Virginia Hopkins



	by Virginia Hopkins, BA '76 75310.2514@compuserve.com I was in the fourth class of women at Yale, an exciting and still pioneering time to have arrived. My freshman year was 1973, after the demonstrations and takeovers of the very early 70s, with Kingman Brewster at the helm. Life on campus had simmered down a bit, but it was still bursting out of its old Ivy League seams, transforming daily. As much as I appreciate the education I received at Yale, which was primarily focused on writing, film and Jungian psychology, my most memorable and life-changing experience there was being on the best Yale Sailing Team ever to hit the waters of Long Island Sound.
			`Atop Mt. Yale, a 14,000-ft. peak in the Collegiate Range in Colorado, the year after I graduated.`
	I knew nothing about sailboat racing when I signed up, but was carefully trained from scratch by my topnotch skipper Steven Benjamin, aka Benji. We won the North American Intercollegiate Championship in my sophomore year, and most of my teammates have since gone on to a variety of careers in sailing, most notably Peter Isler and Dave Perry. I was the first woman to get a varsity "Y" in sailing, and I still have my letter sweater. At that time the Yale Corinthian Yacht Club was run by students, with faculty and alumni volunteers keeping a weather eye on us (so to speak). We practiced at least twice a week out at the Yacht Club in Branford, and drove to regattas almost every weekend in the fall and spring. One year we drove all the way to New Orleans during Mardi Gras to sail in a regatta, six of us packed into a big old station wagon. We slept on the floor in dorms, sailed hard during the day, and took full advantage of all that Mardi Gras had to offer at night. It was a wild, crazy and very fun time. The captivating part of being Benji's crew was the intense focus required. My job was to keep an eye on the trim of the jib, the balance of the boat, the wind, the water, and the boats we sailed against. It was wonderfully all-consuming, and the post-race analyses and camaraderie were also fun. Like most of my sailing teammates, I didn't go the corporate, grad school, doctor or lawyer route. I've had a varied and somewhat freeform life, writing and editing over the past twenty-odd years, and have now settled into a niche as an alternative health medical writer and editor, with a focus on women's health and nutrition.
		I have 24 books that I've either written, co-authored or ghostwritten, the most recent being Prescription Alternatives: How to Get Off the Drug Treadmill and Restore Your Health (Keats, 1998); the bestseller, What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause (Warner 1996) with John R. Lee, MD, and the upcoming What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Premenopause (Warner 1999). I'm also the co-owner and managing editor of the John Lee Medical Letter, a growing monthly newsletter about natural hormones and women's health. Our website is www.johnleemd.com and you can reach me via e-mail at virginialh@compuserve.com.
`At the Yale-Harvard game in my letter sweater with (L to R) my grandmother Virginia Reed (my grandfather Francis C. Reed was class of '25), family friend Robert Redpath (class of '25), and my mother, Mary Hopkins (Smith College, class of 1952).`