By Gregory A. Weiss
Congratulations to Ned Snyder, who will be receiving the Ashbel Smith Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Texas School of Medicine Alumni Association, the highest award that can be given to an alumnus. Ned is currently the chief of gastroenterology and hepatology at the Kelsey–Seybold Clinic in Houston, a professor of medicine at the University of Texas and at Baylor, and on the editorial board of multiple medical journals. His great-grandfather, grandfather, and father all practiced medicine in his hometown of Brownwood, Texas. We remember Ned, of course, as being captain of the golf team and a member of the NCAA coaches All-American golf team.
Congratulations are also in order to John Harvey, who, at an April 19 gala held to benefit the Queen Elizabeth September 11th Garden, Inc., received the Queen Elizabeth II Garden Leadership and Philanthropy Award. The garden was established in NYC’s financial district to memorialize the 67 British subjects who lost their lives on 9/11 and to celebrate the historic ties between the US and the UK.
Morgan Bulkeley will be doing a retrospective of his sculpture and painting this fall at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; the opening reception is Friday, September 29 and it will run until February 4, 2018. It will include gouaches from 1967 and wood sculptures and oil paintings from the last 50 years. The show is titled Nature Culture Clash. He’d be happy to see any classmates—or others—at the opening!
We have a new entry into the category of “who knew?”: at the time in the ’60s when the “Ivy style” of dress (khakis, button-down shirts, madras, etc.) was going out of fashion in the US, it was becoming extremely popular in Japan and still is more popular there than here. We learned about this little factoid from a Yale junior who was writing a seminar paper on the topic and was looking for someone of our vintage who could provide him with some detailed information. I put him in touch with Tom Press, who is uniquely positioned on this issue, his father having been the president of clothier J Press when it was bought out by a Japanese outfit in the 1980s. In the course of our correspondence we had some fun reminiscing about the good old days when students could satisfy the coat-and-tie requirement for the dining halls by wearing a jacket with a clip-on tie hooked over a T-shirt or, better yet, with a tie around the neck and no shirt!
The New York Times has for years included a popular column entitled Metropolitan Diary which recounts stories about quirky little events happening in the city. In the past month or so I have had my own Yale ’66 Metropolitan Diary, running into Dave Rigby at a neighborhood pizza parlor, Tom Barry at a meeting of a foreign affairs think tank, and Gene Dattel coming out of the office of my favorite periodontist!
Steve Clement has finally retired after serving for 28 years as the headmaster of NYC’s prestigious Browning School. Notwithstanding his retirement, Steve says he is busier than ever, having said “yes” to too many offers of board positions. One of them is for Robert College of Istanbul, a 154-year-old coeducational boarding school in Istanbul.