An e-mail from Henry Ruth to Class Secretary, Barry Bryant
April 16, 2003

Barry,

Recently, I was looking through "Time and Change - Yale 1952 - The 50th Reunion" and was struck by your life essay's emphasis upon the fortuitous nature of the key decisions in your life. As one who has wandered through about 18 different jobs since Yale days, I can relate to fortuity and to how its presentation of sudden, unexpected choices is indeed one of life's blessings.

As one who entered college as a naive 17-year-old, I was acutely unaware of the omnibus nature of choices available at Yale and consequently did not take advantage of all that was there for us. I was fortunate to have two superior human beings as roommates for almost four full years, Dick Schneider and Sam Lewis, and we are still in contact with one another. And the chance to broadcast the Yale basketball games on WYBC, 640 on your dial, was truly just plain fun. But I have never attended a Yale reunion and hope to live long enough to perhaps experience a 60th.

After retirement from law, government, research, commission, teaching and other jobs, I immediately unretired to co-author with Kevin Reitz a book that Harvard University Press has just published, "The Challenge of Crime: Rethinking Our Response" (2003). The book deals with crime and the revolution in crime response in America the past 35 years, and then offers suggestions about where we can go from here, given the budget crises at all levels of government.

Who knows what's next? Our Yale generation was so privileged, had so many choices, met comparatively with so little competition, and has now experienced a span of time that covered throwing coal into the house furnace in the 1930s to sending an e-mail to Barry Bryan in the 21st century. We also experienced an American revolution for women and minorities and watched the nation wobble from President to President. We Americans look at each other so differently today, compared to 1952. But in many ways too, we look at each other perhaps the same way as then. It would be fun to have fifty more years of life just to see what will happen to the human condition and the human soul.

Hank Ruth