of our first English assignment “define a line” and “where are you.”

Even our public speaking course was fun especially teaching Miller Brown how to Cha Cha while standing on a desk listening to Tito Puente records. The long night session with Dick Rapson trying to interpret Henry James’ Ambassadors in English 21, the course in metaphysical poets by Professor Ben Demott and Professor Barber’s course on Yeats and Joyce were great experiences. Working hard with Professor Theodore Baird on my honors thesis about D.H. Laurence’s Women in Love was a challenge. Meeting each week at his Frank Lloyd Wright home was unforgettable especially when he rejected everything I wrote. Finally, after Christmas Vacation, he accepted my introduction and I created a thesis, which was new and original.

Years later seeing my three children attend Amherst, gave me great pleasure. Women were accepted, and the student body changed to be more inclusive of minorities and scholarship students making the college even more liberal.

Amherst influenced my professional life as a physician practicing and teaching Radiology. I learned to listen carefully to patient’s problems and correlate their symptoms with the Radiologic findings. I was able to grow in the field, learning how to interpret CT Scans, Ultrasound, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Nuclear Medicine.

Amherst encouraged lifelong learning and the need to grow and change as new concepts were created. I enjoy teaching and continue to enjoy learning. My wife Gail Solomon, MD Smith ’58 and I are taking French Courses at Alliance Française and courses in Economics, Political Science and Theater at Hunter College in New York.

I hope future years will be as exciting and fulfilling for my wife and me after 55 years of marriage.

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Jonathan Helmreich

Another term-paper assignment. Can I plagiarize from the paper written ten years ago? But it is stashed in a bookcase 1264 miles to the north. No way to get it. Yet if I remember rightly (not as easy to do as thirty years ago), I would stand by today what was written then.

As for events of the last ten years, the chief was our 2011 move to Sanibel, FL (for seven months of the year, returning to Pymatuning Reservoir in NW PA for the summer). A gamble, we thought. Retired and shifted to a nearby condo, we came to feel packaged and stored on a shelf. The venture south rewarded us with comfort, light and sun, new and interesting friends, and perhaps better health; in other words, a refreshed life. Downsizing was easier than it appeared at the outset. The sad downsize will come if and when we move to assisted living. After publishing another book on Allegheny's history, I retired as college historian at the end of 2017. Other developments requiring perseverance were a new knee for me and back surgery for Nancy. Writing on the wall?

Today Amherst seems farther away than the mileage. I'm glad the college now shows more responsibility toward diversity as compared to its shameful neglect of it sixty-some years ago. What clearly comes to remembrance is how scared I (as perhaps most of us) felt that first year. This was an introduction to the niggling sense of insecurity that would goad and shadow, sometimes saliently, more usually sequestered in the back of the mind, through the stages of life. Of course, too, some of the spiritual/existential questions that emerged at Amherst are still around, though the responses are different. The journey is the benefit.

A fine education was provided; it broadened my horizons, sharpened my thinking, improved my writing, enlivened my historical imagination. Unfortunately, it was delivered with a heavy dose of intellectual and social intimidation. My professional life was dedicated to carrying forward similar quality education, but in a supportive manner that would encourage the student's potential both as an intellectual and as a person.

We witnessed excellent and not-so teaching; this also provided a guiding experience for a life in academe and especially as an academic dean. The freshman year no doubt is at the root of my habit (to my wife's dismay) of questioning many things and insistence on more precise language. Charlie Cole and others did well in advising us of our good fortune and our concomitant responsibility to serve. I hope I've taken that lesson to heart and practice. Lessons also absorbed involve recognition of how home backgrounds and financial situations affect personalities and create gulfs difficult to bridge.

The art of writing remains elusive. Surely the amount we scribbled at Amherst, and especially the senior honors project, helped in that difficult search. It would have been nice to have had a few faculty – perhaps a faculty advisor – with whom a sophomore could really talk. A strong music instrumental program, rather than just a student-run band, would have enhanced my future recreational life.

Today colleges would be better off without fraternities and sororities. Tribalism, in all its forms, endangers our world. What does it say about Amherst and myself in the fifties when I confess that I doubt I could have gotten through those years – at least not as well as I did – without the fraternity? It was there that the needed support, friendship, best intellectual stimulation, and fun were found.

As my life was in academe, the Amherst experience was influential throughout that journey whether I was acting in support or against it. I was truly fortunate in my career. There were probably no more than five days that I was not eager and ready to go to work.

What makes me happiest? Above all, seeing those I care about – family and friends – happy and secure. Second, feeling (hoping?) that I have helped others, whether as teacher, friend, administrator, researcher, or

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community supporter and participant. Third, enjoying nature and remembering forests, mountains, lakes, streams, and oceans.

What concerns rise in the octogenarian years? The same as experienced by many. Will finances hold up, and Nancy's and my health? How best to protect and encourage the family? The process of coming to our end, more than the end itself, is what haunts. How will Nancy and I handle it? What more should I, can I do?

The over-riding emotion is one of thankfulness, gratitude.

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Art Higinbotham

When I first applied to Amherst, I was enrolled in the so-called three-two program with MIT, earning two bachelor’s degrees in five years. I had chosen Amherst over going directly to MIT, Cornell, Carnegie Tech (at that time), and Hamilton. I turned down an MIT Pittsburgh Alumni scholarship in favor of one directly from Amherst, as I was a penniless orphan graduating from Girard College in Philadelphia. I was clearly at a social disadvantage as Amherst was admitting students from private and elite public schools at that time. But I managed to assimilate to the Amherst environment intellectually but took longer to find my place in the fraternity system. In retrospect, the fraternity experience was one that accelerated my social development, an experience I would not have had at the other schools (excepting Hamilton, possibly). It would not be today.

Academically, I found that Science 1-2 under Professor Arons was intimidating and would have learned more in a nurturing seminar environment; Professor Towne would have been more satisfying. I found that History 1-2 under Professor Salmon was designed for the garbage can mind rather than the analytical mind; when I took my daughter to El Escorial some years ago, I was able to recite the history of the Bourbon kings of Spain, but by then felt that a visit to the Valley of the Fallen would have given her a better historical perspective. So was Chemistry 21-22 (organic), a competitive jungle with pre-meds, with emphasis on learning formulae, not appreciating scientific method. American Studies 21-22 was an offering designed to bring out new ways of looking at American issues; it was a non-traditional step in providing an inquiring education.

When I was accepted into the master's Chemical Engineering program at MIT after 4 years at Amherst, I was able to make up for the intensity of the MIT undergraduate curriculum, but primarily by enrolling in the Chemical Engineering Practice School at Oak Ridge, where the ability to organize an approach to a technical problem was more important that the technical methodology in solving the problem. It earned me the opportunity to serve as Assistant Director at the MIT Practice School at Esso's Bayway refinery, which led to my working for Esso at its Bombay refinery for two years. I made a futile attempt to earn doctorate in physical chemistry, before opting out for the Bayway position; to this day, I found obtaining solutions to the Schrodinger equations beyond my capability.

When I returned to Rockefeller Center from Bombay, I found they had another international assignment in store for me in Canh Ram Bay, South Vietnam; it was 1964--no thanks--I took a position in Engineering Research at 3M in St. Paul. My experience in India earned me a job in Brazil with 3M, from which I progressed to Manufacturing Director, Technical Director (the first without a Ph.D.), Engineering Director, Industrial Tape Division VP, and Group Vice President. I retired early at 59 in 1996, went to law school for two years, owned and operated an Italian restaurant for five years, and developed a proposal for a residential school for disadvantaged kids in Minneapolis (similar to Girard College), but failed to get state funding.

I scaled down to chairing our neighborhood association, and now have four wonderful grandchildren through two daughters (Wellesley and Carleton, but did not like Amherst--student host was too arrogant). My wife, Carleton '66, and I have what the NYTimes calls a custodial parenting relationship, which has worked well since we separated 26 years ago.

Amherst does not aspire to produce political and corporate leaders; if a student has this ambition, he or she should consider Harvard, Yale or Princeton; I may have been an exception. I have evolved from an Episcopalian to Congregationalist to Unitarian/Universalist to Compassionate Agnostic, which I attribute both to my experience in India and to my Amherst upbringing.

But Amherst has made a marvelous contribution to leaders in education, research, the arts and literature. It should not change.

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Postscript: The challenge you and your brethren sent out to offer ideas on how Amherst was influential in our lives intrigued me.

In my spare moments, which I find are increasing in number, it occurred to me that there are a number of questions we might ask ourselves about how we are managing our lives that would be of enough interest to be the theme of discussion groups at our get-together. I am copying classmates with whom I have stayed in close touch to see if they have suggestions of their own.

Here is my list:

1. Did I make a career choice that best fit my talents and my temperament?

2. What have I contributed to society of which I can be proud?

3. How have I influenced others to follow the best paths that I have been able to take?

4. What would I have done differently at various junctures in my life to be a greater contributor?

5. What have I done that will give me a "sense of having achieved a measure of immortality in this existence?"

6. How am I planning to be a contributor until I am no longer physically or mentally capable of doing so?

7. What am I doing to preserve my physical and mental health to be a continuing contributor?

8. What legacies will I have left to those who remain to enjoy or pick up the pieces when I have departed?

This may sound like a personal eight-fold path for my life. Others may say, "Why should you be burdened with these responsibilities? Why not just enjoy whatever we like?"

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John Hopkins

Reflections on My Amherst Experience

Numerous and varied Amherst experiences, large and small, were likely a part of shaping the adult that I eventually became. I think a central factor in the way it shaped me was the relative ease with which a range of friendships emerged and developed as we struggled with and shared challenges and situations. The small set of friends and comrades I had in high school was greatly expanded, and offered more variety in personality, goals, background and experiences; we had many common challenges to share. The curriculum assured a sufficient commonality of experiences that encouraged us to interact easily and non-competitively. (My guess is the general absence of women—overall a bad thing—did contribute substantially to the relaxed nature of group interactions.)

Some idea of the more formative experiences Amherst may be seen in a recital of some of them, specific memories that have survived the dimming of time (in no particular order):

l As a freshman I was a subject for a psych study and I came out in the 95th percentile for “avoiding conflict”, a pretty valid finding that hasn’t changed dramatically in the intervening 60 years. But the good nature and diverse personalities of my cohort on the third floor of Morrow enabled me to rise above this unfortunate trait to a fair degree.

l My classical music education began at WAMF, as well as some technical stuff which built on my pre-Amherst ham radio experience.

l ”Great Novels” read under the tutelage of Alfred Kazin, Bucky Salmon’s take on WW II, struggling to learn German with Frau Breusch, the mysteries of calculus with Herr Prof. Breusch.

l Spending what should have been study hours building sets and working backstage at Kirby Theater; I still have my Masquers pin.)

l The summer of junior year spent working for Prof. Bruce Benson as a lab assistant, I roomed with a friend (class of ’57) who put me on to the American Civil Liberties Union. A few years later, on a job application, I had to fill out a security form listing organizations to which I belonged, including “type of organization.” I thought a bit and wrote in “Patriotic”. I’m still a member. That was also the summer when my faith in technology was shattered by finding that a Marchant electromechanical calculator occasionally made random errors.

l Observing the difference between the very modest and good-natured DU hazing I experienced and that of my two DKE sophomore roommates, who ultimately wound up knocking on my mother’s door in Brattleboro, Vermont at the end of a very long night. (She kindly drove them back to Amherst.)

l Having the good fortune to have Prof. Baird for English 1-2. (After one of us explained that something worked because of the “photoelectric effect” he asked how an automobile gas gauge worked. When we fumbled around with that for a minute, he explained: “It’s the gasoline-electric effect.”)

l Finding out that it was OK to be an atheist—in American Studies, of all places. (I didn’t find out that I was a Democrat—not a “Modern Republican” -- until I was in grad school, under the tutelage of Mayhew and Powell, just in time to vote for JFK.)

l Turning our room in Pratt over to Powell and Baddock to practice dissecting a purloined fetal pig the night before a bio exam. (A widespread custom.)

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l Biggest impact (or non-impact) on my life: my shyness and the absence of women at Amherst meant that my monastic life in high school was extended through college, and pretty much through graduate school. (Turned out OK, however— a few years later Hilary recognized my hidden promise, and reeled me in. By far the best thing that ever happened to me.)

l Freshman year was probably the scariest time, but anxiety hit a peak in senior year with honors project, summer job and grad school acceptance all hanging in the balance. Fortunately, all three came out OK.

Amherst provided a strongly intellectual environment with a constant focus on gathering knowledge, assimilating new perspectives, becoming more and more aware of what a complex and fascinating world we live in, and the degree to which thought and effort can help one understand it. But by graduation, I don’t think many of us could avoid the sense that clear thinking, based on knowledge and understanding, was intended to lead not just to occupational success, but also how one was to be a good citizen with an obligation to society.

Always understanding that we were expected to do well—that applying one’s brain to various tasks and questions and situation was an honorable activity that had to be addressed in a very serious respectful manner. Embodied by most of the faculty.

When I left Amherst, I still wasn’t yet a real grownup (who is at 21?), but I was ready (more or less) for graduate school and able to take on a reasonably professional summer job away from home. I had a good enough education to get a PhD as well a respectable job. I can see that my respect for broadly-based rigorous thinking was nurtured at college, along with the knowledge and cultural/ behavioral values exhibited by many of my peers and the faculty. I can’t think of a better and safer environment for me to have begun my entrance to the real world, nor one that would have provided a better base on which to grow in knowledge and understanding of the world.

My Adult Life

I’m reasonably well satisfied with my life and my career in transportation system technology, analysis, and strategic planning. I’ve made mistakes from time to time, failed to address various situations as well or as fully as I might have. There have been painful experiences, missed opportunities, and responsibilities that could have been fulfilled more effectively. I have often found it difficult to expose myself fully even to good friends and relatives, and generally shied away from intimacy and close relationships.

My shortcomings have not prevented a good life—reasonable success in work, relatively good health, enjoyable activities (including extensive travel in the last two decades), a comfortable balance of income and expenditures allowing for a good home in a very satisfying community, and contributions to worthy causes. We are particularly fortunate in having relatively good health and sufficient resources to support a relatively modest lifestyle while supporting numerous charities as well helping our daughter’s family when specific special needs or opportunities arise. I have been fortunate in having a very tight family (as well as friends) who see through my shell, keeping me from the isolation I could have fallen into. I am now ten years into retirement, which has been filled with a multitude of very satisfying activities—both volunteer and for my own pleasure. While the future is inherently in shadow, I am comfortable about our ability to deal with and accept whatever may come.

Frank Leftwich

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First, it would be hard not to acknowledge the impact of four years at Amherst in those most formidable years of growth and change 18 to 22. The structure of the courses, the required subjects freshman and sophomore years, was good for all of us that arrived in the mid-50s. I appreciate the change in times, culture, pop culture, communications and media may demand a different approach to “education” for today's 18 to 22-year-olds, but for me, I'd say that I departed Amherst well-grounded in knowledge and imbued with curiosity, They served me well in the years to come. I would still argue that a liberal arts education is a necessary foundation for an “educated person” and an able contributing citizen, and to make the best advantage of future opportunities, whatever they may be. Amherst at that time was not the diverse or inclusive place it is today. So Amherst with its outreach and affirmative action is easy to understand as a leading institution in the education and preparation of young people today. With that said, I felt well prepared to enter a country/world of change which up until the 60’s, had been somewhat settled as it emerged from WW II. The Amherst credential was also helpful in my business world.

Second, Amherst from afar looks quite different than I would have imagined. For example, I would be inclined to an Amherst a bit more structured in curriculum, especially freshman and sophomore year. Most all graduates proceed to some form of higher education, and there is plenty of time to diversify subject choices during the 18 to 25-year formal education years. It is my view that the undergraduate years at a minimum should provide some necessary basic exposure to the humanities and sciences that can only be assured through some required curriculum in the early years. These are building blocks. History is a worthy tutor. I would also note Amherst handling of the student discontent and “uprising” issues of a few years back. Clearly it was difficult, but I for one would have preferred a firmer hand.

As I grow older and “downsize” looking back on way too much “accumulation,” I am struck at how smoothly things have gone. I am quite content with the road I followed, launched, and grounded with my Amherst experience. I married a girl from a very similar early life experience to mine, but quite a different educational experience. We have been married for 58 years with two grown “boys” with whom we are very happy. They are men of fine character and integrity, fine citizens, for which I am grateful to my wife. One often thinks of “luck” or “good fortune,” terms often used to describe how things worked out for us. I prefer to think in terms of “timing” and “choices we make.” I take that away from my Amherst experience. I also think that there are “smart” people and “not so smart” people. I was of the latter group. So be it! It concerns me, though, that there is too much apologizing for people that do not “succeed,” and it seems to play down personal responsibility which I view is probably as important a value that we should take forward in our lives. It all starts at home, nurtured by our educational system, and institutions like Amherst and the Marine Corps!! Some might say that despite my Amherst education, I did come away with a sense of “oughts” or values, of right and wrong. I agree that a questioning mind is a healthy mind, and my Amherst experience certainly drove that home to me. However, it also drove home the importance of having a value system, of forming some “rules to live by.” My Marine Corps experience simply confirmed the necessity of that. (Back at our 40th while sitting with three other Amherst classmates plus a dear friend from Williams I went through flight training with [he was a trustee and interim President], we agreed that our Marine Corps experience had been as significant in our lives as our time at Amherst and Williams.)

My business world changed similar to most. The integration of computer driven communications and emergence of social media has sped up the pace and buried my business world, aviation services, in data. The “humanity” of interaction seems to have changed. My sense is that the relationships that drove much of what was done through the creation of trust and judgment has shifted; now it’s all about the data. But can we trust the data and those who analyze it?

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And what if I had had a daughter go to Amherst? If so, I would remind her that it is a privilege, but that she got there principally on her own. Her actions and behavior, her choices got her there. She is responsible for herself. Be proud of where you came from and your family. Have the courage to explore the unknown, but be careful, for it is easy to choose the wrong path. Know that there are some substances to be flatly avoided; for others, heed great grandmother's advice on moderation as the key to good health and a productive life. Be respectful, I'd say: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

On the broader subject of the Sexual Revolution, sorry I missed it!!! Except that we are still in it, even now. Think about it!

Our media and their favorite “unimpeachable" sources, the "elite" intellectual and otherwise are a powerful lot. Been so throughout history. I feel a great "dumbing down" has taken place, though, and tabloid media holds more sway than ever. That disturbs me. I am also disturbed by professional politicians, and perhaps even more by an entrenched bureaucracy running our country regardless of which party is in power. Our government really is too big, too much legislation and regulation on the books that perpetuate too much unneeded staff and spending. There's too much government attention to things that are better left to the individual, but since so much individual responsibility seems to have been lost, it concerns me. That said, I have great faith in many of our young people and, though they're strained, our institutions. Hope I am right. Somewhere in the sixties, though, appearances no longer mattered. Standards seemed to be done away with, and I suspect it may have been just another step in the direction of anything was OK. Everything was relative. Maybe the reaction to the boorish conduct of some men (the man in the White House?) sexual harassment et.al may swing the pendulum, and the “mainstream” may once again reflect that standards of behavior and appearance count.

It is time, finally, to be good and kind to one another. We are a great nation. Our heritage of volunteerism and charitable giving is one of our most special characteristics, unmatched anywhere. It gives me hope. I hope we do not lose it.

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David Luria

"KIDS! This Army Veteran thanks YOU for YOUR service!" is the text of a sign I will be displaying as I walk through the crowd on March 24th during the planned March For Our Lives demonstration in Washington DC.

Instead of reflecting on our glorious past, I believe that people who have been blessed with an Amherst education need to focus on the FUTURE of our country. We adults, Amherst grads and everybody else, have handed our kids and grandkids a MESS: destruction of the environment, inadequate health care, unequal distribution of income, shootings in schools, a society possessing hundreds of millions of guns, rampant greed, an opioid crisis. And we, the adults, have put into office an administration that is effectively and rapidly destroying government and democracy as we know it.

We did that. As Pogo said, "We have seen the enemy and he is US!"

I learned a LOT at Amherst. One of the professors who had the most impact on me was Dr. Karl Loewenstein, the aging Jewish professor of political science, who, like me, had escaped from the horrors of Nazi Germany. With his Coke-bottle thick glasses and his heavy German accent, Dr. Loewenstein schooled us on the origins and effects of totalitarianism. We learned that we must learn the lessons of the past in order not to repeat them.

And so, as I reflect on our country today, I believe that we Amherst grads should use the intellectual, verbal, scientific, financial and legal skills we have acquired in our lifetimes to protect our country, to resist creeping authoritarianism, to speak out, to demonstrate, to give financial support to organizations and political candidates that reflect our values.

It is not right for us oldsters to sit on the sidelines and bemoan the fact that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. We made the handbasket, we must act to fix what is wrong.

And now, finally, the kids have come along to rescue us, to remind us that THEY are the future, and THEY are taking charge. They, the victims, are fighting back.

Let's thank them for their service.

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Steve Lyne

My experience at Amherst was four years defending my values, principles, beliefs against alien attack. I came from a small town high school rural Christian America. Sudden immersion in Freshman English and Physics, beer parties, prep school partners, Holyoke and Smith women, and the like meant I was in a new world. I entered the new world eagerly but determined to keep my old values. I didn't drink alcohol before Amherst; I did not during Amherst; I have not since Amherst. I was a conservative Republican before Amherst, during Amherst and after Amherst but not so much now. These are just outward illustrations. In short, I kept the faith.

I joined a fraternity, became its rushing chairman and President. Made the Dean's list most of the semesters. My junior year I was threatened with expulsion by President Cole when I went to see him to protest the expulsion of one of my best friends, also from small town America. His exact wording was “I want you to know I got my eyes on you, too” before he threw me out of his office. I was flattered. At the end of my freshman year one of my close friends, also from small town rural America was told not to come back. We were a small tribe and got smaller.

I survived the four years, the better, the stronger for it, because I was tested. Went into a friendlier environment at graduate school where the great education I got at Amherst took me through my PhD.

This foundation also took me through the rest of my life.

After my PhD I joined the State Department. In my entering class of 28, 25 came from the northeast. I and another guy from California and another from Iowa. Amherst Freshman class revisited.

We were the first class under JFK, and with the liberal democrats running the show I stood out like a sore thumb in discussions of various current issues. I did not pick fights. I stood up for my view points. Since I was then a Goldwater Republican I was again a small minority. Retribution time came at the end of the three-month class when assignments were announced.

You have to understand that this came following an interview with Personnel where I was asked where I wanted to go. I replied: Indochina, much of my PhD work had been on that area; Europe, much of my PhD work had been there, too; and Washington. I was then asked if there was any area I did not want to go. I replied: A Canadian border post; I grew up along the border. They said: No problem.

My turn came: Toronto Canada via three-month French language training. A Canadian post with three months French although they speak English in Toronto. Charlie Cole once again.

I went to Personnel and appealed. They said no appeal of assignments. But they said they were having a special deal. They needed volunteers for two years hard language training. I volunteered for Cambodian language training and that made all the difference in my career. Followed was a fast thirty-year career through Cambodia, Viet Nam, Washington (thrice), Africa (twice), the South Pacific (twice), the Middle East (twice), the UN, and an Ambassadorship.

My last assignment was as an Ambassador thirty years in, tired of it all, having in hand the offer of a tenured professorship, I sent a cable resigning. The State Department asked if I would go to the upcoming UN General Assembly meeting for three months in the fall as the observer on Africa. Living in New York for three months on the State Department's dime and working without a care in the world about the next efficiency report sounded like heaven.

Life at the UNGA was easy. I was senior and respected everyone and everyone respected me and let me do my job. Then came the surprise. This year, for the first time, there would be a two-day “Special Session on

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Apartheid in South Africa” immediately following the General Assembly. Votes on apartheid were difficult for the United States. Traditionally we ended up being alone and abstaining on crucial votes while all others voted yes. Embarrassing. Usually these were buried in the business of General Assembly. Can't hide a Special Session.

The staff of the UN had prepared a draft version of the Final Declaration which representatives of the key countries began negotiations over around noon the first day. The draft was heavily tilted against us, drafted as it was by the UN staff coming largely from Third World countries. The Chief of our delegation was a prominent Republican lawyer and political figure, who held one of the three permanent Ambassador US seats at the UNGA. The four of us on the US delegation walked in to the meeting to be told that no country could have more than three. The Chief of our delegation, the Senior Ambassador said, “Okay, I'm leaving.” Looking at me, he said “You take over.” He then walked out.

I knew almost nothing about the background of the US position on apartheid; all my experience had been in black Africa. I knew I was going into a room where every other nation was opposed to our views and indeed some hated us for them. Others scorned us for them. On the other hand, I also knew that everyone in that room badly wanted to have a unanimous vote in support of the declaration so that they had to compromise with me to some degree on the word changes I was going to propose. It was me against the aliens again. Hell, I'd been there before. Let's go.

I was successful enough in negotiating the changes we wanted so that I was praised by name in a cable by the Secretary of State and that the US was able to, for the first time, vote for an anti-apartheid resolution. Going out on top.

Looking back, forty-four years of a great marriage to a Mt. Holyoke girl. Series of good dogs. Great kids and grandkids. It has been a battle at times and other times smooth, but it has unrolled pretty much as I envisaged it would. No regrets. Sayonara.

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Jim Magid

As an Amherst student with probably the lowest recorded grades in advanced physics courses, I became a security analyst working with companies founded by the best physicists and chemists of our generation. And I noticed a phenomenon in the 1980’s that continues to this day. Everyone is familiar with “Moore’s Law” which suggested that the complexity of semiconductor would double in a short period of time, a year-and-a half or two years, or something like that. But I noticed that when the growth in actual units shipped were multiplied by the individual power of the chips being made, the growth rate of the horsepower, computing power, or other measure doubled every year, more or less. Well, doubling every year is a one-thousand-fold increase in ten years. Looking at the U. S. Statistical Abstracts I calculated that the motive horsepower (horses, water power, steam, internal combustion, electricity, jet engines, nuclear power) had grown by a factor of 7% annually, and by 1,000-fold in a century. So did measures of communication such as mail, telegraph, and telephone. So semiconductor power grew as much in a decade as technology that changed the world did in a century.

But it was so big a change that no one noticed, and companies couldn’t plan on the future. And it is happening now all around us, and is commonly referred to as “technology.”

Maybe some of our classmates who did better in physics can review the technology from 1958 to the present and give us an idea of what lies ahead in the next decade, or maybe to our hundredth reunion. It would be good to hear about it, as I doubt many of us will be here to celebrate it.

And that same phenomena are taking place in the biology or “biotech” world of medicine and science.

As I wrote to Miller Brown, Reunions make me sad to miss those who can never come back, but most of all, to see how wonderful my classmates are and how little we get to be together.

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Ned Megargee

Reflections on an Amherst education.

Some of the most educational aspects of my Amherst experience took place outside the regular classroom and curriculum. During the summer of 1955, between our freshman and sophomore years, I, along with the late Carl Andrus ‘57 and Amherst Associate Professor of Art Bill Darr and his family, took part in a joint Amherst and Mexico City College archaeological expedition to the Mixtec and Zapotec site of Yagul in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Being immersed in contemporary rural Mexican culture while helping to excavate a pre-Columbian Meso-American site was a transformative experience. Back at Amherst, when it was time for us to declare majors at the end of sophomore year, I decided I wanted to major in cultural anthropology. Of course, Amherst had no Departments of Anthropology or Sociology. However, and this is where Amherst is unique in my experience, Prof. Ted Koester allowed me to cobble together a decent cultural anthropology major combining courses from a number of Amherst departments as well as from Smith and U. Mass under the auspices of his Psychology Department.

Fortunately for us both, by the end of junior year I had decided that I wanted to focus more on the present than the past and pursued a more conventional course of study in clinical psychology. After graduating from Amherst, I got a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley (where I roomed for a year with classmate Dick Noer). While at Cal, I worked as a clinical psychologist for the Alameda County Probation Department. That experience got me interested in aggression and criminal violence, topics on which I have pursued research ever since, formulating my theory of overcontrolled hostility as a cause of violence, first at the University of Texas at Austin and, since 1967, at Florida State University.

Participating in fraternity life was another important aspect of my Amherst experience. Although the “Greek System” has come under considerable criticism in recent years after the hazing-related deaths of pledges at the University of Pennsylvania and here at FSU, I found the collegiality of fraternity life at Amherst beneficial and rewarding, especially after having lived in dormitories at boarding schools from the 5th through the 12th grades. Perhaps Amherst’s insistence on 100% rushing, guaranteeing a bid to each freshman who wanted to join a fraternity, as well as the prohibition on house-based dining facilities avoided some of the exclusivity associated with fraternities and sororities at large universities like FSU. In any event, my Chi Phi brothers are the classmates that I am still closest to.

Intercollegiate competition on the crew and debate teams was also rewarding. No sport depends more on teamwork than crew and no activity contributes more to critical thinking than debate.

Reflections on changing times.

Since my retirement from FSU over a decade ago, I rarely get to campus any more. On a recent visit, I needed to use a restroom, so I headed for the Science Library. I discovered that since my last visit, and a shooting incident several years ago, they have hardened the site considerably. There is a guard at the entrance and to gain entry you have to swipe a turnstile with a current ID card. If you have no ID, you have to convince an attendant of your good intentions and get a temporary permit. In my day, anyone could just walk in.

As I washed my hands, I noticed another sign of changing times: a basket filled with brightly colored condoms there for the taking as a public health measure. I did not try to check, but I assume that the women’s rest rooms are similarly supplied. Hail to the sexual revolution!

I won’t be at our reunion, but I will be interested in your observations and, I hope, reports on a) the availability of free condoms in Amherst rest rooms, and b) restricting access to public areas for security purposes.

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Irrelevant anecdote: Over 50 years ago, in August 1966, I was pinned down for 90 minutes by Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower sniper, a former Eagle Scout who exemplified my overcontrolled type. This was the first of the major mass school shootings that are now receiving so much attention. Like Parkland, we had 17 killed. Texas responded by closing access to the balcony of the 22 story Tower for several decades.

In addition to changes in Amherst life resulting from co-education, the changes in sexual mores, increased diversity, and the abandonment of the fraternity system, I imagine one of the biggest differences between then and now, between us and them, is the fact that today’s students no longer have a military obligation and are no longer subject to the draft, a fact of life we all had to deal with in one way or another. That said, I imagine that this difference is largely unnoticed, at least by contemporary students. They would not notice the absence of something that they have never experienced, or probably even imagined.

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Keith Morris

My almost accidental Amherst experience was very different: one year and a Masters, the only Brit and the first for many years. I first heard of Amherst when my Cambridge college, Corpus Christi, asked if I would like to go there for a year. I remain forever in the debt of Amherst, Danny Meyer 55, who had convinced Amherst on his return from Cambridge to make a gesture, and Senator Fulbright, whose fund kindly paid my fare.

Amherst was my third stint of higher education. First came two intense years learning Russian in the Royal Navy. Then 3 fun years at Cambridge reading history. Amherst was a bonus. There was no pressure and no competition; I was asked to write a thesis and I did so without straining myself. I enjoyed studying American history, but my main interest was the American Present. Amherst for me was an immersion in Americana. It was a liberal arts college which was uniquely American. The broad education was the opposite extreme from the narrow British system. I was guest of a fraternity, also unique, where I mixed with undergraduates from 3 years. I arrived to find the fraternity in crisis, just as the United States was: civil rights. TX had pledged an Afro-American. The National had suspended them on some technicality. The house was split 3 ways. The conservatives were keen to stay in the National; the moderates preferred to stay, and the radicals said leave. They won because expelling the pledge was just ‘not on.’ TX became ATX. It was an encouraging start.

At Amherst I learnt that most were WASPs, perhaps a quarter Jewish and only 6% Catholics in a state with a Catholic majority: that people identified themselves as conservatives or liberals and not Republican or Democrat: that they were more articulate and more democratic than Brits, quite prepared to do manual jobs for extra money but more conformist because of much greater peer pressure. I learnt many jokes, almost all Jewish, and told the most outrageous to a journalist friend in London who told it to David Ben-Gurion. I learnt that American liberalism could be absolutist. First seminar with Henry Steele Commager- Morris you are Welsh. KM. I am English, Sir. HSC. Morrises are Welsh. You are Welsh. Last meeting- argument over Suez. He for, I against. Parting words as he walked off: ’The Arabs are the Red Indians of the Middle East. Remember what happened to them.’ Where else but Amherst would I have shaken hands with Eleanor Roosevelt, listened to Robert Frost and irritated Henry Kissinger by challenging his views on limited war.

My subsequent travels around the States that summer complemented this wonderfully, combining staying with Amherst families in comfort with hitchhiking on $1 a day and sleeping out on beaches and beside roads. I met with almost universal kindness and politeness. One act of kindness left a bitter taste. Despairing of getting a lift after dark in the Delta, I was rescued by three white farmers who squeezed me between them in their pick-up. They congratulated me warmly in unprintable language on the recent race riots in England.

My American Year was to be immensely valuable to me throughout my diplomatic career. It gave me an insight into my own country that could not be acquired elsewhere. I had already traveled widely in Europe and the Middle East: so different in history and culture. With the United States it was the similarities that were so great which highlighted the differences. The United Kingdom is almost as insular as the US and shares the often-mistaken belief that our institutions are superior to others. Second it gave me at least some understanding of American politics which served me well in working with my US colleagues. It was too always a useful opener. The Special Relationship is something that looks much more important in London than Washington but certainly helps in the field. For example, in my last posting in Bogota, where we worked exceptionally closely with the US against Pablo Escobar. No, you did not see me portrayed in NARCOS but neither did you see any US agencies apart from the DEA; there were eleven more involved. My twelve years in Latin America, twice in Colombia and once in Mexico taught me that the United States was not such a benign neighbour as it had been to us in WW2 and the Cold War.

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The 24 years since my retirement were split in two. For ten years I was busy with a wide range of activities- consultancy, academic, semi-political, voluntary. Maricarmen was equally busy dancing flamenco, playing bridge, very active in a Spanish cultural group. Then she had an emergency operation for colon cancer. There followed four difficult years in which surprisingly we managed to travel a good deal. It was very near the end when she let me slip away for the 50th reunion. In the almost ten years since I have remained active, little affected by Type 2 diabetes, which is diet controlled, still allowing red wine. Very fortunately I reencountered the widow of a colleague-Greek brought up in Southern Africa and have been married for four years.

Lacking entirely in artistic or other creative gifts my principal interest has been with the state of the world and having four children and five grandchildren has made me more so. The issue which I have pursued publicly since 2001 is the UN drugs regime. My experience in Colombia convinced me that the war on drugs was deeply damaging, a product of well-intentioned but misguided American puritanism. Sadly, what has happened since in Afghanistan and Mexico has proved me right. Now we have the farcical situation where, because of legal cannabis in some states, the United States is in breach of the conventions which it had promoted, but President Trump continues to threaten Colombia and others for the cocaine traffic. Extraordinarily, the US explanation of its failure to block legal cannabis is that the federal government cannot interfere with the legal decisions of states and does not itself have the resources to do anything to enforce federal law

I accept Stephen Pinker’s view that for humanity in general things have improved vastly over the post war period. But I think he plays down the difficulties of halting global warming and of avoiding nuclear war. In the short term the recent surge of populism, both right and left, in the US and Europe worries me greatly. The traditional parties do not seem to have policies to address the real grievances of those, principally but not only the white working class, who have lost out in globalisation. In 2015 the Labour Party unexpectedly elected as leader, Jeremy Corbyn, an obscure MP from the revolutionary left. In 2016 we had Brexit which I believe will put the unity of the UK at risk, weaken our security and make us poorer. Our government remains split on the issue and the Prime Minister’s attempt to strengthen her position by holding an election saw her lose her majority and bolster Corbyn instead. Then came President Trump. He benefited from genuine anger in the rust belt. But he is no friend of the post war international order, which for all its failings has served us pretty well. I think that we should do what we can to preserve it.

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Al Most

What a year!!

Finally, I won a casserole set by carefully and patiently saving my supermarket coupons and pasting them on the requisite stamp saver sheet.

Yes, Amherst gave me the skill set necessary to prevail when other shoppers were turning down coupons and even handing them off to me at the checkout counter. I knew the value of those coupons while many others did not.

The casserole set vindicated my determination to stay the course.

I wish I could report similar success playing the supermarket MONOPOLY game. I came close but couldn’t complete a set to win even a very modest prize. My Amherst experience, however, helped me weather that disappointment. Perhaps it was English 1-2 where I failed to grasp the deeper meaning of the Holyoke Mountain Range but managed to stay the course and settle for a gentleman’s C.

Yes, it was quite a year. Don’t think I’ll see another quite like it, but reinforced by my Amherst seasoning, I feel I’m prepared for whatever the supermarket may throw at me in 2018.

60 years later I still draw on the strengths imbued in me at the Fairest College.

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John Niehuss

Primary Career Activities

1. Law (16 years)- private law practice and general counsel at two international lending institutions.

2. Finance (16 years)- international investment banking, World Bank and Ministry of Finance of Zambia

3. US Government (6 years)- US Treasury Department and Council on International Economic Policy

4. Teaching (10+ years)- University of Buffalo, Michigan Law School, International Law Institute and Peking University School of Transnational Law.

Impact of Amherst Experience

Career Choice. Amherst had a decisive impact on my career choice and its trajectory. After freshman year, I thought of becoming a doctor. But, after a bad experience in sophomore biology and a good experience in Prof Nelson's economics class, I majored in economics. My interest in the international aspects of the field was intensified by Prof Willard Thorp's course in international economic policy and a summer at Amherst's Merrill Center for Economics in Southampton where I become interested in the fledgling European Common Market. As a direct result of my Amherst experience, most of my career has been working on international economic, financial and legal issues. Professor Thorp also arranged for me to teach a section of an introductory economics course at the University of Buffalo the year after graduating from Amherst. This exposed me to the challenges and satisfactions of teaching, which I continued in one form or another through much of my career.

The New Curriculum. We were fortunate to be at Amherst when the New Curriculum was in place. I am convinced that it made me a more intellectually curious person and provided a way of writing and thinking that was valuable in my career and is still helpful today. For me, the main benefits were: (1) the emphasis on writing, not only in English 1-2 and American Studies but in many other courses as well; (2) the forced exposure to a range of disciplines that taught us that people in different fields have different ways of thinking and approaching problem solving and has helped us better understand those in professions other than our own; and (3) since we had so many classes in common we were a true “community of learning” which accustomed us to listen to and learn from others-a habit that is still useful today.

Lingering Influence of Certain Professors and Courses. Certain courses and professors I encountered at Amherst have had a lingering, lasting impact. The professors include: Thorp, Nelson, Craig, Zeigler, Halstead, Butler and, of course, Arons. The courses include: The American Economy, Comparative Economic Systems, International Economic Policy, Problems in American Civilization, Introduction to Literature, Nineteenth Century English Novel, History of Modern Philosophy, American Government, and, of course, English 1-2 and Science 1-2. I still have several of the textbooks used and consult some of them from time to time.

Opportunity to Participate on Athletic Teams. I was lucky that Amherst teams were truly amateur in the 1950’s, which meant that those like myself who had the interest but were short on ability were able to participate in intercollegiate athletics. As a result, I was able to be on various teams and obtain the lasting benefits of participation in team sports. Amherst also introduced me to rugby, which I continued to play for several years at Michigan Law School, at the London School of Economics and while practicing law in Cleveland.

Broadened Horizons beyond Midwest. When I arrived at Amherst, I was the product of a Midwestern public school system and had rarely been outside of Michigan. Amherst exposed me to classmates from other parts of the country with very different backgrounds and experiences, and this proved to be a valuable part of my Amherst education. During my time at Amherst, I became acquainted with New York City, Boston, and New

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England generally, came to like these places, and spent a significant part of my subsequent life in this part of the country.

Lifelong Friendships. At Amherst, I was able to make a number of lifelong friendships. These include not only those that are still actively maintained but those that were made at Amherst but hibernate only to be rekindled at reunions.

Other Thoughts

Amherst Then and Now. A “better or worse” comparison is virtually impossible. In the 1950's Amherst was an all male, virtually all white college with a relatively conservative faculty, a highly structured curriculum and an amateurish approach to athletics. It is now a school with a diverse, multiracial, student body with an open curriculum, a more liberal faculty and a more active athletic recruitment program. Both versions of Amherst ranked among the best small liberal arts colleges in the country, so it is hard to claim that there has been deterioration since we were there when judged by each era's contemporary standards.

My own preference would be a blend of the two that would result in a racially diverse, multiethnic coed school with a more structured curriculum, a more diverse faculty that represented both liberal and conservative viewpoints and a more amateurish approach to athletics.

What Makes me Happy? Family (my children, grandchildren and sister), having a few good friends, hiking and generally spending time outdoors, playing golf, and staying intellectually involved through eclectic reading habits and teaching at the Michigan Law School and the International Law Institute.

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Peter Parker

1. Probably the primary impact of Amherst was teaching me to think critically about whatever I saw or heard. Relatively speaking, this was more important than the substance that I was taught in the various courses I studied; although, of course, I would not have progressed very far towards graduate school or in my career without all that substance. But still, I do not hesitate to say that the keywords are “think critically”.

Coupled to this was an important broadening of my viewpoints to include areas I had not seriously considered before – thanks to the “new curriculum” in Freshman year and American Studies in Sophomore year, exposing me to new disciplines and perspectives. Amherst provided a wonderfully supporting, liberal environment in which to extend my horizons and grow up. In hindsight, this broadening is probably the aspect of my four years at Amherst that I would most like to have been able to expand even more – although I frankly do not know what I could/should have sacrificed to make room for more courses in history and literature. One of the pluses from my education at Amherst has been the “hunger” for learning about all these other things, and in retirement I find that my reading list is focused on learning some of that missing history and its related literature.

Again, in hindsight, why couldn’t History 1, 2 have included more than just “Western Europe”? Sure, it would have had to be more shallow in its coverage, but maybe there could have been some compromise to include some mention of what was going on at the same time in Asia, Africa and the Americas, to get us started thinking about those continents.

Arriving from a small New England town, Amherst also broadened my horizons in the areas of religion, gender, and race. In the latter aspect, this was highlighted particularly by argumentative interactions on race at our fraternity’s national convention and its associated national board. The role of the college in supporting our resulting actions cannot be underestimated.

2. In the process of visiting Amherst during my daughter’s four years there, I was delighted to find that Amherst was still an exciting and stimulating place with a liberal environment and the highest-standards - with the added PLUS of coeducation so that women were now seen and respected as not just dates but as full-fledged “colleagues”.

As far as changes in my life and my career field are concerned - there Is little substantive to report. Since my life has been almost exclusively in a liberal Ivy League school system, my liberal educational and political leanings have continued to be supported and are basically unchanged since Amherst in 1958. Meanwhile, the scientific field in which I have “labored” has blossomed and progressed at a great pace, and I now happily bequeath it to the next generation.

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John Pendleton

As a legacy, I arrived at Amherst fully aware of its traditions. I had learned the Amherst songs at my father’s class gatherings on homecoming weekends, and it seemed that every year he managed to stop by his fraternity house and have our picture taken in front of it.

I spent five years on campus, a bonus year as the class’s Mayo-Smith Fellow in Admissions. The “Green Dean” is neither fish nor fowl. I attended faculty coffee and ate meals with the students. At a Monday faculty coffee, I listened as President Cole and other administrators discussed a Saturday night incident involving an axe attack on a telephone pole at a key intersection in town. No one at the table knew the identity of the culprit. But I knew. Of course, I did not reveal the name of our former classmate who had returned to school to complete his college education.

I enjoyed my four years as a student but regret that I didn’t take better advantage of the academic opportunities available. However, there were experiences of long-term impact through specific courses: John Butler’s course on Romantic Poetry, “Bucky” Salmon’s on World War 2, Stewart Lee Garrison’s on Public Speaking, Charles Morgan’s on Fine Arts and his brother, Vincent’s, on Beethoven. And imagine sitting at Robert Frost’s feet one evening at the Beta House, and imagine playing soccer for, and listening to, Eli Marsh, “the only Phi Beta Kappa college coach in the country,” giving a pep talk in Shakespearian prose. Finally, there was the Holyoke Skyline which I admired and through which I drove. . . . too often.

A principal benefit of my Amherst education was experienced after I left the college. Basically, I was torn between a career of teaching and one like my father’s, generally business. My extra year at Amherst allowed me to postpone a decision. I chose law school as a means to further delay a commitment. My Amherst diploma assisted in my admission to Michigan Law School and my offer for a position at a venerable, old law firm in Concord, NH. That led to a 35-year law practice.

Much of my early life consisted of unburdening myself of my father’s conservative influence. This took time. In 1979, I quit my law firm for a fledgling startup firm. In 1980, faced with voting for Ronald Reagan, I revolted and became a Democrat. In 1996, I quit the law entirely and, at age 60 began a career of teaching … in the English Department at Proctor Academy, a co-ed boarding school in Andover, NH.

When traveling in France, we were often grouped at a table with Frenchmen who talked among themselves, as if we weren’t even there. For attention, I would interject, “Nous avons dix enfants.” Effective, always drew attention, but also true. After my wife, Georgia died in 1979, leaving me with four children, I was lucky enough to find Betsy Carruthers, alone with six children. It wasn’t just a marriage; it was a merger.

For the past 20 years, I have been writing. Mostly memoirs about family history and my life’s experiences. It has been a way of downsizing and recording for posterity. I really got going when I joined a writing group in Truro on Cape Cod where I retired at age 70. For subjects, I reached back to my first American ancestors in 1634 and included more current stories of many family adventures sprinkled with humor.

This past August, I compiled these adventures, together with a modicum of poetry, into a book, entitled Together, which I self-published in Portsmouth, NH. At Amherst, I roomed sophomore year with Peter Fernald. Peter now lives 10 miles south of me in Portsmouth. Recently, I discovered that, for at least ten years commencing in 1653, Dr. Josiah Fernald, Peter’s direct ancestor and Bryan Pendleton, my direct ancestor, were two of the five selectmen in Portsmouth. The book segment on early history covers this coincidence.

Also covered are the baseball games my 6th grade team played against Joe MacDonald’s 6th graders in Pelham, NY, and my high school double dates with Larry Lansinger in Cleveland. And, of course, there are stories, worth

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telling which occurred during my legal career, my experiences as the fearless captain of a 29-foot sailing yacht and as the intrepid leader of family backpacking hikes among New Hampshire’s tallest peaks.

Last evening, Betsy and I attended a middle school poetry reading in nearby South Berwick. Contestants had free choice of poems to read. My 6th grade grandson, Milo, surprised me by reading a poem from my book. Recently, I received an email from 12-year-old grandson. Caleb, commenting on an exchange of letters I had with Leo Durocher when I was Caleb’s age.

My history is in order.

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Roger Porter

As I think back now on our Amherst years, I’m struck by the strangeness of our “mono-education.” Of course, given the macho fifties, even the presence of women classmates might not have arrested the wolf whistles in the Valentine cafeteria when a particularly busty Smithie waited for her mystery meat on line. And thinking back to awkward pawing at camel’s hair coats in front of the Holyoke dorms after yet another sloshed Saturday night keg party, where women appeared to us both exotic and ornamental, I can’t help wonder how a more natural presence would have changed our sensibilities (to use a good English 21 word). For someone who went to an all-male high school and college, women seemed like rare visions, almost Victorian angels-in-the-house, and I sometimes think I learned more about them from Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf than from the dates that seemed out on temporary loan from a magnanimous but mystifying source.

The greatest impact of Amherst for me was the sterling education I got from the English Department. But those were the days of New Criticism, so that our understanding of literature, highly refined and guided by a complex manipulation of language, was mostly devoid of any context (another of our iconic words) regarding politics, philosophy, history, or culture. Freud? Marx? Banished from the canon. Only Ben DeMott and Alfred Kazin, among my teachers, spoke for a broader way of reflecting on and interpreting novels and poems, beyond the shibboleths “irony,” “paradox,” and “complexity.” I remember Kazin railing at me, when I proposed an essay on Don Quixote, which he was teaching at the time, that I wanted to see through the lens of ambiguity. Kazin bristled: “You can’t go around with a copy of Reuben Brower [the ex-Amherst prof who was a New Critical disciple] in your back pocket.”

The most electric moment in my four years occurred when Howie Wolf, Miller Brown, and I shared a room in Valentine and invited my thesis advisor Armour Craig and his houseguest, Robert Frost, up for drinks. We had the great man to ourselves--just the five of us, our door locked and practically barricaded, and we talked from 7:00 to midnight; Frost spoke in eight-page sentences it seemed, and of course we were entranced. That night may have been the single most powerful force pushing me beyond the law school career I’d always imagined into more than half-century of wandering and wondering in the groves of academe.

II

When I think back over a long life, four different things make me happiest and most deeply engaged: writing, reading, talking, and loving.

Writing has always been difficult and slow for me (despite my five or so books, including one on the discovery of family secrets-Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers, and the co-edited Eating Words: A Norton Anthology of Food Writing), but few things drive me more powerfully than teasing out, in words carefully chosen, how literary meanings shift, how in fact meanings become meaningful. But for years, when academic writing often seemed too laborious I was delighted to turn to the more effervescent-though to my mind no less serious-mode of food writing and restaurant reviewing. The voice opened up, the tongue got looser and jazzier, the vernacular slathered thicker on the page. But still the right word brought me bliss, as in my review of a dreadful Italian place called Pinocchio’s, decorated with reproductions of the “Mona Lisa,” “The Creation of Adam,” and “The Birth of Venus,” all the figures sporting long noses: “I cannot tell a lie; this restaurant does not need a makeover, it needs a rhinoplasty.”

I have always been a serious reader, but when I started teaching a rigorous Humanities course at Reed that ranged from Homer to Aeschylus to Aristotle to Augustine to Dante, I realized both the gaps that even Amherst had not filled and a yearning to understand the complex ways civilizations and cultures come into being. When I teach I re-read even books I’ve known for years, always hoping to see them anew. And I may be most content when I go into my man-cave with a book to absorb the hours. Right now I’m reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s story

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of teaching the Odyssey and how meditating on his relation to his father has illuminated the epic for him (it touches my own instincts as autobiographer and autobiography critic); and Stephen Greenblatt’s magisterial work on Adam and Eve about the ways such a curious myth became a story almost universal in its originating power.

Good talk for me creates community, if only of two. My deepest relationships have always been founded in vibrant talk about the world, ideas and places, and, if I’m not being too self-indulgent, about one another. Maybe we learned this in late night dorm bull sessions, and however sophomoric it may sound, I’ve never ceased hungering for deep and abiding talk as the hallmark of friendship and love, bouncing thoughts, feelings, and concepts back and forth to create a circle of care and commemoration.

Finally, loving and the closeness that comes when you know you have permission-a great gift-to say (almost) anything and to speak your mind with courage. I have spent many years seeking such a partner, and I found her late in my life, with an unexpected and hard-won mutuality. Love, I have found, is at once the most instinctive emotion and sometimes the hardest aspect of any relation to express fully and freely and with unabashed wholeheartedness.

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Art Powell

During high school senior year my mother sent me to a vocational guidance service to help figure out what career paths might be suitable. The data analysis concluded that I should be a concert musician or a farmer! When I said that my college short list consisted of Ursinus and Upsala, the counselor said there were liberal arts colleges where people could “find themselves.” He suggested Amherst College.

Four years later I hadn’t quite found myself vocationally. Had Amherst failed me in that respect? I knew I wanted to stay out of the army and that a graduate student deferment was one way to do that. So I took the path of least resistance. Without deep interest or passion, I started a PhD program in American Studies at Harvard.

As I navigated my way in the world, I was most grateful for Amherst’s clear impact on boosting my socioeconomic and cultural mobility. Just being at Amherst, sticking with it and not flunking out, gave me a boost in the game of getting ahead in life beyond that of my high school classmates who attended other colleges. Amherst’s importance in the country’s social and educational pecking order had a large impact on my life.

Amherst was long celebrated for its favorable (for guys) social life. ‘The Singing College’ also stood impressively for sports, fraternities, parties and extracurriculars. These activities were voluntary, usually student-initiated and often called “College Life.” Through them I made friends who educated me in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. Their cumulative impact was to change many of my cultural and political values.

Unbeknownst to me, I couldn’t carry a tune, but joined the freshman glee club fall semester anyway. After being lovingly counseled out of the glee club, I joined The Amherst Student where I happily spent the next three years with like-minded reporters, who all wanted to make sense of Amherst and write it down. I learned to like The New Republic more than The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times more than the New York Journal American and Adlai Stevenson more than Joseph R. McCarthy. I abandoned my family’s staunch Republicanism. I learned that House of Walsh garments were preferable to my shiny gray Robert Hall suit. I learned there were many theaters in mid-town New York which mounted live plays. After seeing my first at Kirby during the fall, and knowing that a classmate down the hall went to plays in New York, my mother and I attended two Broadway productions one long day over Christmas vacation (Kismet, The Desperate Hours). I bought a record player to listen to original cast albums I had just discovered (and still possess). I also took my first ever shower at Amherst. Back home I used the tub. We had no shower. Everybody I knew avoided high school showers.

The postwar required New Curriculum had ambitions that went well beyond the activities of college life, although the latter had great influence on me. The New Curriculum expressed what Amherst thought in the 1950s was the essence of a liberal education and how it should be conducted. It sought to change the tone and culture of Amherst from a predominantly social focus to one emphasizing intellectual matters and the life of the mind. The New Curriculum was an impressive model. The idea of our “place apart” was to me grand and compelling: an intentional community, beautifully situated, with the guts to try to civilize us savages according to an agreed-on conception of education. Its main components were:

(1) A few required courses for freshmen and sophomores which forced all of us to confront the same issues and problems at the same time. The idea was to encourage us to share academic work and its predicaments with each other, to define our community outside class as a learning community as well as a more typical social community.

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(2) True pedagogical innovation which occurred notably in English, Physics and American Studies. In Amstuds, for example, the focus was not just on facts but on how facts were interpreted; on problems posed for America by crucial events like Slavery or the New Deal. How past is the past? Was slavery a major cause of the Civil War or not? Arguments were not about events but about their meaning, not about facts but what historians concluded about facts.

(3) A commitment to thinking rather than to mere memorization of subject content. Content wasn’t devalued. Content was kept in the service of a higher cognitive goal.

Issues raised by the New Curriculum and the traditional extra-curriculum were integral to all subsequent jobs I pursued: high school teacher, university academic dean, historian of schools, ethnographic researcher in schools, educational policy researcher and administrator. My vocational trajectory looks pretty clear in retrospect, despite all my trepidations. Could I have found myself without knowing it? Was there a better place than Amherst in those days to study consciously the educational process?

Looking back, how do I wish Amherst had been different? I can think of at least two areas which needed a decisive programmatic presence but never got it-areas where my ignorance at graduation was as profound as at college entrance. The first was economics, so necessary for thinking about society and the problem of inequality. So necessary also to teach ignorant students that money was an integral and essential part of American society. The only way I would have studied economics was if it had been required. But the New Curriculum wholly ignored economics, an elective subject outside its domain. The second area, symbolized by the infamous Marriage and the Family course requirement, avoided tough issues of relationships and sexuality that could have been fruitfully explored. It implied that men should dominate and that gays were sick and in need of treatment. It was a prisoner of the fifties.

In spite of these curricular shortcomings, I managed to come out in the wash much better than I had imagined at age 21. There is a kind of personal mobility one might call maturity, a deeper notion of finding oneself. At its heart I believe Amherst gave me a more sophisticated, ambitious, complex, multi-faceted and humble perspective on life. As I look to the future, this perspective can be applied, regardless of age or health, to reading, writing, talking, listening, watching, caring-- thinking in its several guises. I hope I bring this perspective, only partly vocational, to my three children and three grandchildren (with more on the way).

Our recent 50th wedding anniversary reminded me how my outlook on life has been honed not only by the college on the hill. But also, and especially by the love of a good woman. This basic truth may go without saying, but after five decades it still needs to be shouted loud and clear.

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Don Price

I did not enter Amherst as a blank slate. Amherst added onto a substantial text already written on it, and provided the outlines for the still unfinished story to be developed later.

As I entered college I saw myself engaged in the project of climbing out of a well where my knowledge and experience were confined by its walls. I wanted out and above, to gain some kind of Olympian perspective on everything, and liberation from narrower preconceptions.

Before Amherst, there were early roots. My boyhood and youth were marked by a fascination with the exotic, from chopsticks and funny writing on Chinese restaurant menus to the “Terry and the Pirates,” radio show and comic strip. Neighbors’ postwar postings to occupied Japan, China and Germany prompted me first to order a Linguaphone teach yourself Japanese record. Then Chinese and Japanese language books I stumbled across at the public library and the Hugo’s Teach Yourself German book on my father’s bookshelf occupied me for hours.

And then there were questions about religion. My parents’ disagreements over their churches exposed me to the conflicting claims of liberal and fundamentalist Christianity. Going further, I asked why believe that the Bible rather than the Koran, if either, was true. No answer.

So I studied philosophy and German at Amherst, and Russian at Smith. I bought Russian and Hungarian music records at Sam Goody’s when I was on vacation in New York. I was now desperate for some kind of real foreign experience, and managed to get summer jobs in Munich with a radio station that broadcast into the Soviet Union, while boarding with a German family.

Philosophy took me in two directions. One was Hume’s skepticism, pretty corrosive of religion, until I decided (like Hume himself, retreating into everyday life) that it was corrosive of everything. While there would be other reasons to question religion, skepticism wouldn’t hack it.

The other direction, still pursuing truth, was the philosophy of language. I had read the work of Benjamin Whorf just before coming to Amherst. He claimed that Hopi language vocabulary and syntax structured perceptions and thought differently, slicing up their reality in a way unlike ours-much more profoundly than the commonplace that Eskimos have lots more words for snow. This perspective on language and reality, by the way, was totally at odds with Baird’s approach and responsible for the only C I got at Amherst. I was impervious to his efforts to make me understand writing by describing my experience or redefining my vocabulary. No pretense of getting with his program succeeded. Sadly, I never took another English course. In senior year, I wrote my BA thesis on analytic philosophy’s failure, blithely assuming that words refer to obvious things out there, to deal with language’s construction of reality. Still, what was true?

Despite my interest in the wider world, I was pretty oblivious to politics, and never much read the newspapers. I have faulted Amherst for failing to make us informed citizens. My history and political science courses offered some corrective, so maybe the problem was just me. But not until the Suez crisis and the tragic Hungarian uprising in our junior year was I really exercised about US and world politics, and partly because my neighbors back home were Hungarians.

But Amherst did launch me into graduate work in Russian studies, looking forward to a career abroad as diplomat or spy. Thanks to a Chinese girlfriend at Smith, I had already started again to teach myself some Chinese, and I took it up in earnest along with my Russian studies, figuring to be a double threat on both the bamboo and iron curtains. So I did a PhD in Chinese and Russian history, joined the Yale Russian Chorus and went on their summer tour of the Soviet Union, and then spent two years as a graduate student for advanced language training and dissertation research in Taiwan (the Chinese mainland being off limits those days.)

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Finally abandoning the diplomat and spy options, I followed an academic career. As for research, I’m still excited by my painstaking detective work on a difficult long-term biographical project on Song Jiaoren, a very important early revolutionary. That ongoing project enabled me, as one of the few American authorities on China’s 1911 revolution, to enjoy long research sojourns in China and Japan, and numerous conference trips there, as well as one in France.

It was my career field and old mutual friends that brought me together with Nancy, the love of my life, then a graduate student in Asian art history. She was already more widely traveled than I (India, Taiwan, Japan, Korea) and up for more adventure. Travel has remained a passion for us (and for me, languages, too), with trips to Holland, Scotland, Turkey, Iran, and Cuba. Now we are also avid followers of foreign movies-Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Iranian.

As for our other involvements, after several good visiting professor jobs Nancy found academia too sterile, and went on from ‘70s anti-nuclear activism to full-time political mobilization and advocacy, ranging from local to global-city council to environmentalism and the fight against the abuses of multi-national corporate power. My teaching and research are our meal ticket, but I have become an enthusiastic online petitioner and domestic support group.

Finally about philosophy and religion, carry-overs from Amherst and before. After periods of ignoring religion, or feeling it an unwelcome and scary burden, I have lately come to find my religion liberating and encouraging-the fruits, perhaps, of a peculiar idiosyncratic drive to make sense of faith. But who says you can’t teach an old dog new mental tricks?

There were three steps-curiously, a logical sequence of faith, hope and love. First, I became obsessed by the philosophers’ insoluble “hard problem,” of reconciling matter’s self-sufficient behavior with the existence of immaterial consciousness. The logical possibility arises that everyone but me is a zombie, neurons working away, but unconscious. But for most of us a meaningful life requires the faith (or uncritical assumption) that (most?) other people experience all kinds of pleasure and pain like we do. Driven to question that assumption, I find faith (even unacknowledged as such) necessary. Next. whatever cosmic dimension our consciousness is in, I hope that’s where some powerful meta-consciousness is, so my religion is more hope than a claim to knowledge of the unknowable. And third, it’s hopeful because, a critical theory approach to the narrative that congealed out of historically questionable scriptural sources reveals a loving God who can ultimately set things right by the action of a self-sacrificing, all-forgiving and reconciling Christ. Who else? Where did our best altruistic and sympathetic impulses (even secular) come from? The Prophets, in part. Certainly not the macho Greeks, bloodthirsty Romans, Darwin, or Ayn Rand. As the Chinese say, “When you drink the water, think of its spring source.”

Cleaning out our closets and storage, in hopes of handing down furniture and nostalgic clutter, I fear for my son and grandchildren (if he ever gets married and produces some). Even now humans are bringing on the four fearsome horsemen of our environmental apocalypse, but already, since the beginning of evolution, the animal and human world has seen way too much suffering. So, I am desperate for a redemptive hereafter, where our conscious spirits can rejoice in their afterlife. Maybe I’ve come full circle in my quest for a wider and more exciting world.

Dick Rapson

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In 2003, my memoir of ideas, “Amazed By Life: Confessions of a Non-Religious Believer,” was published, including this brief section about my Amherst days. I’ve not changed my mind since then!

“. . . My parents and brother drove me up to Amherst that September day, and as the college came into view from its mountain entrance, our jaws dropped. We had never, any of us, see anything so beautiful. The charming Georgian buildings straddled a high hill overlooking vast autumn athletic fields, woods, hills, and a mountain range. It all seemed drawn from some archetype rather than reality. I had the strangest feeling that I had arrived home, and I was more than ready peremptorily to dismiss my parents once I’d found my dormitory room, my new and real domicile. I met my roommate Dave Ford, my first significant non-Jewish friend. I wished to start creating myself then and there, and wanted not to be defined by my parents who embarrassed me because they were not me. I’m sure I was not the first college freshman in history with those callow feelings, but I didn’t realize that at the time.

“My instincts were right. Though I was quite scared those first few months, I began the happiest years I had ever had. At Amherst I learned to love thinking, to treasure great teaching, to revel in natural beauty, and to develop self-awareness. In that gorgeous country club, I learned at the feet of Henry Steele Commager, Alfred Kazin, Leo Marx, Benjamin DeMott, Bill Pritchard, Robert Frost, and many others who taught me up close and knew my name rather than lecturing at me from afar. There were those teachers who were less renowned but knew me well and altered my mind: Ted Greene, Theodore Baird, Armour Craig, Ed Rozwenc, Henry Mishkin, Hugh Hawkins. Hats off!

“I made many lifetime friends. (Strangely but revealingly I have no friends today from before my Amherst days.) My body and spirit relaxed in that rural atmosphere. It expanded in the presence of its idyllic natural atmosphere. I sang in choruses, learned to play squash, improved my tennis, discovered art, physics, history, psychology, and literature. I made Phi Beta Kappa, was #2 at the college newspaper, spoke at Commencement, and was chosen to Amherst’s main honor societies. From all this I came to know that I wanted to be a college professor, living near to nature and doing for students what had been done for me.

“All my professors, alas, were men-as were all my fellow students. . . . My meetings with young women were almost exclusively institutionalized as “dating.” I did not get the social education and confidence, when it came to the opposite sex, that I needed badly. Though I dated a fair amount, I continued to labor within that intoxicating vineyard in substantial ignorance.

“But by June 1958 I was far more formed as a person than I had been in 1954. I knew clearly what made me happy and what I must avoid. I knew what I believed. I had a good sense of my strengths and weaknesses as a person and an intellectual. I’d found my calling. I had come of age. Friends from those days who know me now profess to see roughly the same person.”

Peter Rugh

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1 – I am writing this on March 1, 2018, the 50th anniversary of my marriage to Debbie Galoob at her family home in Longview, Texas. Debbie and I had met in San Francisco, where we both lived, in 1964, She died unexpectedly on September 10, 2015.

2 - I treasure my Amherst experience, from the time I took leave from the Navy to visit the campus during the 1954 Spring break, to this moment. If given the chance, I would only change my approach to academics, as I frequently regret not being appreciative of the opportunity to learn.

3 – I have lived in Berkeley since 1967, and have become accustomed to issues. demonstrations and political chaos. I look back at our time at Amherst and can’t recall any issue, foreign or domestic, which got my attention.

4 - I appreciate the time and efforts of classmates who have preserved the Class of 1958. Of that group I give special kudos to John Bischof and Art Powell for their memorable service as Class Secretaries a few years ago.

5 – I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2008, after an episode while in Amherst at our 50th Reunion. I had looked forward to attending our 60th, but my disabilities (Parkinson’s is relentless) tell me I should not. (Sorry, Sam)

6 – I practiced law in Oakland, retiring twenty years ago. For seven years I volunteered with Meals on Wheels and was employed by the San Francisco Giants as a Tour Guide at its new ballpark in downtown SF. Retirement beats working.

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Mickey Saltman

In August 2013, I wrote a document entitled “Amherst Reflections” at the request of some Amherst classmate. I do not remember who asked or what the purpose of that document was. However, in rereading it I found that it addressed some of the aspects requested in Hendrik’s call for this submission. Two academic things stand out about my Amherst experience. First, I went from being a memorizer who could “regurgitate” information in response to a prompt, to being someone who strove to understand relationships developed from factual information. Second, I learned to be articulate aurally and in writing (though, frankly, English 1-2 never clicked for me). Amherst, the institution, did not develop those attributes in me. Clearly, the requirements and presentations of the Amherst faculty are responsible for my development. In particular, Arnold Arons was the first teacher responsible for me striving for understanding: “no hen-tracks leading to a box labeled answer.” Whether his intimidating style was “good teaching” or not, it certainly got me committed to a new style of learning. And then, there was John Moore, a quietly brilliant man, who taught by using a Socratic method where each question/answer generated another question/answer and the teacher was not pitcher pouring forth knowledge in the front of the classroom. In my life as a teacher, teaching for understanding and using the Socratic dialog method were the hallmarks of my classroom. In both Chemistry and Physics, I probably could have covered many more topics than I did, but my students would tell you that what they learned they learned well and they developed a style of learning that was unique among their classes.

Amherst was the first place that my “social conscience” started to manifest itself (the origins of that social conscience probably begin with my parents). As a co-rushing chairman of Theta Xi, we recommended pledging a Negro (African-American was not a term in use at that time). The national fraternity expelled the Amherst chapter and Alpha Theta Xi was born. One recollection I have of that experience is that the “brothers” of the chapter never hesitated to offer the young man a place in the fraternity and that speaks highly of the social conscience of the members. That experience of doing the “right thing” carried through to my career in several ways, two of which are substantive enough to mention here. At Bronxville High School, together with a group of students we formed a system of governance for the high school that included faculty, administration and students. Unless covered by Education Law, the Student-Faculty-Administration Legislature governed the school. At Kinkaid Upper School, I led the faculty in providing a safe place for our gay students. Sadly, when I tried to do the same for our gay faculty, I ran into major resistance and decided, at age 73, to retire.

The Amherst of today is not the Amherst of our time, nor should it be. While I was not a big fan of coeducation when it was first being discussed (why change a good thing?), I am a big fan now. The thing I most regret is the demise of the core curriculum. The specific courses were wonderful (even English 1-2), but others could replace them and be just as good. But the philosophy of exposure, not superficial exposure, to fields of learning that young people might avoid out of lack of interest or lack of ease, is critical to a Liberal Arts education. Both my children graduated Amherst after the requirements were gone. I am proud to say that they diversified their course selection and are truly Liberal Arts graduates. But I worry that today’s emphasis on specialization and pre-professional training may remove the kind of broad training that makes one “educated.”

I divide my post-Amherst life into two parts: working and retirement. I was one of the lucky people who chose a field of endeavor and loved every minute of it. Teaching was what I was born to do, and I reveled in each minute in the classroom. Even when I became an administrator, I was still a teacher. In addition to the class I retained, I had a full faculty to teach, question, goad in hopes of producing better teachers and more empathetic human beings. Then, I retired and a new me emerged. The focused, purposeful person was no more. Instead Susan (my wife of 57+ years) and I have traveled and traveled and traveled. Our mantra is that we will continue to do this “as long as the health and wealth hold out.” Our grandchildren (and children) live in Minnesota and New Hampshire, so there are requisite trips there. But, the majority of our travel is out of the

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country (having visited the National Parks too) from Europe to Australia and New Zealand, to Myanmar and Mongolia and points in between. Each trip is a new adventure with one of the several tour companies which we favor. Iceland, the Italian Riviera and Northern Spain are on tap for the coming months. When we are home, we participate in a lot of physical activities, some social activities and the requisite doctors’ visits.

That’s the end of two pages.

Michael Schaenen

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My most impactful experience at Amherst occurred when I was struggling to understand Bohr’s theory of the atom, and what possible relationship it bore to our Calculus I work. I was completely lost and anticipating a failing grade I went to see Dean Wilson to let him know that he had chosen the wrong guy for the school. He kindly assured me that he had not, and suggested that I go to Professor Arons to seek his help. Because I could not even go past Fayerweather Hall without becoming violently nauseated this did not seem to be a reasonable plan for me, but given my alternatives; i.e. none, I followed his advice, and approached the dreaded professor after our next Saturday morning section meeting. I told him I was totally lost, and he assured me that he was aware of that fact. He invited me to come to his office after our next class and spend some time working on the problem; and he said that with a kind smile, not his usual snarl.

After roughly two hours something clicked for me, and I began “connecting the dots” as his smile grew broader. I thanked him profusely for his help and he said: “My greatest thrill in teaching is helping a lost soul like you to see the light!” I had never been so proud of an achievement as I was at that moment.

Throughout the balance of my life I harked back to that afternoon whenever I was confronted with a seemingly insoluble obstacle to overcome, and refused to quit until I had figured out the solution, either by myself or with the help of someone more gifted than I in whatever area I was confronting.

POST-AMHERST

Living in New York apartment buildings with limited storage space since 1966 has forced me to stop collecting items which I once believed to be priceless; i.e. baseball cards; autographed photos of various celebrities I had met; golf putters; birthday and anniversary cards from children; baseball caps and countless family photos that were distributed to those who desired them. Living in the past had no appeal for me when I was blessed with a wonderful present and hopefully an equally wonderful future.

While I do love good movies, art museums and good theater, none of these compare to the pleasure I have received from great music and special books on many subjects.

For 57 years I have had the privilege of managing or helping to manage the financial assets of many families, and for many of them becoming a trusted source of counsel in matters other than that. But for the past two decades I have become saddened by the enormous amount of greed that has invaded our profession, and by the care we once gave to our clients becoming more and more focused on the accumulation of wealth for the advisors themselves. As advisory fees grew larger the quality of the advice given seemed to grow much less profitable for the clients. The many good friends and colleagues I had made “back in the day” mutually mourned the collapse of the culture we had enjoyed from the beginning of our careers.

In that same vein I also include the “dehumanization” of human communication through the use of cyberspace instruments; the enormous deterioration of simple civilities, which we used to call “good manners”; and many other such practices which now label our generation as dinosaurs. Try as I might I can’t get used to seeing a young couple (regardless of gender) being seated at a restaurant and then whipping out their cell phones; or a woman pushing a baby carriage across a crowded street while staring intently into her phone while cars and pedestrians stream by. But none of the negatives even begin to detract from the enormous pleasures I have been fortunate enough to have throughout my life. As Gershwin said: “Who could ask for anything more?”

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Steve Schwartz

I can’t believe it! 60 years later. I’m still being asked to write a College essay! Hope I get it right this time.

From the very first contact at my admissions interview to the present time, Amherst has always had a very special warm spot in my heart. I felt a special sense of pride that I got to be part of that extended family. I knew that Amherst was where I wanted to go.

Amherst was where I made my transition from adolescence to adulthood. Some of it was pretty rocky but all in all, I think I came out a better person because of it. I went from a High School Hotshot to an Under Achiever. But in doing so I recognized various levels from Mediocrity to Excellence. I thought I was a good Tennis Player, and then I encountered far better players. I thought I was smart in math and science and then I found there were others that were smarter. I thought I was only a so-so writer, but a young English teacher, Rufus Bellamy, motivated me to greater heights telling me “You write the worst paragraphs of anyone I’ve ever encouraged to write more.” I hope I got better.

Having identified myself as an Under Achiever, I was not pleased and vowed to correct that in the future. I was a highly ranked student in Dental School and an excellence Dentist for 39 years. I got involved in my community in a variety of ways. I was in the Lions Club International, the Exchange Club (a National Service Club), my Town’s Library Board, my synagogue (as an Officer as well as Youth Director), the Jewish Federation as a Fund Raiser and Visitor to lonely retirees and Holocaust Victims. I’m active today in various Community Organizations. I usually rose to Leadership positions. Because of my Amherst background, I was asked to write a column for club newsletters in my retirement community and my dental society.

Although I had a good number of friends at Amherst, I did not keep in touch with many. But when I return for reunions and Amherst gatherings, I am able to resume conversation with them as if I spoke to them yesterday. I have also found that every Reunion I interact with somebody I had little contact in college years and am at ease with any Amherst Graduate who may have been there before or after me. There is a special bonding with Friends or Friends I’ve yet to meet.

I married Dora Pechter, a Holocaust survivor 58 years ago and have had a wonderful life with her. I also learned a great deal about the war and refugee experience that was not included in my studies at Amherst, not even in a History of World War II course I took my Senior year. We have 2 children son Jeff, (Amherst ’83) and daughter Bev (Cornell ’85) and 5 Grandchildren, (3 graduated Maryland and 2 graduated Cornell). Sarah, Jeff’s oldest and only girl, graduated Maryland and got her PhD in Psychology from GW. David, Jeff’s oldest son (and the second grandchild) graduated Maryland and got a doctorate in Physical Therapy from Mass General. He is getting married March 18, 2018. Aaron, Bev’s oldest twin graduated Cornell and is now writing Algorithms for Putnam. Jesse, the younger twin, also graduated Cornell, is involved with Real Estate financing and custom designed jewelry. And Michael, Jeff’s youngest, graduated Maryland and writes for a financial newsletter, Morning Brew.

My advice to any future (or current) student is to take as many courses in as many different fields as you can. The exposure to diversity of study and people will give you a greater ability to cope with life. Save expertise for later. And try not to do as many stupid things I did. I came out lucky. But do have some fun. It’s a great time in your life. No real responsibilities, just meet a couple of deadlines.

In sum? Strangers once we came to dwell together, Now we’re bound by ties that time cannot sever.

James C. Sheinin

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What I am most grateful for about my Amherst experience is the New Curriculum. The mandated two-year program provided the seeds of a truly liberal education that provided superb preparation for the rest of my life. In addition, I had the opportunity to take two outstanding courses on classical music that laid the ground work for my major avocation, my love and support of classical music. I would strongly encourage my grandchildren to take full advantage of the remarkable opportunity that a college such as Amherst provides.

Firmly rooted in the Chicago area, I have had relatively little contact with Amherst since graduation, returning for our 25th reunion, which coincided with graduation of our son Dan from Amherst in 1983, returning for the graduation of our daughter Sandy from Smith in 1990, and returning for our 50th reunion in 2008.

I graduated from the University of Chicago School of Medicine in 1962. I had a medical internship and residency at Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center, interrupted by two years of military service as a general medical officer in the United States Army in Hanau, Germany, which gave us a remarkable opportunity to be exposed to much of the music, art, and sites of Europe. I then had a fellowship in endocrinology and metabolism at Northwestern University Medical School, after which I began my solo private practice of endocrinology metabolism in 1969. I maintained affiliations with teaching hospitals and was on the clinical faculty of medical schools throughout my career. I wrote several articles and chapters in areas of my special interest and expertise including medical and endocrine aspects of eating disorders and hyperthyroidism. I saw some patients for a few months or a few years, but I saw many patients for several decades, and a number of patients became friends as well as patients. I remained a dinosaur in solo private practice for 45 years. Indeed, my wife and my late office manager simultaneous gave me dinosaurs for one of my birthdays. The practice of medicine, despite remarkable scientific and technological advances, remains an art as well as a science. My subspecialty expertise and my philosophy of treating a patient as a person, the way I would want to be treated if I were the patient, stood me in good stead.

My practice had been very gratifying, and I retired not without considerable ambivalence. However, the hassles of medical practice had increased exponentially, the computer was being interposed between the physician and the patient, and a new set of diagnostic codes was to go into effect three months after my retirement. In a book of medical humor, the physician author suggested that if you felt that you were the world greatest doctor, you should come back one week after your death and you would find all your patients scattered and seeing other physicians with no thought of ever having been seen by you. Fortunately, that has not been the case, and I continue to get occasional calls from patients about various concerns or requests for guidance. I continue to teach endocrinology and metabolism to the sophomore medical students at Northwestern for several weeks each year.

My primary activity since retirement, which actually began before retirement, has been taking "old folks" courses in Chicago and Evanston. Most have been participatory peer taught study groups at the Northwestern Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI). Examples include The Great American Music People, All That Jazz, Curtain Up (reading, attending, and discussing plays presented in the Chicago area), and reading and discussing Thinking Fast and Slow (the remarkable work on behavioral economics by the Nobel Prize winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman). I will be coordinating a study group at OLLI this spring on Chamber Music Masterpieces for Larger Ensembles. I have taken professor taught courses at the University of Chicago Graham School including Beaumarchais' The Barber of Seville and the Marriage of Figaro and the operas by Rossini and Mozart that they inspired, The Fin de Siecle in Berlin and Vienna, and two Stoppard plays, Travesties and Jumpers. I have taken several courses on line through Coursera including the first three parts of a course on the Beethoven Piano Sonatas, and courses on The String Quartet, Music as Biology, and the Holocaust.

My marriage and family continue to be most gratifying. I have a wonderful, loving, and caring relationship with my wife, Rita, LCSW who has put up with me for 57 years. She continues to use her experience and expertise in

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geriatric social work in the Evanston community and will be expert in caring for me as I mature. Our children have grown up to be wonderful human beings and have wonderful relationships with their parents and siblings, and have been productive and respected members of their communities. Our elder son, Dan, PhD, Amherst 1983, is professor of marketing at the University of Rhode Island Business School, and married to Betsy Richmond, DVM, and they have provided us with two wonderful granddaughters ages 18 (a freshman at Brown) and 14. Our younger son, Dick, has developmental disabilities and has lived in a group home very close to us since he was 19. He remains very much an integral part of our family, sees us regularly, and looks forward to seeing his siblings who are very devoted to him. He has a remarkable knowledge of movies, actors, and musicals. Our daughter, Sandy Sheinin, MD, Smith College 1990, is a psychiatrist in private practice, married to Alex Feller, MD, and they have provided us with a wonderful 14-year-old granddaughter (who has sung with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and the Lyric Opera in the last year) and an equally wonderful grandson, age 12.

Although the practice of endocrinology and metabolism has been my vocation, enjoyment and support of classical music has been my primary avocation. It was significantly fostered by the two music courses I took an Amherst, my two years in the military service in Germany where we attended concerts, operas, and music festivals throughout Europe, and being able to attend outstanding performances of classical music in the Chicago area. I was a member of the Junior Governing Board of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra until I was no longer considered junior, a Director of the Chicago Chamber Musicians for 15 years, and I now am a Governing Member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Although I am unable to play a musical instrument, I had the opportunity to be on stage with musicians. An internationally known concert pianist and patient, knowing my love of classical music, graciously offered: "Rubinstein's doctor turned pages for him, you can turn pages for me." So I had the Walter Mitty-like experience (with a lot of practice before each concert), of turning pages for him on a number of occasions when he played chamber music in the Chicago area. My repertoire extended from Mozart to Dvorak.

Rita and I frequently attend orchestra and chamber concerts, operas and other classical music performances. We have a strong interest in the art world as well, frequently go to museums and art and craft shows, and have collected a number of graphics and other art works that give us great pleasure, including works by Hockney, Hundertwasser, Lichtenstein, Stella and Steinberg. We also have a strong interest in theater and musical theater, and Stoppard and Sondheim remain our favorites in these genres for their intellect, sophistication, and wit.

I want to extend best wishes for healthy, happy and productive years to my Amherst classmates on this august occasion.

Mike Simon

I was an academic.

The idea to have us present our recollections is a good one.

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I had a good time in my four years at Amherst, and I much appreciated the New Curriculum, but there was a downside with respect to some of the substance that left much to be desired. It is commendable that the focus was on learning to think, but there was short shrift with respect to the content of many of the courses.

A senior I knew told me he believed that the reason Amherst graduates are often successful is not because of what they learned at Amherst, but because of the abilities that had gotten them into Amherst in the first place. I partly agreed with him but disagreed because some of the courses that I had while at Amherst were terrific.

I started out as a French major, only because I couldn't compete with the English majors. I never expected to be a science major, but when I took Science 1-2, I was inspired by Professor Arons' treatment of the material and use of Holton's book. Much of my teaching as a graduate teaching fellow was teaching science to non-science majors. I was honored when Professor Holton offered me a position as a teaching fellow.

The courses I most admired were Science 1-2, Intermediate Physics (largely because the course had only eight students), and Music of Mozart with Professor Mishkin.

Many times President Cole said that a liberal education means that you are educated even after you have forgotten everything you have been taught. I understand his sentiment because it reflects the goal of the New Curriculum. What it leaves out is the importance of learning and knowledge. No one wants to be an ignoramus.

What about my other science courses? I truly liked and admired Tom Yost.

In embryology, the course was based mainly on research in the 1930's. At the time I was taking this course, the field was already known as Developmental Biology.

I also took a course in based on fruit fly genetics. However, when I moved to Cambridge the summer after graduation, everyone was talking about DNA and Watson and Crick's paper on the double helix which had been published in 1953 the year before I entered Amherst.

When I was trying to decide whether to major in biology or chemistry for a future as a biochemist, I asked Professor Kidder for advice. His answer was "Go where your friends are."

In chemistry I did fairly well, as did almost all the students majoring in chemistry. Though the faculty were bright and intelligent, few did any research. While fellow chemistry majors have done very well, it is hard to believe that they were prepared to be chemists by their Amherst education.

Among all the non-science courses I took, probably the most valuable course was American Studies. The course provided and encouraged better thinking with important content.

The politics of fraternities was a very important learning for me at Amherst. Several houses were kicked out of Nationals for pledging African Americans. Only Phi Delt was kicked out for pledging Jews. I had joined that fraternity because that is where the Jazz musicians were. I had never before been subject to blatant anti-Semitism. Learning that was an important part of my Amherst education, and for that I am grateful.

It is probably worth pointing out that diversity didn't mean what it does today. When we were at Amherst diversity meant that the school held a geographically diverse population. Most of us came from the suburbs of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Washington D.C.

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Win Smith

I was a precocious kid with a psychologist for a father. He had wanted to be a physicist. At age 10 he built me an electrical workbench equipped with batteries, switches and lightbulbs to experiment with. Not long afterward he brought me to a physics lecture by Mark Zemansky on how you could generate artificial lightning with an induction coil and, I think, how the spark would generate radio waves that could produce a spark at a distant point (Hertz’s experiment) if you had the right resonant circuit. After that I was hooked on physics. The same year Percy Bridgman (Harvard physics professor) won the Nobel Prize for generating high pressures comparable to those deep within the earth and studying properties of various materials (including ice) under very high pressure. That inspired me too.

In high school, Dad decided a good project for him and his two sons was to build a summer cottage from the ground up in the town of Randolph among the White Mountains of New Hampshire, near his uncle Percy Bridgman and just down the hill from a cottage owned by James B. Conant. My wife Anne, daughter Sarah and I still enjoy the cottage and the easygoing academic atmosphere of Randolph and the mountains every summer.

As a senior in high school, I applied to Amherst, Wesleyan and MIT and was fortunate enough to have a full choice among the three. I liked the idea of a small college, and Ted Soller, Physics head at Amherst, adroitly used Alan Haught as bait to come to Amherst to study physics. We had a good bunch in ’58. I liked the atmosphere at Amherst from the first time I visited. I have no regrets.

Though Arnold Arons seemed intimidating to many and not without flaws, once he accepted you as a person with talent in science, he was very supportive and helpful. Arons had a substantial reputation in physical oceanography research. Bruce Benson hired me to stay in Amherst to make some relevant lab measurements in summer 1956, giving me a closer relationship to the faculty than many students got. In summer 1957, Arons supported me on an oceanographic voyage aboard the research vessel Atlantis I out of Woods’ Hole, to try to use the oxygen isotope ratios in sea water to trace some of the deep-sea currents. Andy Ingersoll ’61 (now prof. of planetary science at Caltech) was my “assistant” in the laboratory where we welded our apparatus below decks into the boat and worked 16-18 hours a day when the ship was out of port. We also snorkeled around the coral reefs of Bermuda. In the end I passed on our water samples to Peter Parker for his senior thesis. Our late classmate Bruce Warren also worked at Woods Hole in ’57 and for many years afterward, thanks to Arons’ initial efforts,

Amherst prepared me well for graduate work at MIT. I had a very happy and stimulating life in Cambridge once I had passed the general comprehensive exams. My Amherst senior thesis on nuclear magnetic resonance (precursor to modern MRI imaging) with Bob Romer prepared me well for MIT.

At Los Alamos in summer, 1959, I worked on controlled fusion experiments (fusion energy is the source of the sun’s energy and has been “right around the corner” as a practical terrestrial energy source for about 60 years - since about 1958 - now renewable energy looks more promising). Another career opportunity passed up!

Being a graduate student at MIT eventually led to a Ph.D. in experimental atomic (and laser) physics, a post-doc in a new innovative federal-state joint research institute in Boulder, Colorado - a great opportunity for outdoor activities like hiking and skiing as well as physics. And I met my future wife, Anne Keller Smith, who was studying for a Ph.D. in Spanish literature at the University of Colorado. One of many lucky opportunities I’ve had but not planned for.

Another was that, after I returned from Los Alamos in 1959, I found that the MIT Physics Dept. was looking for a graduate student volunteer to help as staff and participant in a 1960 Summer Study on Arms Control organized by an interdisciplinary group of distinguished faculty from MIT and Harvard, some of whom I got to know well. I

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co-authored a paper on estimating the size of the U.S. nuclear stockpile from unclassified sources, with a more expert senior colleague. We were able to confirm that our estimate was in the right ball park from (as I recall) an Air Force general’s Congressional testimony. We sent the manuscript to the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy with a cover letter stating we intended to publish the paper in the open literature if we didn’t hear back from them in a month. We didn’t, so the paper was later available to use in successful negotiations with the Soviets on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which needed some unclassified numbers. A possible government career in science policy? I’ll never know, but it was fun while it lasted. (I later turned down interviews with the CIA and the NSA.)

Among the non-physics courses I enjoyed the most at Amherst were Bucky Salmon’s course on military and diplomatic 20th century history, taken as a senior with much of the football team (good, but not too hard!), a music course in which we went over most of Mozart’s works, and a course on Henry James with Prof. Barber. Freshman year, I was a failure as accompanist for the freshman glee club, but the director Charles Luddington told me that if I’d quit that, he’d give me pipe organ lessons, which continued until graduation. I later had free access to MIT’s two Holtkamp organs and occasional gigs at weddings. At MIT we sang the Bach B-minor Mass in Symphony Hall with the Boston Symphony and I continue to get satisfaction from singing choral music with the Hartford Chorale and Hartford Symphony for nearly the past 25 years.

Amherst taught me that it’s OK to have broad interests and hobbies as well as focusing on excellence in one’s main career. At Columbia, I taught “Physics for Poets” to the leader of the student revolution, Mark Rudd, in 1968, and hobnobbed with Nobel Laureates. I have been fulfilled as a Professor at the University of Connecticut since 1969. I retired in 2005 but am still “practicing.” I have one remaining Ph.D. physics student. I had six sabbaticals away, including a year in Europe. All were productive, and each changed the direction of my scholarship in a useful way. One thing that does concern me is the “corporatization” of research universities like UConn (with a total annual budget ~$1.5 billion, though a pitifully small endowment per student compared with Amherst or Harvard) and the corresponding decline in collegial decision making, as I used to know it, that accompanies the increase in “support staff.” Surprisingly, after 2-3 years as a student at MIT, I felt in some ways more a part of that community, diverse as it was. The faculty there were, I think, more approachable than many at Harvard or Columbia, though I know such generalizations should be made cautiously.

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Mike Spero

Amherst provided the intellectual stimulus in classrooms and dorms and daily contact with faculty and other students. This was part of my broadening of interests and general maturing process. Perhaps my greatest change resulted from interaction with other students.

I had many friends and acquaintances in different areas of student life ranging from academic to athletic to social. I was active in WAMF, served as president of my fraternity in my junior year and a dorm advisor in my senior year with Bill Warren in Morrow dorm for 1/3 of the freshman class. This responsibility was to be an advisor to freshmen who consulted me or just came by to chat. They had numerous concerns, many emotional, and frequently involving the fraternities and their acceptance, delayed or otherwise, and I believe I was helpful in their dealing with their emotional anxiety and keeping perspective.

Walt Diggs and I travelled to Europe by ship and spent almost two months travelling around a number of European counties. Both Walt and I experienced our reaction to the changing languages and cultures and we had numerous discussions about these and who we were after the experience.

After law school I followed my interest in people by concentrating in the trust and estate area which was focused on individuals rather that corporate law or litigation. The clients' needs ranged from financial and tax matters to interpersonal relations and this fit in with my interests developed in college. Helping others generally – professionally, philanthropically and personally with their needs – has given me great satisfaction.

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Peter Strauss

I have had the email in my inbox, staring at me, since you sent it, wondering what I might have to say. Nothing came to me until last night. I began reading Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci.

At 10 PM, I experienced an energy arousal that I haven't felt about the printed word for a long time. Yes, there have been enjoyable books, very enjoyable. But none struck me or enlivened me the way the opening pages of Leonardo did. Immediately I was snapped back in time to what was probably the most exciting class I took in my Amherst years: Richard M. Douglas' History of the Renaissance.

Prof. Douglas was obviously head over heels in love with the Renaissance, and that profound involvement in the subject matter overflowed in every moment of his teaching. It infected me, among others. I dove into Jacob Burkhardt head first, only coming up for air at the end of the semester. I too fell in love with the Renaissance, awakened again a few years ago when Nan and I took our trip to Italy, and stayed a while in Firenze. Walking across the Ponte Vecchio again (I had done that in 1953, while stationed in Salzburg), this time with my bride by my side -- our buying for her a wonderful and beautiful leather jacket from a bridge merchant -- spending time in the Ufizzi Galleries, and even more time in the Pitti Palace -- it all came to life for me, again.

If Amherst had given me nothing else, as we say in my language, dayeinu: It would have been enough. What did Amherst do that impacted the rest of my life? It instilled in me a love of learning, of mental expansion, of horizon broadening. Other sources akin to Prof. Douglas: Walter Seddelow, freshman humanities. The man was an eternal fountain, and I happily got drenched, for two marvelous semesters.

Cesar Barber/Modern Poetry -- that's where I met and was overwhelmingly and life-longingly seduced, romanced, and profoundly deepened by the work of William Butler Yeats, whose poetry I have been memorizing (don't ever want to be without it) ever since that class.

The rediscovery of a deeply important part of me: Peter the Actor/Director/Set Constructor/Lighting Designer.

Another love affair developed at the hands of Theodore Baird: 2 semesters in which I read all the plays of Shakespeare. I loved the reading, I loved, and still love, the plays. I hated the classes. And after that, a seminar devoted to Shakespeare's Sonnets, offered by Professor Bottkol (not sure of the spelling) from Mt. Holyoke – inspirational. I began then and there memorizing the sonnets (I still carry a few around in my head, right next to Yeats' poetry), and I began writing my own sonnets on the same form: ababcdcdefefgg. As Frost said, when asked why he wrote rhymed and metered verse, "I like the feeling of riding easy in harness."

OK. That's one page. Lessee what else I want/need to say.

So how, apart from what I've indicated above, has all this affected me?

Glad you asked. Here's how a piece of it worked: I discovered, in learning to act, the central importance of listening. While I had always shown a talent for that in early friendships and relationships, it became a way of life for me in my 30-year career as a psychotherapist. While Prof. Douglas created in me a taste for analyzing and understanding Renaissance (and Reformation - yes, I took the other semester class) History, I was able to apply those skills when listening to the personal histories of clients in my practice, and was able to help them put the events of their lives in a useful perspective, helping them to see themselves and the important others in their lives with compassion instead of judgment. I treasure the thought that for many of the thousands of people who came to me, I was able to make a difference.

I almost forgot: I did spend eight years, early on, as a secondary school teacher. I had magnificent role models, as indicated above. And more that I haven't mentioned, more that infected me: Kazin, Brophy, Epstein, Kennick, Craig, Boughton, Rogers, McGoun (sp? he of Kirby), and more whose names escape me right now.

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[The next classmate, wrote two reflections sent separately. They're different, and because he was second on the “medals platform” for swiftest response, using editor's prerogative, they are both published.-- hdg]

David Suzuki

#1 I was born in 1936 when smallpox ravaged millions annually and polio was a dreaded disease. We didn’t know what role DNA played, how many chromosomes were in a human cell or the role of X and Y chromosomes (sorry, I’m a geneticist). Back then, there were no transoceanic phone calls, television, transistor radios, Xerox, plastic or antibiotics. When I tell young people when I was born, there were no jet planes, satellites, oral contraceptives, laptops, organ transplants, cellphones or plasticized everything, they can’t believe anyone can be so old and invariably ask “What did you do?” To youth, our childhood was imaginable, an ancient culture long extinct and they’re right, each innovation changes the way we see our place in the world and abolishes old ways.

When I was a teenager, magazines like Popular Mechanics, touted a future in which robots and machines would do our housework and chores, so the big question was what to do with all of our leisure time. Well, that future is here for me – television, computers, voice mail, microwave ovens, cellphones and drawers full of useless outdated electronic paraphernalia – but instead of leisure time, more and more things-to-do are squeezed into my life.

Geologists today call the period beginning from 1945 – 50, the Anthropocene Epoch, the Age of Humanity, when we have become the major factor altering the physical, chemical and biological properties of the planet on a geological scale. It is a result of the sudden confluence of population, technology, consumption, a globalized economy and the move away from rural villages to big cities.

For most of human existence, from nomadic hunter/gatherers to farmers, we lived within a biocentric worldview - we understood we were one species among many within a web of interconnection and interdependence, embedded in and utterly dependent on Nature. In the Anthropocene, we have shifted to an anthropocentric world view in which we are at the centre of the action and everything around us becomes an opportunity if we can find a use for it. At the same time, we have shattered the way we see the world into bits and pieces, twitterizing Nature into ever smaller fragments.

We die without air after 3 minutes and sicken if the air is polluted, yet we dump vast amounts of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere and justify it as the “price of doing business”. For 9 ½ years, Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, refused to do anything to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because “it would destroy the economy”, thereby elevating the economy above the very atmosphere that is the air we breathe and source of weather, climate and the seasons.

World War II pulled us out of the Great Depression but as it was ending, the question was how to transition from a war economy to one in peace. The solution was “consumption” – get Americans to worship at the altar of consumption, to buy things, use them up and buy more. And it worked. Today, 70% of the American economy is based on consumption.

But the economic system that has now been globalized is fundamentally flawed yet drives governments around the world. It is predicated on the ironclad demand for endless growth, an impossibility in a finite world. Things spiritual, sacred or sentimental, have no value in the economy, yet they are what matter most to us. And all of the ecological “services” that Nature performs to keep the planet habitable for animals like us are rendered externalities to the economy. In an anthropocentric world where everything is about us, we elevate human constructs – borders, capitalism, economies, markets, corporations, governments, political parties, currency, religions – above the air, water, soil and biodiversity that are the underpinnings of life on Earth. It is suicidal.

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#2 To understand the impact Amherst had on me, I have to provide some family background. My grandparents emigrated from Japan to Canada between 1902 and 1906. They were poor and uneducated and though Canada was deeply racist at that time (they couldn’t vote even if born in Canada, own property in many places or aspire to professions like medicine and pharmacy), they knew there were opportunities if they worked hard. My parents were born in Vancouver in 1909 and 1911 but like many kids of immigrants, grew up without grandparents or elders. In other words, they had no roots in the land as Indigenous people have. I was born in Vancouver in 1936 and at home we spoke English, but my grandparents never learned the language, so we never had a conversation about Japan or their thoughts about life. I grew up then, with the sense that land was a commodity, an opportunity to make money. (For the past 35 years, my work with Indigenous people has changed this perspective).

My parents, bilingual in English and Japanese, grew up as proud Canadians until Pearl Harbor when Canada applied the War Measures Act that suspended all rights of citizenship of all ethnic Japanese, confiscated property, froze bank accounts and deported us out of Vancouver to internment camps in the Rocky Mountains. All of the propaganda posters of slant eyed, bucktoothed Japanese soldiers were me when I looked in the mirror! Shame of being Japanese has haunted me all my life.

After the war, we were expelled from British Columbia because we chose to remain in Canada and ended up in Ontario where my parents emphasized hard work and education as the way out of our poverty. In a high school civics class, I discovered I was the only student whose mother worked for an income, an indication of poverty. I worked on weekends and every summer first as a farm laborer and later in construction to supplement the family income. I was stunned to learn that my fellow students had their entire summers off and took holidays throughout the rest of the year.

High school was not academically challenging as people like me with good grades were disparaged as “brains”, a pejorative back then. High school in Ontario went to grade 13. John Thompson, a classmate who was American, went to Amherst after grade 12 and when I met him at Thanksgiving, he urged me to apply to Amherst. So I did, knowing nothing about the college at that time, but figuring it would be easy since I’d have an extra year over everyone else. I didn’t know about prep schools or the intense competition to get into a school like Amherst.

I was extremely grateful that Amherst regarded foreign students as an important part of the education of American students and received a scholarship worth more than my father earned in a year, a whopping $1500 that I supplemented bussing morning tables in Valentine. Amherst was a shock. Culturally, I had never encountered people my age who travelled to Europe, enjoyed classical music and wore fashionable clothes. Academically, I was knocked for a loop by bright, well-prepared students who showed me how to work my butt off, organize my thoughts and think not just memorize facts. In order to maintain my scholarship, I had to stay in the top 20%, and it was a struggle through freshman and sophomore years despite my year advantage from high school.

I was acutely aware of being a racial minority. Of three African-Americans in our class, only Ed Crockett graduated. There were two Asians, Gord Uyeda and me. I was too timid to date Caucasian girls so every year, rushed to get freshman books from Smith and Holyoke to check for Asian faces. The one course I excelled in was public speaking mandatory in sophomore year which most treated as a lark. My father always insisted that to succeed in North American society, one has to be able to speak well in public, an ability he felt was rare among Japanese-Canadians. So he made me enter oratorical contests and taught me to be a public speaker for which I am very grateful, although I didn’t think that at the time. (Incidentally, I won quite a few.) But the top public speakers got to perform at a girls’ school which seemed to be quite an incentive for some guys.

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I visited the Dean of Medicine at the University of Western Ontario back in my hometown and he said that I would have no problem getting into medicine. As a biology honors student in junior year, I had to take genetics from Bill Hexter. He was a superb teacher who taught genetics like a series of detective stories that peeled away layers of evidence to reveal the secrets of heredity. For the first time, I couldn’t wait to get to the next class and abandoned the idea of becoming a doctor to pursue a career in genetics. (My mother wept for weeks that her son gave up medicine to study fruitflies.) I also had to take embryology from Oscar Schotté who was a flamboyant lecturer who revealed the miracle of development and differentiation. It’s no surprise then that I went into developmental genetics.

In the fall of 1957, a deadly Asian flu swept the world. I came down with it and staggered to the infirmary, jammed with sick men who booed me when I arrived. (They were joking). Lying in bed feeling awful, I was electrified by a radio announcement that the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik. Every hour and half, the satellite’s beep taunted us with a show of Russian might. Every American rocket blew up as the Soviets launched a series of firsts in space - animal, man, team, spacewalk and woman. What impressed me was the response of the US, a massive program to catch up and surpass the Russians. No one moaned that the Russian lead and cost were too great. It was an all-out effort, yet in 1961 when Kennedy announced the goal of getting Americans to the moon and back within a decade, it seemed an impossible goal. I hold up the story of American space success to counter climate skeptics who complain about the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That’s not the America I experienced when I was in school.

Thank you, Amherst and Americans, for providing me with the experiences and skills that have been the foundation of my career in science and broadcasting.

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Norm Vester

Amherst's impact on my subsequent business life was minimal if not negligible because of an administration that seemed indifferent to the business in which I was immersed. Addressing the world of finance would have been an added positive.

Highlights at Amherst were Robert Frost's visits to the fraternity houses and his lectures. Also, the world of art was opened to me by Professor Frank Anderson Trapp. Any advantages or disadvantages I received from Amherst must be colored by the fact that I was an "under-achiever" and partied too much.

We have little contact with Amherst and therefore have no suggestions as to any remedies for that college. Rather we submit our involvement with Florida Gulf Coast University's Vester Marine and Environmental Facility where we now live. Through this facility hundreds of students a semester become acquainted with the local estuary, and important research is done. We find this to be a satisfying contribution to a better planet.

Also, we are proud of an FGCU student initiative "Rink to Reef" in which broken hockey sticks are constructed into oyster reefs for the purification of the estuary waters.

For more information go online to "FGCU Vester Marine” and "FGCU Rink to Reef".

The world of the internet has changed lives with mixed results for our generation both frustrating and fulfilling.

Downsizing, another fact of life for our generation, holds similar frustrations and satisfactions as we leave our wisdom, such as it is, and worldly goods in an orderly state for the next generation.

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R. David Walker

My four years at Amherst gave me exposure to many new and different things and the focus of exploring on my own. One important area was meeting people from different backgrounds, religions and skin color. Others included the challenge what we see and understand, learning to drink, the difficulty of learning another language and the fact that science is not cut and dried.

This exposure has lead me to challenge facts and the truth of things. I believe it has helped me view new and different things.

However, Amherst did not help me develop the skill set which would have been useful during my life. I came to Amherst without good memory, reading, study and research skills that were needed in that environment.

Amherst assumed that I possessed these skills before I entered Amherst. That was incorrect.

I suspect some of the current entering students also fall short in these areas. The school should find them and help them improve their skills.

Just as a vocational school prepares students for a trade, the college should enhance the skills which the liberal arts student needs in his life of work and exploration.

Another important skill set which may be lacking in the liberal arts college is communication skills. Students should learn to debate an issue, write a report on a meeting, make a plan, present a subject and think about the recipient of any communication.

The issue that comes from all of this is ‘to what extent is Amherst responsible for its graduate’s success in life?

I believe I have had a very productive and successful life, but I have done it mainly on my own with a major assist from my mother.

Thoughts for our children, grandchildren and current Amherst students:

In order have an enjoyable life, identify what you are most interested in, learn as much as you can about the subject or area, then find someone who will pay you to do exactly what you enjoy best. To do this may not always seem obvious. Let me give you an example. A young man had an overriding interest in color. He studied everything he could find about color. He ended up as a set-designer on Broadway making large amounts of money doing exactly what he loved.

Take advantages of all opportunities, particularly ones which give you exposure to new and different things.

Find ways to contribute to society. Not just charitable contributions but other things. For me that means running tennis teams, an old men’s discussion club, or improving traffic patterns in our neighborhood for the safety of young children.

Try to communicate with people who disagree with you.

Try to understand why they disagree. Doing this goes a long way toward solving problems.

Since life is not FAIR, work hard through all challenges.

The best thing you can do with your children is play, IN PERSON, card games, board games and sports. These activities develop problem-solving and communication skills which they can use throughout their lives. Also, it will help them to deal with winning and losing from which they may learn to work harder.

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And who is R. David Walker ‘58?

My life work was as a Computer Programmer/Systems Analyst and a Market Maker (stock options).

I have been married twice and have 2 sons and 4 grandsons. My life has been full of great challenges, new exposures and effective problem-solving. I have experienced some wonderful times and some big disappointments.

What makes me enjoy life the most is ‘winning’. Winning in the broad sense of the word. As a very competitive person I strive to win at all the games and sports which I do regularly. Tennis and Duplicate Bridge are my current activities. I work hard to improve my results by taking tennis lessons, developing enhanced bidding systems and studying my errors.

However, winning for me is not limited to games and sports. I have won by supporting my family, resolving health issues, improving safety at home, even improving communications with my wife. I win by designing a traffic improvement to make young children on our street safer. I win by finding beauty as I travel around the world. I find beauty in vistas, people, languages, religions and cultures. Those are wins for me.

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John Wieland

Looking back, I’m not really sure why I chose to attend Amherst, but I’m very glad that I did. I was the only person who chose Amherst out of my large Chicago area high school, and I only casually knew anyone who went to Amherst or who had ever gone to Amherst. Still, somehow Amherst turned out to be the right college for me. After Amherst there were three and half years of the U.S. Navy, culminating in being the Gunnery Officer on a World War II Destroyer. The Navy was a great experience, but on reflection I don’t think we were protecting the United States from much of anything.

After the Navy came 9 months with Proctor & Gamble in Cincinnati, then Harvard Business School and then General Foods (which was acquired by Kraft and has now merged into Kraft/Heinz). With a year and a half at General Foods under my belt, I moved with my wife, Sue, and our two-month-old son to the small town of Carrollton, GA, 60 miles west of Atlanta. This was the home of my second year Harvard roommate, and we had great aspirations to start a chain of building supply stores. We were going to strike it rich.

Of course, we didn’t get rich. We were Home Mart, and the people who got it right were Home Depot. Our fantasy lasted 5 years, and my partnership with my former roommate dissolved in acrimony. Considering my background in building materials, building homes seemed like a logical alternative employment, even though I did not know anything about how a home went together. Georgia did not require home builders to be licensed, and no one took building codes very seriously. Being a homebuilder was easy, even if it wasn’t terribly profitable. I think that Amherst prepared me a little to get thru the rough passages in life, but I couldn’t possibly explain how.

Over the decades my business grew to where we employed more than 1000 people and were building more than 1700 homes per year in a total of 5 southeastern cities. Then along came the great housing recession that begin in 2007. It was an agonizing experience to see the company that I had built gradually dismantled by our banks as we ran out of cash. The 10 years prior to the big reckoning for homebuilding had been very, very good to me. Sue and I traveled widely, including the North Pole and almost making the South Pole, enjoying every minute of it. The good fortune of being a homebuilder in the booming South allowed for philanthropy (which included Amherst) that was very satisfying.

It also included the financial ability to put together a meaningful collection of museum quality art, selections from which will be on display at the Mead Art Museum over Reunion. Perhaps I should have retired when my home building company collapsed, but it just didn’t feel right to do that. Besides, I had bills to pay and philanthropic commitments to meet. Plus, I had never learned to play golf, so what would I do during the day? That has brought about a boutique homebuilding business (owned by Sue), which we call Chattahoochee Enterprises. Hopefully a limited amount of success will allow us to complete a few remaining items on the bucket list.

Certainly, the ignominious end of my homebuilding company was painful. The same would have to be said about a few health challenges currently. Still, I’m grateful for each and every day and hopefully making it to my 60th Reunion. Where did all of the years go?

So much for what has happened to me over 60 years. I am definitely grateful to Amherst. Way back then I assumed that the college was preparing me for something, but I definitely did not know what. I’m not sure exactly how Amherst did it, but I’m grateful for the preparation. Certainly, the Amherst of 1958 was equipping students to be productive members of society, just as it is with students in 2018.

Still, the Amherst of 2018 is, at least to me, infinitely different from the Amherst we all knew back then. I do have to wonder if there’s any chance that it is now too elite, or can you never be too elite? I have to wonder if

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the college has an admissions quota for smart kids that just seem well rounded and able to contribute to society in the years ahead but who aren’t over the top, and out of this world, exceptional – maybe like the well-rounded kids we were. I do have to wonder how I would do in the Amherst of today, if I had the good fortune to be accepted in the currently vastly more competitive environment than that of 65 years ago. I don’t think it would be as much fun.

I do not spend much time thinking about it. I got in, and I got out, and I'm grateful for what I somehow acquired in the process, even though I may not have realized that I was acquiring “whatever.” Now I'm down to hopefully a few more years of using my Amherst education, plus what I may have learned in the meantime, to build a few more homes and settle some philanthropic obligations that have been hanging around since before the housing recession, and to assist Sue through the challenges of Alzheimer's in the best way possible. Most of all, my appreciation goes out to our class leadership who have brought us together for one final hoorah. Plus, my apologies for not being more insightful in the story above; I was an economics major and did a terrible job in the basics of freshman English.

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Howard Wolf

AMHERST THENWhen I think of the enduring meaning of Amherst College for me, I treasure lifelong friendships with a few classmates, a sense of community that I have been able to preserve in the face of many forces that oppose wholeness of being, and a “context” (important English 1-2 word for our class) for the exchange of ideas and feelings in response to shared courses, lectures, and texts.

I think as well of some superb teachers on the literary side, especially C.L. Barber (Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy), who represented for me then and now a mode of humanistic inquiry, generosity of response, methodological flexibility, exacting standards, and a commitment to making sense in terms that are comprehensible to the common man. “Talk” and “conversation” were the instructional methods.

The excellence of the English Department as represented by the Big Four – Baird, Barber, Craig, and DeMott – was augmented by the college’s and town’s literary heritage: Noah Webster, Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Frost, James Merrill, and Richard Wilbur. It was easy to feel, if you had literary aspirations, that you were part of a tradition that might give you some guidance.

I can’t omit the look of the campus, the town, and surrounding landscape. I fell in love with Amherst when I first saw it during a light snowfall in the late fall of 1953. It looked like a Currier and Ives print, and, as a child of Manhattan’s streets, if not the tough ones, it put the thought of other choices out of mind. The harmonious setting implied other forms of coherence. Town-college-hills were unified.

That world is mostly behind us, but we are a living time-capsule of some of its good values: common sense, community, liberalism. This 60th reunion helps preserve them. . . .”for we have yet a little while to linger….”

Our Amherst lives in and through us.

LESSONS LEARNED SLOWLYNow the hard part, for truth-telling about one's life can make one vulnerable. It's often easier to tell these truths as a story. My fictional mask, Ludwig Fried (The Education of Ludwig Fried), is my mask, an imagined version of myself.

I would list among important lessons the following:

A close relationship, based on mutual understanding, respect, and shared interests is more important than erotic adventurism, a peril of youth and often beyond. Aloneness and loneliness can be a price to be paid for fantasy.

Accepting contradictions and complexity in oneself and the world one lives in, while working to integrate them (the conscious and unconscious content of one’s psyche, the tug of war between autonomy and conformity), is an ongoing challenge. But we were taught to respect self-expression and to reject slogans; and these values have helped us reject simplistic responses to experience. Frost’s poetry sends “a gleam across” our two-sided nature, and neuroscience is opening new pathways of knowledge.

We should look for ways to avoid estrangement from colleagues, friends, family members, and those with whose values, including politics, one disagrees. Given the fragility of identity and self-image, it’s all too easy to take offense and to distance oneself from the very people who can nurture us. We all know cases where different values can tear a family into pieces. I’ve written a memoir as well as a play that touch on some of these rent fabrics: Forgive the Father and Home at the End of the Day.

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Accepting one's best efforts can be an uphill battle. As a writer, I know about this. To strive to realize one's expressive potential is all that one can do as a writer. So, we beat on, boats against the current. My favorite American writers remain: – Hemingway (for testing oneself) and Fitzgerald (for romance).

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John Zinner

It happens, purely by chance, that the impact of my Amherst experience is acutely felt at this very moment. I have become intensely occupied with publicizing the existential threat posed by Donald Trump because of his, presumptively, severe Narcissistic Personality Disorder. (You may recall that I am a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.) As President, Trump has the unfettered authority to launch nuclear weapons at any time and for any reason. By speaking out, I am trying to ensure that some kinds of checks are put in place that will prevent him from carrying out, impulsively and in a vindictive rage, the nuclear authority he, unfortunately, has within his power.

I believe that, intellectually, what makes me able to do justice to my effort is the capacity to reason, think, speak and write clearly, all to a large extent a product of my Amherst education. I think the content of my courses, not well remembered, is not as important to me as the process of reasoning that I internalized in the course of my experience at Amherst, particularly promoted by the New Curriculum. I am referring especially, but definitely not exclusively, to the experiences I encountered in English 1, Arnold Arons’ Physics course, as well as American Studies. In addition, we had the luxury that many of our classes were also taught in small seminar-size “sections” which were led by senior faculty, rather than by less experienced graduate students.

I am including in my praise of my Amherst education and the New Curriculum, the bonding with my classmates brought about by our common experience where we were working on the same assignments at the same time, and enduring similar stresses as well as joys. This engendered lively discussion, debate, and not the least, lifelong friendships.

An unintended consequence of my Amherst education, as I know President Cole did view it, is that I used my newly developing reasoning, speaking and writing skills to speak out and become an activist. Chosen to be the Chairman of the Amherst Student offered me a platform to voice my opinions and to organize protests, which were generally directed toward authority of one sort or another. I argued for the disbanding of the fraternity system, helped organize a boycott of compulsory Chapel by urging overcrowding by students on the secular two days, and non-attendance on the religious days. I also helped to organize a successful protest to the placing of a cross atop the proposed Chapin classroom building which had been a condition of the donor.

While I do continue to believe that my “causes” were legitimate, I also see that they represented an expression of my adolescent desire to rebel against the authority of my elders. However, Amherst did provide me a stage upon which to relatively harmlessly play out this developmental phase, referred to by Erik Erikson as an adolescent “moratorium.”

I am embarrassed to say that I did not participate to any significant extent in the Civil Rights movement, a most valid urgent cause, because I was caught up in my medical school and postgraduate training programs which left little time for anything else. I regret this non-participation very much.

Subsequently, when I was fulfilling my military obligation in the Public Health Service at the National Institute of Mental Health, I kick-started anew my activism, and became one of the leaders of the Vietnam Anti-War movement within the Federal Government. We faced a huge blowback from the Nixon Administration, legal battles ensued, but we survived and thrived as a movement, hopefully contributing in some small way to the ending of that War.

My current efforts to unmask the dangerous character pathology of Donald Trump are a natural evolution of what I learned at Amherst College.

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As fine as it was, Amherst was not perfect. Coeducation would have been civilizing to a sometimes-primitive horde of males, and we would have learned more about sensitivity and relationships and would have benefitted from the infusion of qualities that are often unique to women.

Diversity did not exist at my Amherst beyond tokenism. 100% rushing only exacerbated the humiliation of minority students who were relegated to being the last and reluctantly chosen new members of fraternities. Come to think of it, why would any youth want to attend a college, and why would any parent choose to pay tuition to a school that submitted their child to a social system based on inclusion and rejection?

As I reflect upon my 50th Reunion biography I realize that not so much has changed. Elizabeth (“Betsy”) and I continue to practice psychotherapy in our home offices, although I have limited myself to seeing patients three days a week. Elizabeth continues to specialize in post-partum disorders and day care consultation. I still conduct a weekly seminar in psychoanalytic psychotherapy for psychiatric residents at the George Washington University Department of Psychiatry. Not infrequently I present at conferences on family and couple therapy.

For recreation, I continue to play squash and we cruise on our sailboat on the Chesapeake Bay, with the hope that these activities will endure for a while.

Blessed with good health, I have no current plan to retire. Mostly I work because this is what I enjoy doing the most. I don’t think I would flourish if I left my profession. However, I do think a part of this decision is a denial of aging, as I do not relish what lies ahead. This comes upon me sometimes in the middle of the night when I ruminate on decluttering, and throwing old cherished items out, such as skis, ice skates, baseball gloves, etc. It feels like I am packing up to leave. Ugh!

We do hope to “age in place” in our home of forty years. I pray that we have that choice.

Our family has grown and gives us great pleasure and satisfaction. We have three married children, Lisette, Josh ‘87 and Noah. They and their spouses (Dan, Sarah Leah and Emily are all in the non-profit helping professions. which makes us very proud. We have now a final count of seven grandchildren, ranging from 7 years to 21, with two granddaughters graduating from college and stepping out into the wide, hopefully wonderful world.

Each of the organizers of the project developed session comments based on their repeated readings.

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W. Miller Brown, Comments, May 26, 2018

The highlight of our early studies at Amherst was supposed to be The New Curriculum. And for me and several of you this was the case. I remember telling others when I went home for vacations how extraordinary our educational experience was, how innovative, and how much I felt a part of a radically progressive program. Above all, the experience of sharing with the entire class the same courses, professors, reading, exams, and labs produced a kind of intense collegiality that I had never experienced.

To my surprise, although about a dozen (one fourth) of the statements we received mentioned The New Curriculum, only a handful did so by that designation and only one (John Niehuss) referred to it as a “community of learning.” Rather, many of us mentioned various other courses and faculty members who had been especially influential and (except for Arons) most of them were not directly involved in the key courses of The New Curriculum. However, a similar number of you did acknowledge that studying at Amherst taught you to “think” critically and effectively, but there was little suggestion that this skill was particularly connected with the core courses of the first two years.

Equally influential were friendships and involvement in fraternities, though comments on fraternities were as often negative as positive.

Sports played a remarkably minor role in these reminiscences.

Did Amherst prepare us for later endeavors? Most of you said yes; a few said no or that it had no major or discernable effect; several of you remarked on what was not part of the Amherst program as series deficiencies.

Several mentioned Robert Frost. Allen Clark attributed the phrase “a place apart” to Joe Barber. I remember also being struck by the phrase from a chapel talk Barber gave about travelling to New York City by car with several colleagues and finding the trip a welcome “place apart” from his usual frenetic campus life. He urged us all to find similar moments for reflection and diversion from “considerations.” (“Birches”) But the expression comes from Frost’s poem “Revelation” from his first book, A Boy’s Will (1913).

Revelation

We make ourselves a place apart Beyond light words that tease and flout, But oh, the agitated heart Til someone really find us out. Tis pity if the case require (Or so we say) that in the end We speak the literal to inspire The understanding of a friend. But so with all, from babes that play At hide-and-seek to God afar, So all who hide too well away Must speak and tell us where they are.

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Barber, and Allen and I, all seem to have taken this expression as a call for inner tranquility. Frost, if I read him correctly, warns against too much concealment. What I find so delightful in all these “reflections” is their apparent candor, honesty, and willingness to “tell us where they are.”

Hendrik Gideonse, Comments, May 26, 2018

My remarks are something of a rumination on what Sears ads several decades ago might have referred to as our “softer sides.” Or maybe it's the “spirit” portion of the YM and W's body/mind/spirit trilogy. Or the revealed wisdom embedded in the right brain/left brain myth first popularized only after we concluded our education here sixty years ago. I found myself focusing on the emotions our reflections addressed, our evocations of interior space, of struggles with loneliness and quests for connection, plus glimpses into how some of us addressed adversity or conflict.

I'm not sure it would be fair to claim it's a major theme in our reflections. Possibly it's more a frame of mind I brought to my reading of them. But after reading everything we wrote a first time, more self-consciously identifying threads I was inclined to attend to, and then re-reading everything again, they weren't hard to find in our collective tapestry. The numerous references in these reflections to deeply-appreciated life-long partnerships and the resulting progeny (in a few instances three generations deep, four if you include our own!) are certainly worthy of note. In sum, we harbor amongst our midst a large number of “stayers.” But there are also expressions of the same root emotions from those who for whatever reasons didn't establish such, or for varied reasons did not maintain them, or who came to them only late. The point seems to me that we have striven for such bonds, worked at them, experienced regret at their absence, and think about them at times when they have been absent. Paul Ackerman explicitly referenced the right/left brain formulation, long since scientifically disproven but, like so many lasting myths, containing abiding truths. Part of that is displayed in the frequent references to our varied connections to art, music, theater, and literature which were often linked to course experiences first undertaken here. But other observations underscore it was not treated by the faculty, in its collective sense, with the same kind of specific curricular attention that they directed to language (including math), writing, science (natural and social), analysis, reasoning, and argument. That lessened emphasis to what might be called the creative or the humanities, whatever the reasons, left many of us, I suspect, ripe for the sixties which came only a handful of years after we graduated. And if humor is part of the “softer side” then the flashes here and there in our texts, (for example, my own reference to last winter's 5:30 AM protective-of-others-still-sleeping mutually-whispered breakfast with my three-year-old granddaughter Maggie – and particularly Al Most's submission jousting with supermarket culture) reminds us of Al, to be sure, yes, but also that, guided – if not sometimes driven – by career and seriousness of purpose, there have been and are lighter sides to our lives as well. I leave for last a few thoughts triggered by Steve Lyne's remarkable contribution. It is definitely not soft per se, but he documents for us how his struggles at liberal Amherst required deep personal reserves and an unusually clear sense of self. It afforded me what I took to be a direct window on the intensity within his interior space while at Amherst. It never would have dawned on me that Amherst could have constituted such a Heinleinian 'land' for Steve Lyne to find himself a 'stranger' in. Even more astounding in Steve's reflections, though, is convincingly showing us how his successful journey through Amherst would lead to a life-long career in diplomacy where what he learned and how he learned it here equipped him so well for the life service he ultimately rendered. It spoke to me strongly as I struggle with the sense that America seems no longer to be the

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place of the first thirty formative years of my life and what I can and should do about it. Steve's reflections are certainly instructive in that regard.

Art Powell, Comments, May 26, 2018

When President Cole put forth in 1954 his vision of the impact of a liberal arts education, he was definitely not on the defensive, as compared to many college presidents today. The liberal arts college today needs to be on the attack to be effective. The curriculum should be weaponized. Cole’s remarkably aggressive metaphor was that, at least at Amherst, it should provide “a sharp hunting knife to help a student cut his way through the labyrinths of life.” Cole meant learning to think and his plan was to take no prisoners. The preoccupation of a college like Amherst should be the life of the mind. Amherst tried to broadcast this goal through extensive correspondence with high schools, newspaper articles by Fred Hechinger and a book: Education at Amherst: The New Program by Gail Kennedy.

Sixty-four years later as I read all your excellent submissions, it is clear that many of you took Cole’s vision seriously. When asked about Amherst’s impact, you frequently used words such as “learning to think.” You learned “critical analysis,” “rational discussion,” “reasoning,” “understanding,”“evidence-based inquiry.” The phrase New Curriculum encapsulated pretty much all of these ideas. Their impact, it was hoped, would not make Amherst a “safe space.” Some of you truly loved this conception of liberal education. You wrote about Amherst as a romantic, idyllic “showcase,” “a place apart.” “The happiest years of my life,” said one classmate.

Others had some doubts about what was missing. A few criticized the New Curriculum for invariably downplaying certain subject matter and information. Downplaying these things ignored important components of a liberal education. Is it really wise, one respondent wondered, to push to the margins economics, business and finance? And what is the place of the spirit? One classmate felt the goal of any education was “the Resurrection of the Body and life everlasting.” And how much attention should be given to questions of values and social justice and action? One classmate noted that we have learned much from Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School in Parkland, FL: “The kids have come to rescue us.” He didn’t think the New Curriculum was sufficient to address complex value and legal issues like school shootings. And what about the realm of the inner life and emotional intelligence? Several people suggested that a crucial topic that directly dealt with the question of impact should simply be: How do we deal with and get along with other people? When does this area become legitimate for the liberal arts?

So, the Class of ‘58’s views of the impact of our Amherst education vary tremendously. Your responses raise some key questions:

· Has knowledge exploded so much that the notion of any core curriculum for liberal education makes no sense?

· Do people’s ideas of what is important to learn differ so much that a core cannot be sustained?

· Are these questions being effectively addressed by the open curriculum that presently exists at Amherst?

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Colophon

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Wrap around cover design effort was accomplished by Lisa Baker County Copy Center, Belfast, ME.

The kind of frustration associated with getting word processing programs like MS Word to work the way they’re supposed to and that is ultimately resolvable only through unyielding tenacity and the succor and solace

generated by urgent calls of dismay to such as Miller Brown, Anne Burton, Judith and Tom O’Callaahan, and especially Mickey Jacoba whose suggestions and sympathy solace were directly instrumental in my finally

bumbling into solutions that prove acceptable to those holding this volume in their hands.

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