Class of 1976

Hello, classmates. As you read this, we are closing in on 2025 and about 20 months until our 50th reunion. Your class officers hope everyone who can will chip in and make June 12-14, 2026, memorable. Please contact Naomi Kleinman if you want to volunteer for a committee. It’s also a good time for a shout-out to our consistent and attentive social media chief, Joe Jasinski. He doesn’t receive enough credit, but if you check our class Facebook page, you’ll find all sorts of current news about the College and us. His volunteer work is the epitome of giving. From that Facebook page, you could have linked to a story in Wired about the revolutionary significance of BASIC. Quoting from the piece: “It was BASIC that really blew the lid off. It was created in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, two math professors at Dartmouth College who figured—in a stance that presaged the ‘Learn to Code’ movement of the 2010s—that coding ought to be something any liberal arts student could learn. This transformed coding into a conversation with the machine. Programming was like thinking out loud.…This back-and-forth dance with the machine made the whole process of coding less forbidding. It felt less like doing very important design and more like just messing around. Many of the world’s most popular languages (like JavaScript and Python) are now interpreted on the fly, but BASIC was among the first.” Even we history and English majors share some pride around BASIC. On a similar laudatory note, The New York Times in June celebrated the life of John Wilmerding, an art history professor at the College, 1966-77, and someone I count as the major mentor who gave me the confidence to become a journalist and writer. “John Wilmerding, a towering figure in American art whose eclectic career as a scholar, museum curator, and collector was instrumental in elevating the cultural significance and market value of painters such as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Fitz Henry Lane, died on June 6 in Manhattan. He was 86.…When Mr. Wilmerding began teaching in the 1960s, American art was underappreciated if not totally unknown. There were virtually no university survey courses in the subject, textbooks, or major exhibitions. ‘American art just didn’t hold the same sort of attention and respect that European art did and certainly the art of the Renaissance or the old masters,’ ” said Justin Wolff, chairman of the art history department at the University of Maine and a former student of Mr. Wilmerding’s. “ ‘It was behind culturally. It didn’t really have an identity.’ Mr. Wilmerding helped give it one.” Class treasurer Brewer Doran reported we had a good year. Total revenue for the fiscal year was up 8.2 percent and dues payments rose 9.3 percent. It’s never too early or too late to pay your $76 annual dues, which will in part help support our 50th. The link is easy to find if you Google our class. If you haven’t seen the Matt Damon-Casey Affleck farce The Instigators, you’ll approve of one of the props. Enjoy the holidays. Please send news of yourself and or classmate friends to steve@stevebellcommunications.com. Ciao for now.

—Steve Bell, 15 Harbour Pointe, Buffalo, NY 14202; steve@stevebellcommunications.com