This page is designed for tributes to those class members who died prior to July 7, 2004, when the this class website was inaugurated.  Before then, the only obituaries of deceased classmates conveyed to us were those that appeared in the columns of the Yale Alumni Magazine, where the obituaries were necessarily brief.  There was no opportunity, like those provided by email messages and space on this website, to post or send longer, fuller notices to everyone.  This page offers the chance to make up for that earlier deficiency.  Any classmate who wishes to write a memorial tribute to a classmate who died before July 7, 2004 is warmly encouraged to do so and to send it to jbanner@aya.yale.edu. It will then be posted here for all to read.

Temby Argall, by Jim Banner (posted November 3, 2006)

Temby Argall, by Jim Banner (posted November 3, 2006)

He was a very gentle man, and there were few who knew him who didn’t love him. I met him freshman year and became his roommate when we entered Branford College. He’d grown up in Lakeville, Connecticut, where his father cut the hair of generations of Hotchkiss School students. Not surprisingly, while living at home he attended Hotchkiss; and while I never heard it from this reserved, sweet man, I suspect that he suffered the subtle discriminations that "townies" always seem to have to suffer in a boarding school environment.

One would have thought that at the Yale of our days, filled with young men whom my own Yale son terms "triplets"-"guys with three last names," as he says-a man who carried the three names of Temby Richie Argall would have about him the whiff of aristocracy, wealth, and entitlement. Nothing could have been farther from the case. Of Scots origins, yes, but also of Scots simplicity. Firm at the core, he could be the easy friend to all, open to everyone, always good humored, and quick with laughter, especially at absurdity. And that gentleness: everyone who came upon him felt it and loved him for it.

But underneath that gentleness, sometimes appearing as reserve, worked other forces, forces that even Temby didn’t know or understand until after college. I don’t believe that as a collegian he ever fell into the depressions that would torment his later years. If so, he never revealed them. True to his caring nature, he went off to medical school and became a doctor. It was during his years of training and then service in the army that he was initially struck by the inner demons of what we now know of as bi-polar, or manic, depression. Though through two marriages, the first of which gave him three daughters, he was able repeatedly to pull himself back from the brink of despond and serve as general practitioner and family doctor beloved by all whom he treated, he was never free of the torments and dangers of periodic, deep depression. It eventually forced him to give up his general medical practice and to take up work instead as member of a hospital staff-a kind of occupational anchor that relieved him of the responsibilities of personal care when he just wasn’t up to helping others.

I thought that he had finally found surcease from depression with the aid of medical drugs and the comforts of a second marriage. When I would see him then, he seemed robust and full of smiles and laughs, the Temby whom I had known when at Yale. But when he attended a party for my 60th birthday, I knew that all again was not well. He didn’t look healthy, his eyes were glassy, he was struggling to be social. Not long after, one morning I received a call from Larry Kramer, another of Temby’s old friends, telling me that Temby had taken his life. He had not been able to battle back those demons after all.

His struggle cost him dearly, and his death cost his friends much anguish. A man of such richness done in by illness he wrestled with but could never conquer. Others have known that struggle. I never have. I can only imagine how terrible it must have been. And I can only marvel that, fighting it, Temby was able to give such love, friendship, and comfort to so many for as long as he did.