Alums Put Best Feats Forward

They’ve been mocked by the likes of Norman Mailer for their windy, boastful style. They’ve been ignored by literary critics and scholars. But for decades, they’ve been devoured by more of us than might admit it.

They are “class notes,” the listings of alumni’s goings-on that appear in the magazines that colleges use to keep in touch with graduates. If you haven’t discovered them, you’re missing out on the confessions of the upper crust--a peek into the egos and pathos of the nation’s most highly educated.

Alexander Panov, Dartmouth ‘96, says he’s constantly broke and may soon have to resort to, “Fries with that?” Diana Hamlet-King, Yale ‘75, is getting on with her life “after years of living with (and for long spells, without) a substance-abusing spouse.” William Hamilton, Stanford ‘55, is heading an effort to prove Einstein right and catch gravity waves. And Frank Handy, Princeton ‘26, lives in a retirement community in Winter Park, Fla., where he reports that someone else tells him what he should eat and when he should eat it.

By dutifully publicizing everything from weddings and promotions to alcohol problems and hip replacements (always with the alumnus’ name in boldface type), class notes give each generation a forum in which to talk to itself. Part holiday letter, part gossip column, they give the rest of us something too: a chance to glimpse the past and the future--youth and old age--through the eyes of those who are experiencing them.

“It doesn’t matter whether you actually know the people you’re reading about,” said book critic and literary biographer James Atlas, who says he reads class notes from colleges he did not attend. “Something about the format produces revelations of character that don’t show up anywhere else in the literature of our time.”

Unlike other age-old college traditions that have died out, like letter sweaters, freshmen beanies and “pinning” your steady, class notes appear to be here to stay. Thanks to e-mail, it’s easier than ever for alumni to send word. And as many colleges begin to post their notes on the World Wide Web, Internet “hits” indicate that readership is booming.

Of course, some of what they’re reading is fiction. Run on the honor system, with alumni writing in about themselves and one another, the notes are spiced with braggadocio, embellishment and sometimes pure invention. But that’s part of the fun.

Creative Class Notes

More than one class secretary, as the alumni volunteers who compile the notes columns are known, have made things up to enliven their prose. Perhaps the most notorious fibber was a Yale man, the secretary for the Class of ‘43, who invented an alumnus--”Dave Henderson”--and reported “news” from him for six years before editors caught on. Bruce Milligan, Colgate ‘73, once penned an entirely fake column after none of his actual classmates got in touch.

“Scud East is still in the U.S. Army,” reported Milligan, inventing a nickname for a nonexistent classmate. “He claims to have an extremely interesting job, one that is both terribly exciting and of vital importance to our national security. Unfortunately, the nature of his work is top secret and he can’t tell us what he does.”

Other pranksters include a Dartmouth alumnus who claimed to have invented killer bee anti-venom and the buddies of Joel Kraut, Princeton ‘58, who recently reported that he is the owner of the Boston Red Sox and a star on the Olympic water polo team.

“Joel Kraut does exist--he’s an ophthalmologist in Boston. But what he has allegedly done is untrue,” said Ralph DeGroff, the class secretary, who nonetheless reprinted these tall tales, cautioning readers to be suspicious.

But reality, as they say, can be stranger than fiction. Anne Diffily, the editor of the Brown alumni magazine, was wary when she heard from an alumna in Maine who reported that she had taken up clog dancing and changed her middle initial to the numeral “3.” Diffily contacted the woman, who confirmed the report.

“There’s also an artist who now lives in France who goes by the single name ‘jecca,’ ” said Diffily, who has taken to referring to that alumna “as ‘the artist known as jecca,’ because you can’t start a sentence with a lower-case letter.”

Underneath such levity, however, runs a sobering current. Class notes are a reminder of our mortality. They are arranged in chronological order, with the oldest alumni in front and new graduates way in the back. So as years pass, graduates are painfully aware of their inexorable “movement” forward.

“I’m nearing the front of alumni news notes in the back of ‘Pomona Today,’ ” went a song that was part of a 1987 musical about Pomona College. “I’m not sure how it happened, and it just couldn’t be: I’ve moved up three pages since May. Every issue ages me nine or 10 years. I’m face to face with one of my fears. . . . But it’s news of my friends that’s a comfort to see. I can watch them getting older with me.”

Many people use class notes to keep track of their former flames. (Happy? Healthy? Still available?) Others use them to get even. Alumni magazine editors report an increasing “class notes as weapon” phenomenon: Irate former spouses who exact revenge on their exes’ by writing in and declaring them dead.

Almost everyone who reads class notes has this in common: Like octogenarians who scan the obituaries to see who they have outlived, they want to know their place in the vast spectrum of humanity.

“Today, people are having their first baby at 15 or at 35, retiring at 30 or not at all. Huge numbers of people are not marrying. There aren’t predictable markers anymore. So who better than our ‘class’ to tell us how we’re doing?” said Carol Tavris, a Los Angeles social psychologist who sees people using class notes as a reference point as societal mores change.

“They are little tables of contents of the chapters of people’s lives,” Tavris said. “And that’s endlessly interesting.”

Jay Heinrichs, who edited the Dartmouth alumni magazine for 10 years, was more blunt about the notes’ appeal: “There’s a sense of sneaking triumph when you’re doing better than someone else.”

Heinrichs believes, though, that class notes are more than a measuring stick by which we compare ourselves to others. In a very real sense, he says, they are a kind of glue that connects us to who we are--or aspire to be.

“Class notes are literally a definition of your class, your socioeconomic group,” he said, “because education now means wealth. You don’t have a landed gentry anymore, you have an educated one. Americans hate to admit that. But it’s true.”

That, theorizes Heinrichs, is a big part of the reason that class notes published by public universities are usually anemic at best--”because people want to identify with the elite class. The more ‘elite’ the school you went to, the more your class notes confirm your membership in the elite of society.”

Ivy Leaguers, by this reasoning, are more likely to send updates to class notes than are UC graduates--it’s a club they want to belong to.

Keith Brant, the executive director of the UCLA Alumni Assn., disagrees. The reason class notes published in UC publications are often thin, he says, is not that the schools aren’t prestigious enough. It’s that their graduating classes are so big.

“When you graduate with a class of 5,000, people identify with other aspects of their experience--where they live, for example--not just the class,” said Brant, who has researched the history of alumni in American higher education. Moreover, he said, “Public universities did a lousy job in general of keeping track of their alumni up until the ‘70s, when they said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to play the same [fund-raising] game as the privates.’ ”

Indeed, private colleges figured out early on that if you want alumni to give money, you have to keep in touch. Many private colleges have nurtured their class notes columns--some for nearly a century--knowing that from camaraderie may also come cash.

Class notes are an American invention with roots in alumni societies that date to the early 1800s. Even back then, according to Frederick Rudolph’s book “The American College and University: A History,” graduates felt fierce loyalty to their alma maters. Rudolph reports that one alumnus of the University of North Dakota, for example, named his twin daughters Una and Versa.

Particularly after the Civil War, alumni began to organize, trying to gain more control of their institutions. In 1865, an alumni-trustee movement was born at Harvard--by an act of the Massachusetts Legislature, alumni gave themselves the power to elect the university’s board. A few years later, Williams--whose graduates had formed the nation’s first alumni society in 1821--added an alumni member to its board.

“The alumni were just beginning to arrive at a position of eminence and wealth which would enable them to . . . [help] support American higher education,” Rudolph wrote. Soon, alumni monthlies would be born--an important way for colleges to keep connected to their potential benefactors. Then, apparently around 1900, the first class notes appeared.

“It was a time of great dispersal among the American upper classes--the college graduates. People wanted to be in touch with each other,” said Heinrichs of Dartmouth, who traced that school’s class notes back to this 1905 column: “The Rev. Levi Henry Cobb, D.D., has been a sufferer for three years with rheumatic gout--acquired, so far as he knows, by ‘high living among the missionaries on our Western frontier.’ ”

Gold-Plating Achievements

Over the years, class notes have gotten hipper: Linda Hubbard, Barnard ‘84, works part time doing cloud sampling in the Smoky Mountains and recently brewed her first batch of beer--an East German Schwarzbier; Martha Cristy, Mills ‘60, tunes pianos, grows flowers and lives in a passive solar, earth-bermed house in Michigan; and Elizabeth Caplan Morris, Radcliffe ‘37, counts tai chi as her “latest enthusiasm.”

But the notes’ frequently self-satisfied style--what Mailer once dubbed “that inimitable lead-kitten charm”--has remained much the same over time. In his classic “The Elements of Style,” E. B. White, who reputedly hated reading his class notes from Cornell, lambasted them as a platform for brazen self-glorification and “a sort of windiness.”

“The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is of general interest,” he wrote in 1957.

The same is often true today. Some months, everyone seems to have climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, caught a 360-pound marlin or hit a hole in one (“My second,” wrote one alumnus). The retirees are all cruising the Danube, the fortysomethings are running marathons, and everybody, it seems, is engaged in something meaningful or hugely lucrative or both.

At times, such smugness prompts rebellion. In 1969, for example, one Pomona alumnus--appalled by his classmates’ penchant for “vulgar” self-promotion--proposed a new “con” section to give vent to “the bitter disappointments, frustrations, failures, broken romances, shattered dreams and mediocre routines which in a significant way have informed their lives.”

Several alumni jumped at the chance. “Still gathering material for a first novel, ‘Springtime Cottage,’ now retitled ‘Menopause Manor,’ ” a woman from the Class of ’45 wrote. Another alumna, Class of ‘54, said her big news of the year was quitting smoking for three months. She signed off, “Back to my washing machine-ful of dirty bathmats and stinky sneakers.”

Other alumni stay silent, refusing year after year to answer secretaries’ pleas for any morsel of news. The hardest-core rebels don’t even send the old school their latest addresses, landing them on the ignominious “lost list.”

Very occasionally, alumni showthey are capable of understatement. Actor Tommy Lee Jones wrote a note to his “reunion book”--the hard-covered cousins of alumni magazines, in which graduates write essays to be published and distributed at their reunions--that was conspicuous for what it left out.

“We are raising our own replacement heifers from a flourishing herd of Brangus cows,” wrote Jones, Harvard ‘69, neglecting to mention that he’d starred in such films as “The Fugitive” and “JFK.” “I caught a 10-pound black bass on a fly rod in High Point, N.C., in 1992. My 2-year-old daughter is fluent in Spanish.”

Robert Reich, the former U.S. Secretary of Labor, was similarly subtle when he reported a classmate’s promotion in the journal for the Assn. of American Rhodes Scholars. “Bill Clinton has changed his address,” Reich wrote. “He now lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”

Reich and Jones are the exceptions. If anything, class notes--like America in general--have become more confessional of late, injecting a new poignancy into the old pomposity. You have to feel for Lauren Darnell, Mills ‘90, when you read that she is still single and “looking for a man who will tolerate my schedule.” Or for Alex Nicholson, Stanford ‘70, who says he and his wife are still hopeful of starting a family. Or for Jay Webster, Princeton ‘61, who reports celebrating 15 years of sobriety Jan. 23--although “he and Mimi, sadly, have split.”

Such intimate revelations have become so commonplace that no one raised an eyebrow when a Yale alumnus submitted this for inclusion in a reunion book being compiled for the class of ‘75: “I have come to terms with my homosexuality and the reality of AIDS in my life.”

Unfortunately, the person whose name was attached to that admission had not sent it in. He was neither gay nor sick with AIDS. He was, however, very angry: He sued for $5 million.

He did not write to the class notes to report the subsequent settlement.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Noteworthy Examples

The Writing Style. . .

Here are samples of real class notes taken from recent college alumni magazines:

HARVARD

* Reese Alsop (‘36) sends a communication entitled “In the Belfry.” He reports that “although well stricken in years, bald, deaf and with diminished visual acuity,” he is still strong. After a recent “explosive” awakening at 3 a.m., he found his wife acutely alarmed about a “huge cat in the bedroom. ‘Cat?’ I said. ‘Cat?’ ‘Not cat,’ she said. ‘Bat! Lie flat!”’ After the careening bat failed to find the open window, the Alsops retreated to the guest room, where Reese “lay staring at the ceiling remembering a famous question of the specialty boards for internal medicine designed to stress that bat bites in daylight mean rabies, while at night ... their movements are allegedly benign. I wondered. In the morning he was gone.”

DARTMOUTH

* Kathy Boak Dubishar (‘82) whirled into Bloomington on the way to St. Louis last fall. She, her husband Craig and her three children were ALL wearing matching tropical-fish shorts. “Craig... spent the four hours on the phone while our collective five children tore the house apart. I remember that a hose was somehow turned on and all the fish shorts had to be put into the drier. All was chaos.”

POMONA

* Robert Michael (‘66), Santa Barbara, writes: “I’ve been on quite a roll contest-wise the past few years; won the grand prize on the NOVA (PBS) 20th Anniver- sary Science Quiz, an Earthwatch expedition for two anywhere in the world (I chose Kamchatka). Then, late one night on a milk-and-bread run, I tossed one entry into a shoebox at my local Lucky supermarket and ended up with a new Ford pickup. Was on ‘Jeopardy’ last year, but lost big.”

STANFORD

* James Ingebretsen (‘28) spent a number of years practicing law but retired... in 1955. Since that time, he has enjoyed life and “followed his bliss.” He founded a retreat center and developed a number of psychological theories [and] is... in the process of writing his memoirs in order to share with others his lifelong spiritual journey. Patsy Jacobson Etter (‘67) writes that she, her husband, Ginge, and their dog, Yukon, survived the ice storm that hit Spokane, Wash., in November.... Always hospitable, they invited close friends (with their dogs) to move in for a week-- and they all ate peanut butter sandwiches for Thanksgiving. (Even the dogs?)

. . .and its Parodies

These are some of the spoofs of alumni notes that have appeared over the years:

* Marge and I are heartsick that in July pirates boarded our motor-yacht Triunfador II as it was passing through Malacca Straits, stripped it clean and then opened the sea valves, sending the most comfortable cruiser we’ve ever owned to the bottom of the sea.... Fortunately, Marge and I had disembarked in Dar es Salaam and flown back to Johannesburg to check on some of our investments. We are now battling with our Panamanian insurance company about the sinking--they claim it was an act of God!

--”Dave Henderson,” a fictional member of the Yale Class of ’43 invented by a mischievous class secretary

* Well, chums, here I am again with my bagful of dirt about your disorderly classmates, after spending a helluva weekend in N’Yawk trying to view the Columbia game from behind two bumbershoots and a glazed cornea. And speaking of news, howzabout tossing a few chirce nuggets my way?

--An “aging collegian” invented by E.B. White in “The Elements of Style” to show the dangers of a “breezy manner”

* We are now living in the country, and find to our surprise that we like it, although the children miss the ambiguity and partial unshelterings of a New York public school education. Suburban life is great--I find to my perhaps overstructured horror that I rather enjoy the high-pressured rubber of bridge on the evening rocket back--wife and I are working you see with local PTA.... These activities do not quite satisfy my programmatic ambitions of 15 years ago, but still if I will be granted my enthusiasm for one cliche, the little realities of the graying poll and the burgeoning paunch are bracing realities.

--Norman Mailer, mimicking his Harvard (‘43) class notes, in “Advertisements for Myself”

* Kellie Petrova (‘72) recently divorced third husband Derek Chapin after their adopted son Jason, 17, sued to learn the identity of his birth parents so he could see if he was a legacy at a decent college.... Speaking of big changes, a happy Joe Firestone writes from his private room at the Hospital for Special Surgery that he is no longer a man, and Ed Starker, still at Goldman Sachs, reports that he is no longer black. Ed had been slated to join the Clinton administration at Treasury, but now it seems all bets are off. Best of luck to both Ed and Dorothy, which is Joe’s new name.... And from sunny Tucson, this correspondence from Leonard Brill, who missed our last reunion: “By now, I’m sure the whole class knows about our abduction on the way to the 20th. Sheila was assigned to an alien breeding facility and--wouldn’t you know it?--I was sent to a labor camp, where I bumped into Matt Pew, who, as you might imagine, was in fine form.”

--Garry Trudeau, Yale (‘70), in Time magazine