Ted Walch - I am still teaching full-time at Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles: seventy students in three sections of Cinema Studies and one section of Philosophy in Art & Science. I plan to spend six weeks in Paris this summer as a post-script to my time there over the last several years researching Truffaut's THE 400 BLOWS. I had a skirmish with lung cancer last year, but thanks to Cedars-Sinai, a dogged internist, and a brilliant oncologist, I'm completely out of the woods. I thank Kenyon for the kind of education that in its broad strokes prepared me for the work I do today.
Eric Wagner - I am happy and well living in a terrific retirement community, The Village, in Gainesville, Florida. (This has no relation to the mega development of the villages south of Ocala, Florida). Here in mid-February I am sitting on my apartment screened porch with a small lake just a few feet away enjoying an almost 80 degree day full of sun. Ducks, egrets, herons, wood storks, and various other birds are here virtually all the time. It is a nature lover’s paradise; earlier today there were over 70 black bellied whistling ducks just feet away and there are still several dozen sleeping in the grass, along with a snowy egret. Everything is provided here, including too much food. Mostly I play bridge, water volleyball, and represent my building on the resident advisory forum. Travel is out these days, though I do go to South Carolina to see family on rare occasions. My previous travels in retirement (170 countries, all continents, and Antarctica several times and the North Pole on a Russian nuclear icebreaker) and my now leisurely retirement living unquestionably have been the best parts of my life! Life as a retired Professor Emeritus is good!
I hope all of my Kenyon classmates and friends are happy, healthy, and enjoying retirement.
Jim Keyes - From time to time, the jokes and other odd things I did while at school just make me break out laughing. Like the time throwing brussel sprouts across the dining hall led to a memorable food riot. Or the time a waiter was carrying a tray with all twelve settings on board. He started to walk very fast. Then, when he got to the kitchen door, someone had locked it. The tray - along with the language - went flying. Or, while someone else was showering, reaching and turning off the hot water. Ah, those were good days.
Dane Woodberry - Nothing to report, but thanks.
Bob Macdonald - We are starting to travel again with a trip this past January to New Orleans to enjoy its great restaurants for our 54th wedding anniversary. Upcoming trip to Carmel and Napa Valley in late May. In June, we will continue our annual tradition of hosting a large number of the best independent Twin Cities chefs for a barbecue in our back yard.
Neal Mayer - It is hard to believe that next year will be our 60th reunion and the 64th year from our arrival at Kenyon in September 1959. Jane and I and our family have gotten through the pandemic, notwithstanding that we missed travel, family and friends as social contact was reduced. In November we were delighted by the visit of our four children and 12 grandchildren who came to Delaware for Thanksgiving and to celebrate my 80th birthday a week early. They came from Houston, St. Louis, Atlanta, Johns Creek, GA, Poolesville, MD, and New York City. I had a knee replaced in mid-December and am making a terrific recovery. I am still getting work from clients and enjoy the mental exercise, and Jane is still making her pottery. We are hoping to play golf again when the weather warms.
Obituary
Calvin Lamar Ellis, Kenyon Class of 1963, died on March 7th, 2022, of complications of Alzheimer’s disease. He was 80 years old and a resident of Reston, Virginia. His beloved wife of more that thirty-two and a half years, Judith Ann Kilmartin, survives him.
He was a prototypical Kenyon man — a Renaissance man: scholar, athlete, leader, educator, writer, linguist, polyglot, anthropologist, photographer, foreign correspondent, adventurer, coach, computer scientist, project manager, refugee relief administrator, docent, education administrator, volunteer, mentor, and a lover of nature, books, animals, music, good food, and good friends, and Kenyon.
He was born on November 30, 1941 in Memphis, Tennessee, to Mary Neal and Irving Lyle Ellis. He spent his childhood in Richland, Washington, where his father worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II; in Orange, Texas; and in Circleville, Ohio where he was the top male graduate in his class of 1959.
Ellis came to Kenyon on a George Gund scholarship. He was a member of Beta Theta Pi; chairman of the Student Judicial Board; president of the athletic lettermen’s club, the Kenyon Klan; and a member of the honorary six-man Senior Society that functioned as the liaison between the student body and the Kenyon faculty and administration. He was a senior dorm counselor in Norton Hall and Kenyon’s student representative to the Great Lakes Colleges’ Association.
He was also a four-year letterman in baseball, captain of the team in 1963, and arguably the best player on the best team in the 20th century. Prior to coming to Kenyon he had played on 16 consecutive championship teams, and he brought that winning attitude to the field at Kenyon. He was the offensive and defensive leader of the 1961 team that set school records for best team defense and pitching that still stand. This was the only Kenyon squad ever to lead the Ohio Conference in victories. He and his Circleville teammate, Joe Adkins, a Kenyon College Athletic Hall of Famer, were the first Kenyon players to receive All-Ohio Conference honors. At the time of his graduation he was the fourth leading hitter in school history and held the single-season and career home run records for 15 years. He was one of only two shortstops in the 20th century to hit over .300 and field over .900 during a four-year career at Kenyon.
As an undergraduate, Ellis majored in economics, anthropology (with honors), and linguistics (with honors). He was selected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was a two-time Fulbright fellow.
After leaving Kenyon, he spent more than a decade in Southeast Asia, during which time he developed a linguistic familiarity with 11 foreign languages and worked as an educator and education administrator, a journalist, and a refugee relief administrator.
He was one of the first Kenyon graduates invited to train with the newly formed Peace Corps. He went to Bangkok, Thailand, where he taught English and American literature at Thammasat University during 1964-65. While in Thailand, he taught himself to speak Lao and subsequently went north to the capital city of Vientiane where he taught at the National Education Center and collaborated on the first ever Lao-English dictionary. He taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong while studying Mandarin and Cantonese at the Yale Language Center and was a two-time Fulbright fellow at the Faculties of Liberal Arts and Pedagogy at the University of Saigon in South Viet Nam.
He also managed the University of Maryland’s extension program in Saigon and administered refugee and orphan relief programs in Viet Nam for the International Rescue Committee, a non-profit organization founded by Albert Einstein.
He was the founder, president, and editor-in-chief of his own news agency, Multimedia Asia, which developed a clientele that included The New York Times, Newsday, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Kansas City Star, The Boston Globe, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Cincinnati Inquirer, Parade Magazine, The Far Eastern Economic Review, and The London Daily Express. He subsequently became the Saigon Bureau Chief for Westinghouse Radio’s Group “W” News. In this capacity he provided radio reportage on political, economic, and military developments during the post-ceasefire period of the Vietnam war for the company’s network of 24-hour news stations, including WINS (New York), WBZ (Boston), KYW (Philadelphia), KDKA (Pittsburgh), WOWO (Fort Wayne), WIND (Chicago), KFWB (Los Angeles), and KPIX (San Francisco). His exhibition of photography from this period, called Vietnam in Retrospect, was on permanent display at the University of Maryland’s College Park campus for 11 years.
He was evacuated from Saigon when South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese army in April of 1975. He returned to the U.S. and worked with relief programs designed to assimilate the Indochinese refugees into American society. He ran English language programs at the refugee camp at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, and administered government assistance programs in bilingual education throughout 11 southern states, where he was responsible for 50,000 refugee children. For his efforts he earned local and regional honors from Rotary International as a “Teacher of the Handicapped”.
Ellis later earned a master’s degree from the University of Virginia in the management of information technology and enjoyed a distinguished 36-year career in that field. He worked for the government services divisions of Honeywell, Wang, Data General, Candle Corporation, and Data Networks and earned a reputation for restoring troubled programs to solid footing. He played leading roles in winning and deploying more than $287 million in computer hardware, software, and services in support of federal agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Veterans’ Affairs Department, the Smithsonian Institution, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Transportation Command, the Naval War College, the National Security Agency, the Executive Office of the President, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Douglas Aircraft Corporation C-17 Globemaster transport program.
He was an Olympic torch-bearer during the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and was one of the top masters’ milers in the Washington, D.C. area during his early 40s.
Throughout his life he was active as a volunteer and supporter of charitable causes. This included giving back to Kenyon in various ways. He supported the school’s Career Development Center in their resume development and internship programs as well as helping generate job leads for students entering the work force in the Washington, D.C. area. He was a member of the reunion planning and fund raising committee for his class’s 50th annual reunion, when the class of 1963 broke all previous records for giving.
He was the ex officio historian for his class, and the exhaustive photographic documentary he prepared to chronicle the accomplishments of his classmates on the occasion of the reunion has since been accepted into the College’s archives.
However, he was most proud of his work as a fund raiser for the Major League Baseball Players’ Alumni Association and as a Little League baseball coach, something that he did for ten years. He ultimately became Director of Training for baseball in his hometown of Reston, Virginia. During his tenure and under his tutelage, nine young Reston players attended major college programs on baseball scholarships. He felt it was important to give back some of the very positive experience he had had with baseball during his youth in Circleville and at Kenyon.
These activities earned him the lifetime Presidential Volunteer Service Award.
He was inducted into his high school’s Achievement Hall of Fame in 2015.
Early in his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, Cal became determined to donate his remains upon his death to Georgetown University School of Medicine for research. It was one of his last ardent wishes and has been accomplished.
In addition to his wife, Judy, he is survived by his brother, Irving L. Ellis, Jr., of Camden, South Carolina, as well as numerous nieces and nephews.
A Memorial Celebration of Life will be held at a future date in his hometown of Reston, Virginia.
