This month is a report on what I’ve been up to for the last two months. I am one of my two class secretaries for the Williams College Class of 1966. Normally every now and then I collect news from as many classmates as I can smack into action and edit their contributions into a column for Williams People, which appears in everyone’s mailboxes about four months later. In consequence, the news is woefully out of date, and, frankly, often painfully banal.
So I came up with a new idea. We have a class list-serve, run by the college. When the COVID pandemic came crashing down on all of us, I sent out a message: “Because Class Notes has such a lag time between your contributing and my submitting and the eventual publication, it seems silly – given the fast-moving events we are all in nowadays – to wait so long to talk to each other.” My solution was that everyone should send me news of what’s happening in his COVID life, and each night I would send it back out via the list-serve. (Because I live on the west coast, it was well past midnight on the east coast before I went to bed; everyone could wake up and read yesterday’s news over morning coffee. Sort of like the Long Beach Times.)
It has been a successful enterprise. Since the beginning April I have sent out 51 “class responses,” almost one a day. So far 92 classmates – out of the 235 members on the list-serve – have written in, some more than once. One classmate has been keeping a sort of journal of his pandemic experiences, with almost 30 postings thus far. Some classmates have responded for the first time in years.
The content has been wildly varied. At first, as expected, people wrote about their health and how they were coping with the “shelter in place” directives. Two classmates, Brent Butcher and David Tunick, had contracted the virus and were recovering. One of them reported that his girlfriend was a retired RN and was caring for him, which seemed a happy circumstance. Bob Sonderman had to return from Venezuela just as things were starting to close down, returning to the US via Cuba, and was on one of the last flights to leave before the island closed down.
After a while, things started to slow. Typical class news items appeared. Two classmates, Knut Nordness and Paul Pearson, died during the stretch, although neither from COVID. The news consisted not so much of health news, but events: for instance a tornado touched down near John Amerling in Florida. Stuart Simon reported that he and his wife missed “the cruise from Hell” – the Grand Princess bound for Hawaii, which turned up in San Francisco complete with coronavirus infection and a two-week infection. “Fortunately,” he wrote, “we missed both the Grand Princess and the Titanic.”
People started writing about their college experiences. Bailey Young told about a suggestion from a professor – “You should go to graduate school in history. That’s what you care about. That’s what you are good at.” Now he is a professor of medieval history at Southern Illinois University.
At some point I introduced a form I had invented for a grammar/writing class I taught: a “nifty fifty.” This is a piece that, including the title (if any), consists of exactly fifty words. Here’s one by Jack Iliff:
Fetching the paper
We didn’t wake up dead, so walk out to the three-quarter-mile drive for the paper. Tree tunnel canopy, what will we see? A Pileated Woodpecker, deer with their Lymey friends, and a wild turkey. Do it again at dusk. The spring peepers are out. Makes us smile.
Nifty fifties were popular; at least twenty appeared in the first four days after their introduction. They covered domestic life (as Jack’s did), jokes, philosophy, even meta-nifty fifties, as Jeff Jones’s:
Does Gould actually count? What if I’m off — 49 or 51? (Do “49” and “51” count?). Does he refuse to publish or call me out publicly? He says I can use the word count function — is that one of those Safari vs Chrome things? Does “vs” count? So many questions.
Somehow baseball became a major topic. A number of us had been Giants or Dodgers fans in our youth, and at least three of us had met either Ralph Branca or Bobby Thomson, the pivotal characters in the “Shot Heard Round the World,” Thomson’s grand slam off Branca that in 1951 won the World Series for the Giants. Not to be outdone, I had to tell my greatest fan moment:
I’ve got a baseball story that’s also about Mother’s Day, which is today, after all. In the late 70’s, when I first moved to the Boston area to teach, I used to go south during spring break to Winter Haven, FL, to watch the Red Sox train for the season. One lovely spring day I went into the Clock Restaurant for breakfast. Feeling a nudge from nature, I went into the men’s room to stand in front of a urinal.
All of a sudden, a Really Tall Man came in to stand beside me. I looked up and, by God, it was Ted Williams! I shrank away, not daring to look any closer. But after I’d washed up, I went out to the cashier and bought a post card: “Winter Haven, Florida! Red Sox Spring Training!” I carried it over to Ted’s table and asked, humbly, “Mr. Williams, would you sign this post card?”
He looked up suspiciously, but eventually took my proffered pen and signed the card. I then went back to my table and wrote “Love from the Kid,” just above that graceful signature. Then I addressed it to my mother, back in Maine, who loved Ted utterly. I thus assured my place in her will, and made all future Mother’s Day greetings redundant!
One of the great advantages of publishing on-line is that word limits don’t matter; there’s plenty of room. Guy Fairstein wrote a long piece about Ulysses, about studying it senior year, but also about meeting Morris Ernst, a Williams grad and lawyer, who defended the book against charges of obscenity. He followed that one a few days later about his clerkship in England for Goodman, Derrick, where he observed the obscenity trial of Last Exit to Brooklyn:
The real excitement for me was the barrister Lord Goodman had engaged to present Last Exit’s appeal: the great John Mortimer. I knew of Mortimer by reputation only; I would not become acquainted with his fictional barrister, Horace Rumpole, until years later, when I became a great fan due largely to Leo McKern’s portrayal of Rumpole in the television series.
Another long piece was Doug Olcott’s description of an old (1887-8) house built in Williamstown for his great grandparents. Called the “Jerome House,” it has been recently sold and restored by a young couple. Doug has written extensively and carefully of the house’s history, and of who lived in it after his family sold it.
Who can say where this Class of ’66 COVID blog will end? As we press slowly, inexorably into the future, what will bring us all to conclusion? Surely it is no coincidence that the recent days have exploded into violence, resulting from the dreadful murder of an unarmed, handcuffed, Black man by a Minneapolis police officer, backed up by three of his fellows. “I can’t breathe,” the man said several times before he died. Oh, dear. I think of Yeats, “The Second Coming”:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
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