FAVORITE MEMORIES OF WILLIAMS

Fred Stocking, Benjamin Labaree, Charles Fuqua, Robert Barrow, Russell Bostert, Steve Botein, Robert Dalzell, George Damp, Elizabeth Scherr, H. B. Northup, Michael Steinberg, R.R.R. Brooks, John Todd, Ted Mehlin, Vincent Barnett, Francis Oakley, Conrad van Ouwerkerk, Fran Cardillo, Gail Haslett, Morris Arnold, Bob Gomeau, Chuck and Rita Gardner, James Hodgkins, William Grant, Bob Scott, Fred Copeland, Roy Clark, H. Richard Archer, John Eusden, Bill Dickerson, Douglas Burgoyne, Thomas McGill, Irwin Shainman, and others

WILLIAMS CLUBS / ACTIVITIES

Williams Record, Purple Key Society, College carillonneur, admissions tour guide, Freshman Council, Class Speaker at commencement, 12-College Exchange at Wellesley College, Marching Band

CURRENT INTERESTS, PASSIONS, AND ORGANIZATIONS

Here’s part of a sonnet I’ve found in some ways interesting and meaningful when thinking about the passage of time:

“Vain the ambition of kings
Who seek by trophies and dead things
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.”

—from “Vanitas Vanitatum,” by John Webster (c. 1580 – c. 1632)

LIFE SINCE GRADUATION

My wife, Lucia, and our daughter, Jessie, are both well. Lucia and I live in Lake Forest, Ill., and Jessie lives in Chicago, where she currently helps teach at a Chicago public school as part of the City Year Chicago program. Lucia is a personal banker, and I continue to practice law. One of my most interesting current activities is a long-term project for one of the world’s largest professional services firms.

Now comes a string of sentences beginning mostly with the word “I.” Most of these activities took place during the past 25 years.

I met a crew member of the Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 NASA missions to the moon. I received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree in 2000 from a theological seminary. I took part in a mini-mini-reunion of our classmates in northern Pennsylvania in 2020 and loved every minute of it.

I helped curate a private collection of Abraham Lincoln manuscripts. I have dined with four of the nation’s leading Lincoln scholars. I was the automobile driver for a presidential candidate in the 2020 Illinois primary, who was spending a weekend campaigning in Chicago.

There is an oil well named for me near Fairfield, in Wayne County, Ill. I was class secretary or co-secretary for 10 years. I helped organize our 45th reunion, the theme of which was “Great Conversations.” I have helped write a number of obituaries of deceased classmates.

My family and I spent several days staying at the Lubec, Me., home of Fred Stocking ‘36—a genuinely great man—and his family. I’ve visited all but two gravesites of U.S. presidents. I chaired the boards of several Illinois non-profit organizations.

I have appeared in two local theater productions of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. I was once allowed to sit on the couch on which John Quincy Adams, in 1848, breathed his last. I own and had restored a directory of lawyers from 1850, which lists one of my Webster ancestors in Kalamazoo, Mich.

I saw a perfect total eclipse of the sun, in highway-deprived eastern Wyoming, in 2017, with three classmates of particular brilliance and conviviality. I attended what may have been the best WilliamsAmherst football game ever, in 1997.

My autograph collection includes the signatures of Mark Hopkins and John Bascom and photographs signed by Dr. Jonas Salk and Mikhail Gorbachev. I have seen, up close, bald eagles on the Connecticut River and puffins on the Isle of Staffa in Scotland. I created a program to commemorate, at the offices of my then employer, the life of Martin Luther King JR on his birthday.

A few op-ed pieces I wrote were published in a daily newspaper. I’ve met seven of the directors of the CIA. I’ve been to all 50 states.

Unclear to me at this time is the extent to which the absence of truthfulness in our political life—and the seeming failure of so many to acknowledge this—is something new. At least some manipulation of the truth and purposeful disregard of it have been part of this nation’s political system in the past. What I don’t know yet is whether what is taking place today so greatly exceeds what took place in the past that we as a people are in serious trouble. I fear sometimes that we might be.

I refer readers to our 25th reunion book. To my sorrow, the hope expressed in the penultimate paragraph of my biographical entry has remained largely unfulfilled. The observations expressed on page 9 of that book I heartily endorse. My association with the Class of ’72 has been the most enjoyable of my life.