Nov. 5, 2012
Here's Bill Stork's essay on this week's leadership transition in China, with hints of internal fissures to keep an eye on as we go forward.

    — Chris Cory, Corresponding Secretary

Oct. 29, 2012
As we were going to press with this issue of our class website, we learned of the death of Jim White, our most recent Class Secretary Emeritus. We will post a formal obituary for him in due time, but for the moment, let me share this tribute to Jim sent by Ford Maurer to Co-Corresponding Secretary Steve Buck:

"Steve - just heard from Catherine White that her husband Jim did not make it through his difficult surgery in Boston, to repair a tear in a vital organ. After our 50th, Jim was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and was recovering slowly, when this other issue surfaced. The surgery was complicated, and infection occurred which would not diminish.

"My wife Christine and I have known 'Jimmy' and Catherine since our Yale 70th birthday gathering in New York City. They visited us in Kansas City, principally to view the Kansas City Royals Baseball facility, as baseball was Jim's passion, especially the Boston Red Sox. He edited a baseball blog, which was fascinating, erudite, and deeply analytical, in my opinion.

"As I told Catherine, Jim was one of those rare persons, who is more interested in what YOU are doing, than what he is doing, and for that reason, is one of the most delightful people I have ever had the pleasure of spending time with. Jim has a daughter Isabella, who is a Yale graduate, and she is married with a son, but I do not know their names.

"Jim spent an inestimable amount of time, working for Yale '62, so I would like to solicit comments from other classmates, who also knew him, perhaps better than I did."

            — Ford Maurer ford@foxxequipment.com

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This issue of Yale62.org takes you from the high-pressure executive decision-making on the mens hockey bench to views that the late conservative guru William F. Buckley might offer the Republican US Presidential contender. You'll also find an admonition about the misuse of business language, excerpted from the - can you believe it? - 14th edition of Roman Weil's accounting textbook, and links to new fiction, old ties, and more political thinking from two classmates who write columns.

Believe it or not, we ask you, in the cliché of our age group, to "tell us about your grandchildren"!

I hope you'll keep enjoying the doings of our interesting group. Please comment (as a number of people and Bill Weber have about the last edition, on "fracking" for natural gas.) A comment area is at the end of each feature article. Please tell us about your own news and what you might like to write about some day.

    — Chris Cory, Corresponding Secretary

Ps: You heard it here first. In our reunion panel on China, Bill Stork said "The top 660 US officials are worth $7.5 billion; the top 70 Chinese officials are worth $90 billion." Five months later, The New York Times of October 25 has a story headlined "Exclusive: Family of Prime Minister Holds a Hidden Fortune in China."

By Mike Kane,
Corresponding Secretary Emeritus, former lightweight crew varsity

Yale has the oldest men's hockey program in the country (since 1893), but years to celebrate were rare between our days at Yale and the end of the last century. Now things are quite different.

As many classmates — and college hockey fans elsewhere — know, since taking charge in 2006, varsity hockey coach Keith Allain has taken the men's hockey program to the top tier national level.

Yale is now in each season's conversation with the perennial D-1 powerhouses, and has been a dominant force in its own league, the ECAC, which includes all the Ivy League hockey programs. Yale has won the ECAC regular season title for the last two years in a row. Quoting from the Yale website,    "The numbers tell the story of Yale's ascension in the Allain era:

• 100-56-13 in five seasons as Yale head coach
• 3 straight NCAA Tournament appearances (2 wins)
• 2 straight regional finals
• 2 ECAC Hockey Tournament Championships
• 2 ECAC Hockey Regular Season Titles
• 4 Ivy League Championships (last 3 straight)."

As a Yale undergraduate (class of 1982), Allain was starting goalie for four Yale squads before playing two years of pro hockey in Sweden. After an injury, he became an assistant hockey coach at Yale and coached in Sweden for several years before a short spell in the investment business. As he describes below, soon he was back in the game as a scout and assistant coach for the Washington Capitals and, from 1998 to 2006, the St. Louis Blues. His Yale position is endowed: officially he is the Malcolm G. Chace Head Coach.

Kane: The Yale web site describes your record of high achievement in playing and coaching at all levels including the NHL, but special people or turning points are usually part of the story. Can you share some of that background?

Allain: There were probably two critical moments. The first occurred in the mid 80's. I had a new young family and got out of coaching to better support them. Working in the investment business for two years was misery for me but I thought it was best for my family. Finally my wife told me I needed to get back into coaching, we should return to Europe, and she would act as my agent and get me a coaching job in Sweden. She did and we have been in coaching ever since.

The second moment was in the summer of 1990. Dave Peterson was a coaching mentor of mine; we had met doing numerous assignments for USA Hockey. That summer he was named head coach of the 1992 US Olympic Team and offered me a position as his assistant. The following year and a half working with him and that team was extremely vital in my development as a hockey coach.

(For the rest of the interview, including Allain's long-term planning and split-second bench decisions, click here.)

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ELECTION NEWS: ROMNEY MEETS WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

"Romney would have squirmed" in a dinner conversation with the late conservative guru William F. Buckley, Jr., according to Neal Freeman.

Neal imagined such a conversation in a speech at Yale in connection with last year's launch of the Buckley Program on campus. His words evoke the admonitory charm and edginess of the man he calls "Yale's designated apostate." Amid the reunion news, we haven't had a chance to reprint the remarks 'til now, but trust you'll find them relevant to the election and public discussions to come.

Neal is a board member of the Program, and at the end provides an update. I found one example on a recent campus visit — a full-page ad in the October 18 issue of the Yale Daily News promoting a forum on "Is Free Trade good for the American Middle Class." The ad said the session was supported in part by Bob Rosenkranz, his son, Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz (PC'92, Law'99), and the Rosenkranz Family Foundation. The Buckley Program regularly twits Yale for what it claims is a lack of intellectual breadth, proclaiming that the program "promotes intellectual diversity at Yale by providing a home for conservative thought."


November 5, 2011

Buckley, If Not God, Returns to Yale
What the late, great controversialist would have said to Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and today's conservative talking heads.
By Neal B. Freeman

Editor's note: We replace our regular Weekend Interview feature this week with an essay adapted from remarks by Neal Freeman, delivered yesterday on the 60th anniversary of the publication of William F. Buckley Jr.'s "God and Man at Yale." Mr. Freeman is chairman of the Blackwell Corporation, served on the board of National Review magazine for 38 years, and is a director of the William F. Buckley Program at Yale, which brings speakers to campus and sponsors for-credit courses.

New Haven, Conn.

It was my good fortune to be the guy standing next to Bill Buckley when he became Bill Buckley. When I went to work for him in 1963, he was a fiery polemicist in the world of the little magazine. Less than three years later - after the Buckley newspaper column had spread to every city across the country, after the Buckley for Mayor campaign in New York City, and after the launch of the "Firing Line" television program - he had become a large and influential presence on the national stage.

What I remember most vividly from those transformative years are three things. The first is his extraordinary personal courage.

When Bill Buckley set out to change the world, the ideological forces arrayed against him permeated the media, the academy, the political establishment and popular culture. As just one measure of the correlation of forces, consider the situation on the Yale campus.

For the rest of Neal's piece, and his update, click here.

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THE CHILDREN'S CORNER

Sometimes it seems our children are more interesting than we are these days. To reflect the well-deserved pride many of us feel in our offspring, we are experimenting with - and inviting items for - this section of notes on how far the acorns are falling from our family trees. We'll be looking for stories of particular timely, topical or other interest. Here's one example. Send us more, with photos and links if possible.

Bill Stott writes: "For anyone looking to downsize, my son, Gordon, and his partner, Jared Levy, both architects, are building beautiful houses that can be shipped anywhere. See their website."

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A GRANDCHILDREN'S CORNER?

We know from the reunion book that many of you have grandchildren who of course are absolutely the greatest grandchildren in the world. Without overloading the website, we're considering including a short item and photo in every issue on a grandchild or two whose stories might be of particular timely, topical or other interest. We're not sure exactly how this might work and would welcome suggestions and submissions, with the clear understanding that we might not be able to include what was sent. So if you've got a grandchild who's timely and topical, tell!

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LAUNCH ART

When Karl Frank worked for NASA, he helped design spacecraft. Recently his artistic eye and camera found wistful beauty in a place used for launching another kind of craft - a marine railway. It's in Gloucester, Massachusetts, near where he now lives and thinks about such things as a patentable robotic/prosthetic sensor device. He also paints, and is an artist member of the Rocky Neck Art Colony. The Colony displayed three of his photographs, including these, in a show this summer.

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ODE BETRAYED BY CODE

Your Eli-educated eagle eyes, dear readers, doubtless caught the errors in the English translation of the late Richard Doeblin's Latin class ode that was posted at our reunion and in the special reunion edition of Yale62.org. However, you still might want to know that it was the autocorrect function on a computer that erroneously substituted correct English words for four Latin words it didn't recognize. The corrected version is now on our site, but the errors were file for fila, fonts for fontes, posit for possit, and amicus for amicis. This modern-day mistake machine was picked up by John McLucas, a professor at Towson University who is a classicist colleague of our impeccable but cyberbetrayed translator, Prof. Judith Hallett.

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TIE ANOTHER ONE ON. PLEASE.

In today's meritocratic world, the power of the proverbial "old school tie" for getting jobs and doing deals has weakened. So, apparently, has the appeal of old school cravats. Bob Oliver writes "I am holding 41 ties. Beautiful silk, class 6Y2 design, Yale blue. Please advertise them for sale via me at cost of $24.50. I will absorb the postage. The proceeds repay the class treasury for the expense of the 100-tie guarantee we had to give the tie company."

For the purchase of your personal piece our class sartorial splendor, email Bob at oliver@moglaw.com.

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SIXTH COLUMNISTS

Several classmates write semi regular political columns. Two we know about (please tell us about others) speak from the conservative side of the spectrum.

Charlie Mills's "Confederate Lawyer" writings are syndicated by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, which says it features writers from the "Old Right." He says his pieces are sometimes picked up by newspapers in Fredericksburg, Virginia and St. Paul, Minnesota and the online site Newsblaze. His most recent efforts include a call to "abolish the U. S. Department of Agriculture and its crushing rules and regulations," and a discussion of organizational politics within orders of "dissident religious sisters" in the Catholic church, who he says are engaging in "left-wing agitation and radical feminism."

Arthur Laffer, now in Nashville, writes for the Wall Street Journal, most recently arguing that in several countries, "increased government spending acted more like a depressant than a stimulant." As of October 25 the column had drawn 733 comments.

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THINGS DAVID TELLS US


"All Those Boys," David Finkle's newest short story since he published the collection "Things People Tell Me," is available through Amazon for $.99. "Is it a bargain? Only readers can say," says David, but the first Amazon reviewer said "Certainly the best 99 cents I ever spent."

A sample: "[The hostess took me by the arm] with her familiarly firm grip and asserted under her breath, 'I sat you next to Enid because I think she's someone you'll enjoy and not because she often describes herself as Manhattan's oldest paralegal.'"

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WATCH OUT: NO ONE WILL KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN


"What can one excerpt from a textbook that will interest classmates?" asks Roman Weil. We suggested he might find something because he's about to publish what is fully the 14th edition of his book, "Financial Accounting: An Introduction to Concepts, Methods, and Uses," coauthored with Katherine Schipper, and Jennifer Francis (Cengage Publishing, 2013). He replied with the following:

My first reaction was, "Nothing." But here're some lessons that will likely surprise, hence instruct, you. Before you read further, answer to yourself the following questions:

· What does "capital" mean when a financial writer uses the word?

· What does "making money" mean when a financial writer uses the term?

· When a financial writer says, "a company distributed profits," what does the company distribute?

A Wall Street Journal reporter writes that "Groupon set aside money in case customers asked for refunds. It didn't set aside enough money." How likely is it that Groupon set aside no cash (nor other funds, such as Treasury bills) to give back to customers?

The last 100 pages or so of the book contain a Glossary of accounting and financial terms, which I have been writing and revising for over 35 years in more than 35 editions. It contains mini-lessons.

For examples of what Roman calls "words or terms that many layman and professionals, who should know better, often get wrong," click here. You can comment at the end.

Roman adds: "The dedication page of the book might give you the flavor of our text and how it differs from its (many) competitors."

For Our Students
Whatever be the detail with which you cram your students, the chance of their meeting in after-life exactly that detail is infinitesimal; and if they do meet it, they will probably have forgotten what you taught them about it. The really useful training yields a comprehension of a few general principles with a thorough grounding in the way they apply to a variety of concrete details. In subsequent practice the students will have forgotten your particular details; but they will remember by an unconscious common sense how to apply principles to immediate circumstances.

        — Alfred North Whitehead
            The Aims of Education and Other Essays

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GROANER DEP'T

Here's one of "Phil's Phunny Phacts" from the latest edition of Phil Proctor's blog, "Planet Proctor," which as many of you know also has ironic believe-it-or-not news clips, entertainment news, and shameless self-promotion. The website also notes that three more books of wit from the comedy group Phil was part of, The Firesign Theater, are in the works. If you're a fan, watch for them.

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NECROLOGY

A new obituary written by Bob Oliver for Michael Horigan has been added to our website. Click here to read it.

Obituaries will soon be posted for the following classmates: Charles Evans (d. 6/10/12), Charles Shaw (d. 6/2/11), Richard Madlener (d. 5/22/12), Samuel Joseloff (d. 4/7/12), Lee Patterson (d. 6/29/12), Fred Reames (d. 7/19/12), Tom Luckey (d. 8/19/12), Carl Barth (d. 9/9/12), Geoffrey Spencer (d. 9/7/12) and Jim White.