February 2025
Gentlemen (and a few ladies):
Here is your February update for The Class of 60’s 65th Reunion – May 22-25, 2025.
First of all, we are going to be comfortable in JE. We will have access to its Common Room for reflection and reminiscence, another room for relaxation (maybe a late morning snooze or two), an area to select our Reunion tchotchkes and swag, and an area to display our own memorabilia and show our photos (more below).
We start off on Thursday evening May 22 with our curated visit to the remodeled Peabody Natural History Museum, including our inaugural Class dinner addressed by our own historian Daniel Horowitz in the Hall of the Dinosaurs (how fitting, one might say).
Friday morning marks the start of Yale programming with optional lectures by distinguished faculty members, who are also good teachers). Details to come.
On Friday after our first Class lunch together in JE Common Room, we will move the hundred yards or so to Yale’s globally heralded and newly refurbished Collection of British Art, where, after a guided tour of highlights of the Collection, we will be greeted by the recent Interim Director of the Center for British Art, Dean Richard Brodhead, who, along with John Wilkinson, will speak to us from the perspective of their own deanships (and Brodhead’s presidency of Duke) about the highs and lows of collegiate administration in the latter part of the Twentieth Century.
Later on Friday afternoon, in keeping with our partnership with the Library for this Reunion (thanks to Honorary Classmate Lynn Hanke), Yale Archives will be highlighted using refurbished Linonia & Brothers as walk thru entry to M&A’s (Manuscripts & Archives) beautiful and special (Gates) classroom where late ’50’s materials will be on display with University Archivist Mike Lotstein. With the architect of L&B’s refurbishment and of the new Exhibition Gallery, we will visit that gallery (which has close association with the Class of 1960!) and hear from experts how exhibits are selected, built, researched and presented. Then we will be received in the magnificent Gilmore Music Library by Stephen F. Gates ’68 University Librarian, Barbara Rockenbach for hors d’oeuvres and beverages and live piano music. While there, we will hear from a digital maven whose expertise traverses both music and the building of the complex digital platform “LUX” which hosts the collection of data bases for the entire Library system, the art Gallery, the British Art Center and the Peabody Natural History Museum.
Class dinner on Friday and program in the JE dining room will revisit some of the more fascinating events in Yale’s history with the help of historian David Richards as previously announced. Saturday programming will include University lectures and music in Woolsey Hall, our traditional Memorial Service led by John Wilkinson, and our festive Class Dinner hosted by Peter Wells, Chairman of 1960’s Executive Committee.
From all classmates, whether or not they attend the Reunion, we will be collecting undergraduate memorabilia, both to share at the Reunion (Jim Ottaway, for example, will bring his morgue of 1950 “Yale Daily News”) and to donate to Yale’s archives. Believe it or not, the Manuscripts and Archives collection is interested in our own letters, photos, flyers, etc. Representatives of the Library will be present at JE to evaluate our offerings of student life and the Yale Community. Thank you, historian John Bing, who offers the following:
“The older I get, the more I see history as a branching of pathways, the study of which is important if we are to gain some degree of shared knowledge of the paths we travel and shared responsibility for the choices we make at important crossroads. We live in a time of competing histories. Archival material does not guarantee “final judgement,” but it helps many of us come together with more plausible ideas about our past. I believe this will prove critical in the years ahead. Let’s see what we can offer the Yale Archives.”
Finally (for this report at least), for the Reunion we will be publishing online (for easy access from your smart phones at the Reunion), and in print for those who want it that way, an up-to-date Class Directory with our Reflections on undergraduate life. John Blanpied:
“For this, our last stand-alone reunion of the class of ’60, many of us will feel moved to muse or opine from the vantage of our long life experience, to distill the wisdom accrued, the lessons learned, the achievements garnered since our undergraduate days. Let’s not do that. Many of us have done it before, anyway, in one way or another. Instead, let us indulge the understandable desire to mark this occasion with some reflection about those few years when we were becoming the class of ’60.
“How about writing, say, 250-500 words on a single event, episode, or experience from our undergraduate days – something particularly savory, notable, inspirational, disastrous, embarrassing, frightening, revealing, humorous, ludicrous, epiphanic, mind-blowing, heart-warming, future-forming, or spine-stiffening. Or, if nothing singular occurs, then go ahead, give vent to your musings about Yale then in the light of Yale now.
“After all, this will probably be our last chance to talk collectively about our years together back when we and the world were young. Think of it as chiming into a big conversation around a really big table. Spirits may be served and aroused. Contribute, but don’t hog. Compress into a good bottle with a stout cork. Mix metaphors freely.”
We will provide more guidance on all this in our next update. In the meantime, start your 450-word undergraduate recollections, delve into your diaries, search your scrapbooks, reread the letters you saved, unfold the flyers saved, and find those keepsake ticket stubs and photos to share with Classmates and to donate to the Yale Archives.
AND, please, make your hotel reservations! May 22-25.
Thanks and best wishes,
Chuck Schmitz, Class of Yale 1960
Reunion Chairman
charles.schmitz@icloud.com