Class Note 1958. The winter months are proving to be their usual wasteland of original news for the bimonthly column of this magazine. I was originally tempted to turn to ChatGPT to help me create 350 fascinating words about what I didn’t really know about the class. So I decided to improvise by creating ChatJCT, a preposterously original, AI-influenced puffery from which you will learn almost nothing! Were I in residence on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, my seasonal domain, I would be looking out windows caked from the 20 inches of snow that fell in 20 minutes earlier in the week. We still have no clue whether our trusty generator was trusty, since our trusty prepaid system that we trust will tell us whether its trusty promise to send us notifications whenever power is untrusty, has proven untrustworthy. Instead, we gaze out a third-floor window in Naples, Florida, at a landscape that for much of the prior month has been frosted with unseasonable temperatures and green iguanas that have fallen out of their tree perches by the hundreds, thereby doing what hunters of invasive species have failed to do to reduce their numbers. Our trusty southwest Florida temperatures have tested record low levels in untrustworthy ways, throwing the whole weather conundrum widdershins and, heaven forbid, destroying countless golf days. Intruding in these fables have been a couple of pieces of real news. John Voll tells me his book, The Eighteenth Century: A World History, has been published by Oxford University Press. Scott Pardee wrote to compliment the publication of The Sound and Fury: A True Story Made of Whole Cloth, published in its editor’s mind. Ron Zwart paid a surprise visit to Naples and over lunch he recounted a U.S. State Department-sponsored time on a farm during which he learned how to milk cows. Tax dollars well spent! Unfortunately, we also have to report several classmate deaths: Beven M. French, Edwin “Ned” Stedem Jr., James D. Brackett, M.D., Mahdi A. El-Baghdadi, Richard Saez, and Charles H. “Kit” Cowperthwaite.
—John Trimble, 2735 Golfside Court, Naples, FL 34110; (508) 737-7420; jtrim99@comcast.net