By Arthur Greenwald
As I write this it’s not quite a year since our 30th reunion, and I have to admit I thought we’d be a little further along by now implementing the suggestions from our class survey. Mike Greenwald and I plan to use the summer to jumpstart those initiatives and look forward to reporting our progress in the September/October class notes.
Revised plans and expectations are a popular theme as we all progress through our 50s. Just keeping up can be a full-time job. By our next reunion, for example, will I be producing television shows for broadcast, cable, Internet, iPod, or cell phone? (Correct answer: All of the above.) Last issue I reported that our classmate Virginia Boulet was running for mayor of New Orleans. While she made quite an impact in the debates she didn’t reach the runoff election. But Virginia won a lasting prize: the name recognition and political clout to ensure a role in leading New Orleans’s post-Katrina recovery. After much debate, Virginia threw her support behind incumbent mayor Ray Nagin, who went on to reelection. Virginia expects to be hard at work rebuilding infrastructure, businesses, and housing, and restoring education and medical care.
The road to success was equally surprising to Joy Sterling, who made the most enviable career move of all our classmates. A successful network news producer after college, Joy traded video for vineyards. Specifically, she became marketing director of her family’s business, Iron Horse Vineyards. This job involves extensive travel to fine restaurants where she often hosts wine tastings. (No, she does not need an assistant.) For recreation, Joy enjoys the occasional challenge, like climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. Recently Mark Peters and I had the pleasure of attending a “wine dinner” at the Yale Club of NYC, which Joy hosted with considerable verve.
Joy is also the subject of our second class podcast, which you can listen to or download from our temporary class website at http://web.mac.com/yale1975. There you’ll also find my conversation with Chris Buckley plus a somewhat more ambitious program: a conference call with several of our women classmates who interrupted or curtailed their careers in order to raise their children.
It would be presumptuous to call this an interview, as my main job was to stay out of the way of five majorly smart women from widely varied circumstances: B.K. Munguia had already worked as a public defender and at a major law firm when she decided to raise her kids full-time. Cynthia Tauxe learned she was pregnant the same day she earned her license as an architect. She launched a successful home-based design practice. Joan Berliner-Spear’s path to work and motherhood was more, well, organic. She was working at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage when she met her husband, moved to Connecticut, and launched a natural foods business — while still making time for music and other passions. Nancy Young was a partner in a leading international law firm when she received a wake-up call of sorts, the day after delivering her first child. It was a client who said, “Congratulations. Did you send the documents to Japan?” And after producing dozens of health stories for TV news and writing two books on child development, Amy Liu knew she wanted to balance full-time parenting with a career that emphasized writing. No small trick.
Their stories are vivid and surprising — with support and criticism coming from the most unexpected places. I hope you’ll listen and write to tell us what else you’d like to see and hear as we develop our permanent website.
In fact, write to me for any reason at yale1975@aya.yale.edu. I’m going to need lots of news for the next issue.
In the meantime, please remember to keep your contact information current by visiting http://www.alumniconnections.com/yale/.
And please subscribe to our class listserv: go to www.aya.yale.edu/lists. Have a great summer!