By Rich Banbury
In the summer of 2009, Dan Schlosberg ’10 traveled to Germany where he immersed himself in the history of symphonic music. That study program was facilitated by a Branford College Fellowship awarded by virtue of the generosity of our class and the participation of those classmates who serve on the Summer Fellowship Committee. On October 16, 2010, five months after Dan’s graduation, the Yale Symphony Orchestra performed Dan’s original orchestral piece entitled Five Stuck at Woolsey Hall. Dan credits his Branford Fellowship as playing a major role in completing this original composition. Thanks to Arvin Murch, who has assumed the chair of the Fellowship Committee, which administers the Jack Heinz, Les Aspin, and Branford programs, for submitting this inspired item. Over the years an estimated 135 students selected by the Class have benefited from grants exceeding $325,000. At the AYA Assembly in November, an award was given to the class which has demonstrated the most productive relationship with Yale undergraduates, known as the Outstanding Student Engagement Award. Pete Knudsen, Arvin’s predecessor, accepted the award on your behalf.
Among those who were unable to submit a personal essay for the 50th Reunion Book, Conrad Cafritz may be the only one whose alibi consists of an energetic five-year old son. Of the many children sired and adopted by Conrad over several decades, Alexander, known by family and friends as Sasha, is the most like his father. “He has my metabolism, my incessant speech, and a comedic sensibility. We read eleven different comic strips every morning …”. Based in Washington, DC, Conrad is still active with his business interests, as well as participation in politics and the visual arts. At the center of Conrad and Ludmila’s world, however, is that “intense reciprocity of a young child”, a joy which Conrad muses is “hard to describe with any precision”.
For the last twelve years, since retiring as a clinical psychologist, Burt Danet has been involved with developing A Better Community for All, an outreach organization emphasizing and implementing advance technologies for providing water, food, and shelter around the world to those who lack adequate access to those basic needs. The work of this laudatory enterprise can be found at home.abc4all.net.
Susan and Al Gillotti, a retired international banker in New York and London, have moved northward from Martha’s Vineyard to Norwich, Vermont. Perhaps the proximity of the Dartmouth campus, just a mile or so away on the other side of the Connecticut River has inspired Al to reprise his first novel. Skim, originally published under a nom de plume, tells the story of a banking syndicate which makes a billion dollar loan to a corrupt West African country. That turns out to be a questionable underwriting decision, since the sovereign borrower slides into civil war, with adverse creditworthy implications. The bad fortune is not only financial, however, as unwelcome complications befall the bank executives and those who sleep with them. The publisher is Academy Chicago. Al’s second novel, George Evans, set in London, will come out later this year.
Coming out of retirement, Ed Elmendorf, once an assistant to Adlai Stevenson and later Arthur Goldberg as Ambassadors to the United Nations, has now become president and chief executive officer of the United Nations Association of the USA, a non-profit advocacy and public education organization.
Here is further evidence that we can turn in our original knees and trade up for a newer model. Fred Jacobson has again been leading hiking groups in the Swiss Alps with a pair of knees he purchased six years ago. Downhill and cross-country skiing are also on his recreational agenda. So pleased is Fred that he volunteers at the New York Hospital for Special Surgery, where he left his old knees and emerged with two new ones.
For updated news about our class, be sure to access Mike Dickerson’s Yale60.org and add it to your favorites screen. Born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833, Alfred Nobel was a brilliant and eclectic scientist, inventor, author, entrepreneur and pacifist. He was perhaps best known for inventing dynamite, a curious credit for a pacifist. When he died on December 10, 1896, Nobel left a considerable estate to fund annual monetary prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and for activities in the service of international understanding, commonly referred to as the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden, established the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, which has been awarded annually since 1969. The 2010 recipients of that Prize were Peter Diamond, Dale Mortenson, and Christopher Pissarides. Highly regarded in the world of academic economics, Peter’s work includes a broad range of topics, including taxation, risk aversion, labor markets, and rigorous research that has “changed the way people view economics”. In addition to being a brilliant star on the MIT faculty, Peter also serves on the Federal Reserve Board, to which he was appointed last year by President Barack Obama.
Stayoung.