"A 65th Reunion"

Seven of us, out of a class of 80, trudged through the sunshine on that comfortably warm June day to attend their 65^th reunion from what was then Williston Academy and is today the Williston Northampton School in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Remarkably, none of us were placed “on bounds.” The youngster – third from the left – is the author of this essay. 

The timing of this remembrance is auspicious, as we are just back from Darien, Connecticut where we attended the high school graduation of a granddaughter who is off to Notre Dame in the fall.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“A 65^th Reunion”

June 16, 2024

 

“I count myself in nothing else so happy as in a soul remembering my good friends.”

                                                                                                                               William Shakespeare (c.1564-1616)

                                                                                                                                Richard II

                                                                                                                                Henry Bolingbroke speaking

                                                                                                                                Act 2, Scene 3

 

On June 7, Caroline and I drove to my high school’s 65^th reunion in Easthampton, Massachusetts, home of the Williston Northampton School, but what had been Williston Academy. Those 65 years have passed quickly, except when parsed and we enumerate some of what has transpired. 

 

In 1959, Dwight Eisenhower was in his 7^th year as President. There was no internet, and the first cell phone, a Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, was fourteen years in the future. The population of the United States was a little more than half of what it is today. The average age of an American in 1959 was 29.5 years versus 38.9 years today, with life expectancy of 69.9 years against 79.1 years in 2023. A year’s tuition in 2024 at Williston cost $76,600; in 1959, the cost was around $1,500 – suggesting an increase of about four times the rate of inflation – a trend consistent with almost all of America’s private schools and colleges.

 

Another way of looking at how long those sixty-five years have been is to recognize that 65 years before the 80 of us in the class of 1959 graduated was 1894, a time when horse-drawn carriages carried our fore-fathers along unpaved streets. 

 

………………………………………………………….

 

While we had driven up on Friday afternoon, we only arrived at the school on Saturday in time for lunch. (It happened that our youngest son was at Deerfield – about twenty miles north – for his 35^th reunion. And since he was one of the speakers, we wanted to hear him.) Back at Williston, walking across the quad, with the Homestead – once home of the school’s headmaster – on our right, Memorial Hall (Memorial Dorm where I lived for two years) on our left, I sensed being a student again, but with my wife on my right and a hesitancy in my step I was quickly brought back to the present.

 

Seven from our class returned, coming from California, Texas, New York and Connecticut. We had nametags with our yearbook photos, so the grizzled faces would be recognizable as the youths we once were. We did not know how many of our classmates were deceased, but a guess was about twenty-five. It was fun to catch up with people we had known in school but who had gone on to different lives and careers – jeweler, entrepreneur, actor, banker/insurance, lawyer, teacher and stockbroker. We recalled school days, but we also talked of lives lived since – of wives (four were present), children and grandchildren, of jobs, travel, hobbies and interests, but not of politics. Among us we had two or three dozen grandchildren, doing our share to help the Country grow. Impressive was the realization that four still work – perhaps not as hard as they once did, but keeping busy. (And that does not include one whose photography continues to win prizes, nor the thirty-seven essays I have written so far this year.)

 

What we have in common were formative teenage years, and memories of those boarding school days.   

"Friendships - Old and New"

                                                                     Sydney M. Williams

Essay from Essex

“Friendships – Old and New”

December 18, 2021

 

“’Friendship,’ said Christopher Robin, ‘is a very comforting thing to have.’”

                                                                                                                                Winnie the Pooh, 1926

             A.A. Milne (1882-1956)

 

An unexpected benefit of writing essays has been old friends retained and new friends made. With an e-mail list that approaches two thousand, included are friends who go back to boarding school days, a few from college, and from my first job on Wall Street with Merrill Lynch in 1967, to my last at Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co., from which I retired in 2015. While not everyone agrees with my political opinions, they tolerate my right to express them. Some on the list are friends of friends and even friends of those friends. Many I have never met but hearing from them is pleasurable, as they are provocative and energizing. In a letter to Lidian Jackson Emerson, wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau wrote: “Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and the longitudes.” In my case, I don’t think of latitudes and longitudes; what I do think is that friends make the world smaller and more intimate – a happier and better place.

 

Some of my more personal Essays from Essex are based on nostalgia – that time cleanses memory of past unpleasantness. Quoting studies by Professor Clay Routledge, a psychologist at North Dakota State University, Elizabeth Bernstein wrote in the November 17, 2021 issue of The Wall Street Journal: “Nostalgia increases positive mood, self-esteem and self-confidence…It makes us feel more socially connected and optimistic. It helps us feel that life has more meaning.” Recently, I attended a lunch with a few alumni from Williston Academy, three of whom were 1959 classmates. While our genetic determinants are decided at conception, our character is molded over time, especially in our early years, from families, friends and school. So, it is unsurprising that we prize returning to those days when our identity was being formed. Each of us is unique, but we share certain of life’s experiences, like teachers, coaches, bosses and even drill sergeants. A shared past allows us to recollect, companionably, of former times. 

 

Friendship is a non-obligatory, reciprocated relationship between two people who share common interests. Most of us have friends, orbiting different spheres. For example, I have school friends, work friends, friends with whom I skied, friends my wife and I see in Florida, or on the New Jersey shore where we go in August. My wife and I have friends at Essex Meadows, where we now live. I have friends with whom I enjoy ROMEO (retired old men eating out) lunches, and friends from volunteering at local organizations. Friendships outlast separation. In his collection of essays Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “I was going to say, when I was interrupted…” The interruption to which he referred had occurred twenty-five years earlier. That quote would come to mind during my first evening in Vail with skiing friends, when the conversation would pick up just where it had left off a year earlier. 

 

“To be without friends is a serious form of poverty,” speaks Victor Moore as Aloysius T. McKeever in Roy Del Ruth’s 1947 comedy, It Happened on Fifth Avenue. He is right, and I am fortunate to have all of you as friends, as well as a wife who is my best friend – and has been for almost sixty years.

 

Thank you for your friendship, and I wish you the best for the Holidays and for all of the New Year.