Yale71.org

Noreen O'Donnell, news columnist for Westchester's Journal News, reported on Jim Kaplan's July 4 tour of lower Manhattan:

"Each Independence Day, for the past 13 years, Kaplan has led a group through the streets around City Hall in the early morning hours. It's as much a very personal telling of American history with Revolutionary New York as a backdrop as it is a tour of historical sites."

For the article, click here or visit www.lohud.com.

Jim Kaplan's annual dead-of-night July 4 walking tour of lower Manhattan is officially sold out, but below are excerpts from and links to his recent articles in Last Exit magazine on Horatio Gates and Thomas Paine, both of whose lives he celebrates on the tour; Jim claims Gates is the greatest of the Revolutionary War generals:

Although most people do not consider New York as important a Revolutionary War site as Massachusetts or Virginia, New York was actually equally if not more important than those places in the revolution. Furthermore, contrary to the belief of most New Yorkers, the American Revolution was critically important to what New York is today. Two of the major battles of the Revolution—the Battle of Long Island and the Battle of Saratoga—were fought in New York. The Lower Manhattan hosts the graves of three very significant Revolutionary War generals: Richard Montgomery, hero of the battle of Quebec; Alexander Hamilton, the commander of the final assault at Yorktown; and Horatio Gates, commanding officer of the victorious American troops at Saratoga.

For the full article, click on the following link: J. Kaplan—Horatio Gates, New York's Forgotten Revolutionary

***

On June 8, 1809, a 72-year-old man died in poverty and relative obscurity in a rooming house on Grove Street in Greenwich Village. His name was Thomas Paine, and 33 years earlier in 1776 he had been the most important political theoretician in the country. The New York Post on June 9, 1809, one of the few papers even to note his passing, stated that he “lived long, did some good and much harm.”

Despite his modest obituary, Paine has not been forgotten, although many think he still has yet to receive full recognition for his achievements. In the last ten years there have been more than five full-length biographies of Paine, most of which argue that he was one of the most important men in modern history. To commemorate the 200th anniversary of his death, I will be giving a walking tour on Sunday, June 7 sponsored by the Fraunces Tavern Museum that examines Paine’s underappreciated impact on the growth of New York City, where he resided at the time of his death. In a sense it is to refute the New York Post obituary of 200 years ago.

For the full article on Paine, click on this link: J. Kaplan—Thomas Paine's America

Catching up on a Forbes profile of Preston Athey:

Mutual Funds
A Different Tune
Zack O'Malley Greenburg, 03.12.09

High price? No problem. Preston Athey's value fund ignores the first tenet of value investing.

Amid market chaos you might not expect a veteran portfolio manager to spend his free time blithely belting bass lines to a cappella songs. But that's what T. Rowe Price's Preston Athey was doing on a recent Sunday afternoon with his six-man group, Some of the Parts, on the Mall in Washington, D.C. . . . "I haven't lost 10 minutes of sleep," says Athey, 58. "If you manage your affairs prudently and you do the right thing, you don't have to worry." . . .

For the full article, click here or visit www.forbes.com.

Magical mystery tour and morality tale
By Martin Rubin | The Washington Times, Sunday, May 31, 2009

A DAY IN THE LIFE: ONE FAMILY, THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE, & THE END OF THE '60's

By Robert Greenfield

Da Capo Press, $24.95, 338 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY MARTIN RUBIN

Oh, London in the Sixties, that fabled place and time of freewheeling existences and all manner of extravagant experiences where, so the saying goes, "if you were actually there, you won't remember it." Tommy Weber and Susan "Puss" Coriat, the couple at the heart of this extraordinary story, part magical mystery tour and part morality tale, are unsurprisingly no longer alive, but chances are, given the activities they indulged in chronicled here, their recall would probably be spotty at best.

Fortunately for us, Robert Greenfield, the author of "A Day in the Life," has done a marvelous job of re-creating the wild ride of Tommy and Puss with a splendid immediacy, allowing the reader to follow closely their manic activities. As rendered here anyway, they are in themselves fascinating characters, oddly compelling and attractive despite their glaring flaws, but their story intersects with (and sheds light on) many iconic Sixties figures far better known than them, including Keith Richards, George Harrison and Charlotte Rampling (for a time Tommy's companion). . . .

For Martin's full review, click here or visit www.washingtontimes.com.

For the May 2009 issue of the Calvin Hill Day Care Center newsletter, click on the link below:

ch_newsletter_may_2009

SAVE THE DATE!   

The Yale Class of 1971 Invites Classmates and Their Guests to a Celebration of 40 Years of Coeducation at Yale   

Please join us for an insightful and fun event featuring the people who made it happen:

ELGA WASSERMAN, Special Assistant to the President on Coeducation

HENRY (SAM) CHAUNCEY, JR, Secretary of the University   
JOHN WILKINSON, Dean of Students

Hear these key players tell us about Yale before Coeducation…  Hear the funny stories and power plays behind the scenes…  Hear them tell their own inside story of the beginning of Coeducation at Yale… Receive a special commemorative sampling of news clips about Yale Coeducation as early as the 1800s.

When:  Friday, October 9, 2009, noon lunch with wine   
Where:  Yale Club of New York City
Price:  $75.00 per person    
RSVP:  Space is limited so please rsvp by June 15 to reserve your place   
RSVP: Email cori [dot] okeefe [at] yale [dot] edu to receive a reservation form

We look forward to seeing you at this historic luncheon!

Vera Wells  & Susan Yecies

Congratulations to Harry Bear, honored for cancer research at a ceremony earlier this May; the profile below includes an update on his family as well:

Harry D. Bear, M.D., Ph.D., Chairman of the Division of Surgical Oncology and Medical Director of the Breast Health Center at Virginia Commonwealth University's Massey Cancer Center, received the Distinguished Investigator Lifetime Achievement Award from the NSABP Foundation, Inc. at a ceremony in San Diego, CA on May 2, 2009.

The NSABP (National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project) is a national cooperative group that develops and conducts clinical studies to improve treatments and outcomes for breast and colorectal cancers. Dr. Bear became a research investigator with NSABP in 1984, and has held several leadership positions with the organization. He served as study chair for two major NSABP-sponsored clinical studies, B-27 and B-40, and has served on NSABP's Board of Directors since 1991.

Dr. Bear was also honored this spring by the Medical College of Virginia Alumni Association, which named him the Outstanding Alumnus for 2009.

Harry's wife Christine has recently retired from her job as a high school nurse, and after raising 3 boys, is finally spending some time "doing her own things."  Their oldest son Phillip (26) is a marine biologist working for a NOAA contractor; Michael (24) is working in a research lab at Tufts, after graduating from Boston University two years ago; Brian (21) is majoring in psychology at UNC Wilmington.

For a video clip of Harry speaking on his recent research, posted in the Fall 2008 issue of VCU Across the Spectrum, click here or visit www.spectrum.vcu.edu.

Victoria and Albert, Allies in Love

By Martin Rubin, Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2009

We Two
By Gillian Gill
Ballantine, 460 pages, $35

Queen Victoria (1819-1901) is known to Americans perhaps more than any other British monarch in part because her name characterizes an ethos or outlook that is oddly critical to America's own cultural self-definition. "Victorian," the biographer Gillian Gill writes, is an "intensely affective word, since it relates to things closest to all of us, to the way we run our sex lives and organize our families." . . .

In "We Two," Ms. Gill makes it clear that the creation of the Victorian spirit, however one defines it, was very much a joint enterprise. Victoria and her husband, Albert—the German-born "prince consort," as his royal position was known—were famously devoted to each other . . . . But their marriage, Ms. Gill claims, was not a real-life fairy tale of doting and pretty ceremony; it was "a work in progress, not a fait accompli, a drama not a pageant." Ms. Gill pores over letters and diary entries to confirm that many of the traits we associate with the word "Victorian" would have been impossible without Albert's partnership. . . .

For Martin's full review, click here or visit www.wsj.com.

In April, Carol Hobbs of the Yale development office wrote to Gail Henry about Amy Koenig '09, whose studies at Yale are supported through the William A. Henry III '71 Scholarship Fund. A portion of Carol's letter follows:

At this time, I am delighted to tell you about Amy Koenig, of the Class of 2009, who has again been named the Henry Scholar this year.

From Annandale, Virginia, you may recall that Amy was a scholar, an accomplished violinist and pianist, and a classical ballerina.  Here at Yale, she is a resident of Trumbull College, majoring in the classics.  An award winner in high school for the National Latin Exam, Amy is the recipient of the Henry Hurlbut Award for Latin translation here at Yale, and is a contributing writer for Helicon, the Yale classics journal.  In addition, she is a copy editor and member of the Editorial Board for the Yale Daily News and is the associate editor for The Insider's Guide to Colleges.  A section leader in the Yale Precision Marching Band, she played in the pit orchestra for The Mikado.  A competitor in the Yale Student Academic Competition, she has also participated in the Model United Nations and the Yale International Relations Association.  Amy has recounted that her trip to Rome and London last summer was the most her most rewarding Yale experience.  It was her first independent trip abroad and resulted in, what she believes to be, a fundamentally transformative experience, allowing her to make decisions for her future and solidify her goals.  She plans to attend graduate school next year to pursue a doctoral degree.  After that, she hopes to find an educationally based position in a university or a museum.

I hope that you are as impressed as we are with Amy.  In these days of rising costs and economic uncertainty, the University is grateful to be able to rely on the lasting assistance provided by these scholarship funds, established in memory of your husband.

"Is He Dead?" is the Mark Twain play that was rediscovered by our classmate Shelley Fisher Fishkin and produced on Broadway in 2007. It's now on stage in Long Beach, CA. Below is an excerpt from the L.A. Times review:

"The throaty guffaw you just heard emanating from the great beyond belongs to Mark Twain, who is no doubt getting a kick out of the posthumous success of his 1898 play 'Is He Dead?' — an exceedingly silly doodle of a comedy that he never saw produced in his lifetime.

"Thankfully for us, 'Is He Dead?' was recently resurrected from Twain's archives and has received a first-rate polish by playwright David Ives. A production opened on Broadway in 2007 to some critical praise, and now the comedy is receiving its West Coast premiere in a buoyant staging by the International City Theatre in Long Beach. . . ."

For the full review, click here or visit www.latimes.com. For an interview of Shelley by Jordan Young, click here or visit www.examiner.com. The photo below is of Shelley with director Shashin Desai and Caryn Desai, general manager of the International City Theatre.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin with director Shashin Desai, L and Caryn Desai, general manager