February 14 marked Steve “The Gremlin” Wuori’s 75th birthday. A celebration surprise Zoom call was held, organized by Cathy Waters, widow of classmate Roger Waters. “The Gremlin” was joined on the call by Steve Honig, Mack Haning, Howard Edelstein, Bob Ficks ’70, Sandee Molden (widow of Parker Molden), Gus Heisey, Spinner Findlay and Jerome Williams. A happy event in a tough year, the comments confirmed that this crowd still knows how to “dish it out.”
Jeffrey Northup: This summer will bring retirement from forty four years in medicine, the last seven as Chief Medical Officer at Knox Community Hospital in Mt. Vernon. It’s been great to be back in central Ohio and just down the road from Kenyon, although COVID has certainly curtailed activities on the Hill and kept those of us in healthcare pretty busy. We did enjoy getting together for our 50th reunion. My wife Cindy and I have just about completed our restoration of an 1855 house on East Gambier Street, just two blocks East of where "the bench" used to be located. We will be heading back west, splitting time between Arizona and Colorado.
William Northway: I have been blessed: born into a great family, was allowed to attend an excellent private preparatory school, was able to get a degree from Kenyon while having a fantastic time and making so many wonderful friends. After that graduation, I stumbled over dentistry and fell into orthodontics, which was about perfect for me; I got to remake people’s bites and smiles. I have published 19 articles that have advanced the art of orthodontics, spoken in six foreign countries as well as providing a day and a half seminar in China. Especially through my membership in the Edward H. Angle Society of Orthodontists, I have made some of the most incredible friends for whom anybody could ever wish, Paul Rigali being one. That all came during a career that lasted 47 years ending in 2019, just in time to allow me to join the Community Advisory Council at Interlochen Center for the Arts where I have served during the past year. In 2020, I was elected Trustee for the Crystal Lake Township where I am working to make government more responsive, especially when it comes to ecological concerns. Many thanks to Dr. Robert Burns H’92 for heading me in the right direction. I am also ultimately appreciative for the friends made while at Kenyon, especially in soccer, lacrosse and within my fraternity. I have been blessed.
I also want to announce that it is with heavy heart that we report having lost Jeff Jones on September 23, an excellent student, phenomenal athlete and a wonderful friend. We love you, Jonesy.
John Risler: As COVID-19 contracted our world of volunteerism, SHIP Medicare counseling went electronic to deliver counseling services to the seniors of Northeast Florida. We are also leading the Senior Medicare Patrol in informing seniors of the numerous Medicare scams in the marketplace. We also research reported scams, preparing informative reports to assist Federal law enforcement in targeting these billion dollars frauds. Here in the wide-open state of Florida we have been fortunate to not to catch COVID-19 and now have both shots. We are looking forward to in-person volunteering at Wolfson Children's Hospital and Medicare Counseling with SHINE. Recently spoke to Sylvan Seidenman ’65 and emailed with David Wallace. I-95 travelers always welcome to say hello as they pass through Jacksonville.
Merrill Burns: We have managed through the pandemic in Sonoma, where we live full time. Given that I have worked remotely for 10 years in the affordable housing finance arena, ZOOMing was an easy adjustment. Not so easy, for the first time in 45 years, not setting foot in an airplane. We have gotten our exercise hiking almost daily in the surrounding hills. As for complaints, given that our family is far flung from Australia to Hawaii, North Carolina and Chicago, socializing has been limited to the internet. Now fully vaccinated, we are itching to hit the road to see family and friends.
Stan North: I’m living and working on an ocean side estate in Maui with my wife, Christine.
Mike Cross: After 30 years in Virginia, Chris and I recently moved to Lakewood Ranch, FL where we are once again enjoying the warm, sunny weather of our earlier years together. Visitors welcome.
Peter Arango: Pandemicized in March, I was able to knock out another novel, A Fine Old School, ripping a narrative from the scandal-ridden headlines emerging virtually on the hour as boarding schools replaced the Catholic Church in the grim glare of the Boston Globe's Spotlight team. It languishes on Amazon next to the rest of my vanity line quietly awaiting discovery and appreciation. That done, there was little to do after watching the curtain come down on my work at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival but to pack the car with our important documents and photographs and wait for fire season, which arrived on schedule in September. Phoenix, our small town outside Ashland, was almost entirely burned to the ground. We evacuated in time and our place was untouched, but the devastation in the region is still visible. Details about the fire and about life on Storybook Farm are available at https://impracticalcogitator.com/ as are idle musings which will make up the next collection of essays. Tentatively titled It Seemed Like A Good Idea, it contains the unvarnished account of my career as Kenyon's typist for hire, including my insertion of a steamy scene of seduction in an Honors Biology paper on the mating habits of the Bering Seal. "She raised her flipper slowly, allowing a slender trail of seaweed to outline her glistening flanks." Apparently Professor Burns was not amused.
Howard Edelstein: I continue to work in my life insurance and estate planning practice while keeping involved in community activities in the Cleveland area. I was recently selected to be President of The Union Club Foundation. This Foundation was established 10 years ago in support of philanthropic activities and the art collection of the almost 150 year old Union Club of Cleveland.
Jeff Henderson: I held my last classes (remotely) last semester, after 50 years as a professor of classics at Yale, Michigan, USC, BU, and visiting at UCLA and Brown. Post-teaching I will continue my editorship of the Loeb Classical Library and various research projects, as well as activities with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and national humanities organizations, and I look forward post-pandemic to visiting my children and grandchildren, and generally getting out and about once again.
Mark Sullivan: Mark Sullivan lives in Raleigh, NC. He and his wife, Teri, have just received their second shot and are "rarin' to go" for whatever is out there! He heads a small law firm. Still working from home (goin’ on 7 months now!), with the kitchen table as his new desk, he is still practicing family law, with a strong emphasis on military divorce issues. It's been a year since his voice (last heard in Gambier via the Kenyon Singers) has been heard at the spiritual choir at the cathedral in Raleigh. He’d love to hear from more classmates at law.mark.sullivan@gmail.com.
John Morrison: A little over three years ago I retired from Family Medicine after 41 years in practice. For a variety of reasons - pride and fear of retirement among them - I took a part time job with a long term care group doing nursing home work. All was going well until a year ago, when Covid struck. What was I thinking? Pleasant and satisfying turned into sad and exhausting. But I'm happy to say things are looking up, for residents, staff, AND doctors. Hope my classmates have stayed well - and out of nursing homes!
Tim Holder: Nicknames were prevalent in our day at Kenyon, and I have always been impressed with the sharp wit, knowledge of history, grasp of literature and poetry (onomatopoeia even), biology, art, religion, drama, entertainment, etc. reflected in these names. This was the essence of Kenyon, a fine liberal arts school, something you could get your intellectual teeth into. You would not find this in an ordinary college.
Some examples:
• Chaucer (his real first name was Geoffrey);
• Hoggsie (anatomical with a gluttonous appetite and manners to match);
• W.C. (uncanny facial and vocal similarity to W.C. Fields; he had all of the lines down);
• Crusher (what he did to opposing front linesmen and his lady friends);
• Ross van Bag (“in the bag” in the vernacular at that time meant to be drunk, and he was Dutch);
• Rasputin (he internalized too much Russian history and wanted a new persona);
• General Sherman (going on vacation to Fort Lauderdale through Georgia but didn’t make it past the bar in Howard six miles down the road from Gambier);
• P. T. Barnum, the Greatest Show on Earth (to “throw a show” meant to do something that was entertaining and exciting and he excelled);
• The Troll (an angry and foreboding troll growling loudly, spewing spit in the dark under the bridge);
• The Monk (he took to studying too hard, cloistering himself in Middle Leonard but then he met a nun at a mixer with St. Mary’s of the Springs and fell in love);
• The Worm (the etiology has been buried deep in history);
• The Cloud (when he walked in the room it felt like 3 people walked out); and the list goes on.
Michael Gaynon: After a year of sheltering in place, my wife Susan and I are back to seeing live patients and teaching ophthalmology residents at Stanford. Thank Heaven for the vaccine. We have two daughters. One is an internist in San Francisco and one is a professional cellist teaching at Cal Poly. It's nice to see Kenyon becoming bigger and better, year by year.
Richard Levey: Sigrid and I are weathering the pandemic as best we can. Who could have foreseen the universal reliance on Zoom to connect with those close and afar? A 10-year old grandson in Vietnam keeps me hopping with magic tricks and his reading adventures. On-site classrooms have been shuttered in VN (as here)... and Khanh has way too much time on his hands. My work with the MI Poor People's Campaign continues. To close, a geo-political book recommendation: Lawrence Wright’s The End of October. It is about a pandemic similar to Covid-19 with a super-spreader event which rocked my clock.
Geoffrey Hackman: Glad to join the fully vaccinated club on March 15th. We have been blessed with good health throughout the pandemic, limiting our adventures to grocery store runs, pre-dawn workouts on the Stanford campus and walks in nearby parks. We are looking forward to getting out and about more after lockdown, although I have seen more of my family and classmates (via Zoom) than I have in years. In-person chorale rehearsals and concerts will be a welcome return to normalcy but most important will be visits with family and friends sans screens. Be well!
Eric Linder: My year of Covid-19 lockdown has passed by quietly with lots of reading, interspersed by letters to persons I had not written even an email to in a long time, but this year with fountain pen and green ink!
I am using this occasion to tell all classmates who read this that we lost John Lloyd Owen III on the night before the Nov. 2 Election. John had been living in quiet retirement at the home of a former business partner in rural New York until dementia required his move to a nearby nursing home where the partner, David Weidt -- a man with a rough manner and heart of gold -- oversaw John's care and legal matters. When Covid finally breached the doors of the nursing home, John was moved to a county hospital, where he died peacefully, I am told. The Head of Trinity-Pawling School, William Taylor '85, has been most helpful in advising me how to proceed in the matter of John's final resting place. Trinity-Pawling, also in New York state, is where John's parents, John L. Owen, Jr. and Lois Owen, spent many years on the staff, and where John spent his boyhood before going on to St. Paul's School and then to Kenyon. My plan is to organize a service at the time of interment of John's ashes next to his parents' graves in Pawling sometime this summer, the pandemic allowing.
I am sending a brief obituary to the Alumni Magazine to be published in the fall, as I have missed the deadline (pardon the expression) for the spring issue.
Any Kenyon alumni seeking further information are welcome to get in touch with me by email at eelinder.46@gmail.com.
