This page is for the use of those who wish to register their thoughts and views, record their doings, tell stories of their lives, and the like at lengths that cannot be accommodated in The Yale Alumni Magazine.  Send all proposed submissions to the corresponding secretary.

Greg Austin: Commitments and Contributions (posted August 7, 2007)
Brian Walsh: Moneymaker Didn't Do It - Inky Clark Did (posted March 24, 2007)
Bob Pelletreau: Where We Stand in the Middle East (posted February 18, 2007)
Dave Johnson: A Proud Father's Daughter's Best-selling Book (posted October 6, 2006)
Larry Kramer: Nuremberg Trials for AIDS (posted September 15, 2006)
Dave Johnson: A Tale of Yale (posted July 31, 2006)
Bob Rosefsky: Touring Help Solicited (posted January 24, 2006) and Addendum (posted July 22, 2006)

Greg Austin: Commitments and Contributions (posted August 7, 2007)

For God, for Country, and for Yale? Did we ever really think about that while we were students? Now, with 50 years of accumulated wisdom, is it time for us to do a re-write?

As a start, should All Humanity come ahead of Country? Should Family come ahead of Yale? How many of us truly put God first, and how about those of us who do not believe in a personal God?

Okay, trying to keep it to 25 words or less, how about "For Contribution to Humanity, Commitment to Family, Adherence to Principles, and Continued Alumni Support"? Not snappy enough? Perhaps the re-write would be a good class project.

Turning to an entirely different subject: As a senior at Yale, I sent money (it might have been $15) to Fidel Castro to back his efforts to overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Since then, I have supported many politicians, sometimes just with a vote, sometimes with money, and sometimes with real effort. I have had not only hope but also real confidence in my candidates. With only a couple of exceptions, the result has always been the same. I did not get what I expected. I should have learned that the first time.

Credit is due equally to my formal education and to the bull sessions at Yale for my desire, even now, to make political commitments. There can be no question that involvement is the right thing. However, I have grown to feel that I can safely devote more attention to family, friends, fishing, shooting, golf and the like, and less attention to politics, without severe harm to the Republic.

As to the critical issues faced by humanity, the older I get, the less I know for sure.

Brian Walsh: Moneymaker Didn't Do It - Inky Clark Did (posted March 24, 2007)

Since the end of the 19th century there has been a member of my family at Yale every thirty years, with a brother and a niece in between. My grandfather graduated from Yale in 1897, and my father in 1929, just twenty-eight years before that beautiful day of June 10th in 1957. My nephew and God-son then graduated in 1987, just to keep the string going.

When we were freshmen, I often thought how little Yale changed between my grandfather’s time and that of my father. My father thought my years at Yale were astonishingly different from his, though, for I remember his muttering that we no longer had to take Latin and Greek. Then there was also that matter of Yale’s national football championships in his 1920's of which he took great pride, even as a diver for Yale’s championship swimming team. What really got to him, I suspect, were those mustard yellow pants on our "eleven."

As the years passed, however, I began to see how remarkably similar were the 1920's and the 1950's in New Haven, and that the two world wars between my grandfather’s time and ours had relatively little effect compared to the enormous changes occurring from 1957 to my nephew’s experience at Yale. It is tempting to say this is all due to rapidly changing technology, but I am convinced it is much more a matter of a tremendously changing culture. Interestingly, from 1987 to 2007 not that much appears to have changed except technology.

Aside, from the obvious, such as co-education, a comparatively huge influx of racial and ethnic diversity, and an unprecedented expansion of the campus, including two new colleges, Yale has become much more meritorious in its admissions policies and strategies and more political as to how meritorious is defined. We had a hard enough time imagining a Yale with women, let alone a Yale where all who were admitted were guaranteed a way of paying for it. My recollection of our 1950's is that the campus was vastly Republican, if somewhat moderately so. Who would have guessed then what the political climate has become now?

Moneymaker didn't do it - Inky Clark did!

Bob Pelletreau: Where We Stand in the Middle East (posted February 18, 2007)

Yale ’57 Luncheon

February 3, 2007

Thank you, Dick [Jones], and thanks for the invitation. This is the first time Pam and I have come to this winter get-together and we think it’s a great idea.

A few weeks ago, I was in Egypt attending a conference and happened to be sitting next to the Foreign Minister at dinner one evening. We’d known each other for about 15 years, and after downloading on me the usual litany of complaints an American hears in the Middle East these days, he became ultra-serious and said, “You know, Bob, we in Egypt have invested our future in the United States. What really concerns us is not the one-sidedness of your policies or your unpopularity with our public opinion; what really concerns us is your incompetence.”

After the clear outcome of our mid-term elections, after the fall of his approval ratings into the thirties, after the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report, compiled by foreign policy heavyweights of both parties, the President and his advisors have conducted a “strategic review” and rejected all these messages. Instead, they have come up with a policy adjustment that most Middle East experts regard as basically more of the same: a few more troops to Iraq (21,500 to add to the 130,000 already there); a more threatening posture toward Iran; still no engagement with Syria; a little more effort in Afghanistan, but we can’t afford much; and a little more involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an improvement but not enough to reverse six years of violence, hatred and growing separation between the two communities.

Let’s take a few minutes to look a little more deeply into where we stand in this violent and tormented region, our President’s nightmare and the probable determinant of his place in history, by briefly examining each of the Administrations five priorities in the Middle East, stated in its own terms as follows:

• pressing the war on terrorism;
• pursuing victory in Iraq;
• preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons;
• spreading democracy; and
• achieving a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would allow both parties, particularly our friend and ally Israel, to live in peace and security.

THE WAR ON TERRORISM

Most of us know where we were on 9/11. I happen to have been in Cairo and was able to spend the next week that I was stuck there sampling Egyptian reactions. There was no question that the government was with us. These were the same people who had assassinated President Sadat and almost killed President Mubarak, but popular reactions were more complicated. There was denial - that Egyptians could have been among the terrorists; fear - that America would blindly lash out at the countries they came from; revulsion - at the acts of discrimination against Arabs and Muslims that began to appear in this country; and finally, a certain grim satisfaction that said, “America, it’s your turn now.”

Our understandable response was to go after Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, perhaps the most remote and difficult terrain on earth, with impressive early results. We created a new sprawling bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security, and have begun to tighten up on some glaring deficiencies. Intelligence cooperation with other governments has improved and the FBI and CIA now sometimes speak to each other and even share information. International money flows are more transparent and closely regulated. Our legislators and judges are struggling to define how far national security concerns in our era will be allowed to affect Americans’ right to privacy and the rights of defendants to a fair trial.

We seem, however, to have taken our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and his network remain at large and operational, the Taliban is coming back from its incomplete defeat, and opium production is soaring. And the reason for our diverted focus, Iraq, has turned from a nasty and tightly run dictatorship into a magnet and training ground for would-be terrorists.

IRAQ

It’s no secret that we and 26 million Iraqis are in serious trouble. Behind the daily spin of positive news, there is mounting evidence of the spread of civil war and a continuous drain of casualties, both ours and theirs, whose sacrifice will mark our respective societies for years to come. The recently released National Intelligence Estimate is properly pessimistic.

Our objectives four years ago when we launched this war of choice seemed clear: eliminate the threat from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, topple the tyrant, establish a free, stable and prosperous society. The means? A shock and awe bombing campaign followed by an armored drive on Baghdad. Forget about the looting. Forget about the thousands of dismissed Iraqi soldiers and police returning to their villages with their weapons and training but no future livelihood. Forget about securing the borders. Restore electricity and oil exports and the cheering Iraqis would do the rest.

Today, with multi-billion dollar deficits following multi-billion dollar deficits, it is clear to most that we are not succeeding, that we’ve bitten off more than we can chew.

The President still talks of victory, but 70% of Americans oppose his plan to send more troops who will become more active and exposed in the daily fighting in Baghdad. The Congress is clearly reflecting the public mood and we can expect much more rigorous focus and debate on the Hill than in the past. Much as we would like the President’s new plan to succeed, there seems to me very little likelihood that it will.

Yes, over the next few months we can surge five more brigades into Baghdad and they can play a bigger combat role (and take more casualties), but the Iraqi army is in no position to do its part. It can’t surge to the 18 brigades called for in the new strategy without ordering its Kurdish units to Baghdad and they have no interest in becoming involved in inter-Arab, Sunni-Shia sectarian fighting. In fact, the first Kurdish unit ordered south out of Iraqi Kurdistan had a desertion rate of over 50%. Inadequate equipment is another huge problem. And Baghdad is far from the only city in conflict, as recent horrendous bombings in Hilla and Kirkuk have demonstrated. It’s also possible that some militia groups will simply go to ground for awhile, hide their weapons, and wait us out.

The other Iraqi commitments in the plan are equally uncertain: reconciliation in a parliament that rarely achieves a quorum and often dissolves into shouting matches; agreement on the distribution of oil revenues, none of which come from Sunni areas; allocation of $10 billion of national funds to economic reconstruction when the oil exports that could generate these funds are hardly flowing due to sabotage and smuggling.

The limited consortium of neighboring countries which the Administration is trying to put together does not include Iran or Syria as the Iraq Study Group proposed. We are sending a very good team, General David Petreus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, to replace a very good team, General George Casey and Ambassador Zal Khalilzad, but it’s the policy that is deficient, not the troops or diplomats who are trying to make it work. What is needed here is a serious and comprehensive diplomatic surge, not another military surge, which has been tried before.

IRAN

A clear beneficiary of the removal of Saddam and the Taliban from power has been Iran which is today awash in budgetary surpluses thanks to the continuing high demand for its oil and gas and increasingly confident that its revolution is secure. Here is a nation of almost 70 million people, located in the midst of a geo-strategic area, possessing the world’s second largest gas reserves and fifth largest petroleum deposits, center of a rich civilization and culture, which the United States has been determinedly, unilaterally and unsuccessfully trying to isolate for over a quarter of a century. Our posture of hostility, instead of persuading Iran to forego uranium enrichment, has helped make it a national imperative which virtually every Iranian supports. It is a country with problems to be sure: an outrageous gamecock of a president who denies the holocaust, consorts with Chavez in Venezuela and is becoming too much even for many of his supporters, and an economy that is struggling to modernize amid corruption and lack of foreign investment, but despite these weaknesses, Iran’s influence is increasing, especially in Iraq and Lebanon.

We have tried various tactics: threats, shouts, prohibiting Americans from almost all contact, encouraging Europeans to engage, hauling Iran before the UN Security Council, but we’ve always withheld the thing the Iranian regime wants most, dialogue and recognition from the United States. Instead, we’ve been detaining Iranians in Iraq and continuing to wave a big stick, which in the view of a group of savvy Iranians with whom I’ve met in a track-two exercise, lacks credibility.

PROMOTING DEMOCRACY

The mission of promoting greater democracy in the Middle East is a worthwhile goal if it comes about through internal evolution and in ways consistent with Middle East societies and cultures, but it is doomed to failure if seen as a foreign implant. The word “democracy” as such has become too closely associated in peoples’ minds with a US policy initiative. A prominent democracy advocate in Jordan has told me he can’t speak out any more because he’ll be branded as an American puppet, and the courageous Egyptian sociologist Saad ad-Din Ibrahim, who has been repeatedly imprisoned for his efforts to open up the sclerotic Egyptian political system, is often vilified in Cairo as an American agent.

It would be more palatable and productive to talk about helping evolve governing systems that are responsive to the aspirations of those they govern, of developing transparent and accountable institutions, especially independent judicial systems and a free press, and of expanding civil society outlets that encourage greater popular participation, rather than pushing for immediate elections in places that have no voting experience or tradition. Otherwise, you risk seeing HAMAS elected in Palestine, or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or hard-line Shia clerics in Iraq. That, of course, is exactly what has been happening.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Mentioning HAMAS brings me to the Arab-Israeli conflict which ought to be more of an Administration priority than it is. My own career has been more closely linked to this intractable conflict than any other: as a hostage taken by a Palestinian guerrilla group in Jordan in 1970, as our principal negotiator with the PLO in the late 80’s, as a member of Secretary Warren Christopher’s negotiating team in the 90’s and as co-director with Pam of an international conflict resolution organization in Jerusalem in 2004-2005.

The six years of the Bush Administration have been largely a story of disengagement, neglect and let the Israelis do as they wish, and the result has been wider divisions, less contact and interaction between Israeli and Palestinian officials, a declining economy and growing Islamization of the Palestinian community. Israel has overwhelming military superiority, but a proud and nationalistic people will always resist foreign occupation and Israelis will never be fully secure until they are at peace with their neighbors.

The last few weeks have seen some hopeful signs. Secretary Rice’s last visit to the region produced the prospect of informal talks between Palestinian President Abbas and Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert under our auspices, and both we and Israel have begun to realize, belatedly, that we have to provide more support to Fatah in its confrontation with HAMAS. The Saudis have also helpfully invited Fatah and HAMAS leaders to the Kingdom for reconciliation talks. But negotiation over the real issues is a long way off and even if we do get there, it may well be that the gap between what the Israelis are willing to offer and what the Palestinians are able to accept will be too wide to bridge. Meanwhile, the violence and the killing continue.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, the results of our various policies in the Middle East - reducing the threat of terrorism, establishing stable and prosperous democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan, dissuading Iran from developing nuclear weapons, expanding democracy and securing greater peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors - while all works in progress, all seem to be going downhill.

If 9/11 should have taught us anything, it is that the United States cannot build a wall and expect to live safely behind it while conducting selective military campaigns outside. We need to work with other governments and societies, as many as possible, to confront the global challenges of the 21st century: not only terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, but problems such as ethnic conflicts, drug trafficking, HIV/AIDS and avian flu, and environmental degradation. A United States that acts in this manner, listens as well as speaks, and takes the views of others into account in shaping its policies, will be welcomed abroad as a partner, not distrusted as an adversary.

In the long run, there is really no other way.

Dave Johnson: A Proud Father's Daughter's Best-selling Book (posted October 6, 2006)

Some years ago my oldest daughter, Elizabeth, informed me that she was writing a novel. "That's nice, what's your novel about?" I asked. "Vlad the Impaler-- Count Dracula, and Eastern Europe." I used to tell the kids Dracula stories when we were living in the early 1970's in Tito's Yugoslavia, where I was doing research and writing. So I could hardly object to the subject, though I thought it unlikely that Dracula would have wide appeal.

Elizabeth worked on the book for ten years, carefully researching the topic in libraries and in Eastern Europe to which she had become attached. In the late 1980's with the fall of Communism, Eastern Europe had become more accessible and of more interest to Americans. As a Yale undergraduate Elizabeth helped form the popular Yale Slavic Chorus. After graduating in 1988 with a major in British Studies, Elizabeth and several of her sister "Slavs" obtained a travel grant to research and record folk music in Russia, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. They came back with music, and Elizabeth, with a Bulgarian husband. So Elizabeth Johnson became Elizabeth Kostova.

Elizabeth finished work on her novel a few years later. She titled it, The Historian. (It is filled with professors, librarians, and diplomats who write history). The literary agent who read it was sure it was publishable given the popularity of The DaVinci Code. Indeed, Little, Brown snapped it up, and upon publication in 2005 it immediately went to the top of the New York Times fiction list, a record for a first-time author. A paperback edition is due in October 2006. SONY has bought the film rights and scripting is in progress. The Historian has been translated into 36 languages and has been a best seller in a dozen countries. We are all quite overwhelmed and astonished at Elizabeth's achievement.

The Historian is a good read, hard to put down once you start. Yale alums will recognize a number of places and scenes in the book, including Sterling Library.

Larry Kramer: Nuremberg Trials for AIDS (posted September 15, 2006)

AIDS has been a plague since 1982, although officially it never has been called one. I was recently asked by The New York Times to participate in a public forum entitled “AIDS at 25: What next?” I was not allowed to make the following remarks; indeed, a representative of The Times attempted to prevent the distribution of them to the audience. The forum was about the future of what is incorrectly called a “pandemic.” But you don’t learn much about how to live in the future until you understand the past. Surely Freud taught us this. Unfortunately, the future and what is going to happen is obvious. Many millions more people will die, drug companies will continue their insatiable and never-ending evil greed, and governments, particularly our own, will not stop their base, mean behavior in the face of so much death. None of this will change, no matter how many panels or public forums or Bill Gateses there are. It is deeply disheartening that 25 years later the message remains the same. No, we must face up to the past and ask why this plague has happened.

From the beginning AIDS has been a disease inextricably and irretrievably bound up in the minds of the world with homosexuals. There is not one person in the world, even South African wives infected by their itinerant truck driver husbands, who, when hearing the word “AIDS” or “HIV,” does not think the word “homosexual,” or, more likely, faggot or fairy or queer or their local equivalent. Homosexuals are hated everywhere in the world. That is why there is a plague, and why the plague will continue.

The mayor of New York when this plague started was a closeted homosexual. Ron Reagan, the ballet-dancing son of the president of the United States, was thought to be a homosexual even by his father and mother, who had her own sexual proclivities to hide. (See my book, The Tragedy of Today’s Gays: Penguin; and my play, Just Say No: Grove Press.) The original director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the division of the National Institutes of Health that should have been responsible for HIV and AIDS, was a homosexual. His assistant was a homosexual. The editor-in-chief of The New York Times that covered this plague so abominably and destructively was virulently homophobic. Even Mrs. Iphigene Sulzberger, the matriarch of the Sulzberger clan that owns The New York Times, became exceedingly unsettled when anything about homosexuals appeared in her paper. It is deeply disheartening that the actions of all of the above remain uninvestigated and unreported and unchallenged 25 years and more than 70,000,000 infections later.

Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien and Dr. Linda Laubenstein and Dr. Mathilde Krim and Dr. Joseph Sonnabend and Dr. Lawrence Mass were the only doctors I know of who warned outright and from the very beginning that a virus was at large and immediate caution was required by all. Their warnings were in no way heeded. Dr. Laubenstein was the only doctor anywhere in the world I know of who said, bluntly and immediately and from the very beginning, “stop fucking each other to death.” The director of her NYU Medical Center, Dr. Saul Farber, branded her a crazy person and put a cap on the number of patients she was allowed to admit. No warnings of any sort ever came from any official anywhere, in the New York government, in the Federal government, in the NIH, in the Public Health Service. By the time the virus was actually identified, on the eve of 1985, pretty much every gay man in the world who had sex had been exposed to this virus or to someone who had been exposed to this virus.

We are currently witnessing endless commemorations of various milestones of HIV/AIDS, as it now is called. To commemorate something without even knowing and acknowledging its history and how the actions and inactions of individuals and institutions and governments caused and shaped that history of this plague is a harsh and tragic joke. This country still admits to shockingly little, even when it is staring us in the face. A formalized and honest process to establish the facts of the history of this plague must be initiated.

I do not expect The New York Times to own up to its own enormous role in allowing this plague to progress any more than I expect The New York Times to honestly and completely own up to its repellant record of reporting the Holocaust. On this latter unbearably sad subject I refer you to Buried by the Times, by Professor Laurel Leff, (Cambridge University Press, 2005). As with AIDS, it defies reason, nay sanity, what this “newspaper of record” did not report about the Holocaust. Additionally, just prior to the Holocaust, the Times Moscow correspondent from 1921–1934, a most peculiar man named Walter Duranty, received a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for actually denying the gigantic famine and widespread starvation going on in Russia under Stalin’s purges. He and his paper completely whitewashed Stalin. What is it about this newspaper that it is so cowardly when it comes to fully and honestly reporting the horrors of our times? It is no small feat to falsely report, downplay, ignore, describe it as you will, three of the biggest tragedies of the 20th century. It makes one forever suspicious of the veracity and validity of their coverage of anything, most certainly of the world’s horrors today. When the leading newspaper in the world behaves like this, setting the template for all other papers all over the world to follow, which they unfortunately do, how are we to have a true history of anything?

These are the writers who covered HIV/AIDS for The New York Times: Richard Flaste, Erik Eckholm, Dr. Lawrence Altman, Nicholas Wade, Philip Boffey, Gina Kolata, and Philip Hilts. Each was as bad as the others. How bad? Read my book, Reports From the Holocaust (St. Martin’s Press) for details on how badly this newspaper has reported AIDS. Kolata was so bad that ACT UP plastered New York and the Times building with stickers: “Gina Kolata of The New York Times is the worst AIDS reporter in the world.” They took her off that beat. But they never replaced her with a reporter who covered AIDS specifically. And the job they are doing is still awful. The Times has never, ever, covered the politics of HIV/AIDS, particularly in America, as they cover the politics of other serious issues. But then, the politics of AIDS are inextricably embedded in all that I am writing about here. All grist for a Nuremberg Trials, no?

Yes, I would like to see something set up to document the real history of this plague akin to the Nuremberg Trials, which nailed Nazi responsibility for the Holocaust,. Why did or didn’t Edward Koch do X? Why did or didn’t Ronald Reagan do X? Ron Reagan, Jr.? Nancy Reagan? Dr. Richard Krause and Dr. Jack Whitescarver of the NIH? Abe Rosenthal of The New York Times? Sulzberger mother, son, and grandson of the Times? The drug companies that made Factor VIII? The list is an extensive and far-reaching one, certainly not confined to these major villains. Each of many, many people committed acts of inconceivable inhumanity that must be documented. Without such official documentation, the politics of homo-hating and bigotry will continue to rule the world and this plague will never end.

I have spent the past twenty-five years or so researching and writing my own history of America and of the cause of HIV/AIDS. My book is called The American People: A History. Writing and researching this history has convinced me that the plague of HIV/AIDS has been intentionally allowed to happen.

Two of my most recent findings are these:

HIV made its entrance into the gay population through infected Factor VIII as injected by gay hemophiliacs. Factor VIII is a treatment that prevents hemophiliacs from bleeding to death. It was available in trials beginning in 1975 and in distribution from 1978. It was manufactured and sold by these companies: Baxter Travenol Laboratories, Alpha Therapeutic Corporation, Armour Pharmaceutical Co. (a division of the Revlon Cosmetics Corporation), and Cutter Laboratories. Each single individual treatment of Factor VIII contains blood parts that have been spun down from the pooled blood of tens of thousands of people. This blood was collected from paid donors all over the world. Only one donor had to be infected for the whole vat of pooled blood to be infected. All of these companies came to know that the blood plasma they had bought all over the world and which they had used to make their Factor VIII was infected with what would become known as HIV. They did not heat-treat this blood, even though early methods to do so had been available since the end of World War II. Even when they possessed the knowledge that their product was infected, these companies did not immediately cease selling their Factor VIII. It will not be until 1987, in this country anyway, that Factor VIII would be completely cleared of poisons. (I am grateful to Pulitzer-prize winning science writer, Laurie Garrett, for first presenting this awful information in her book The Coming Plague, Penguin.) By then the gay population was well on its way to being hideously depleted. One single gay hemophiliac on infected Factor VIII having sex with only one other man on Fire Island in 1975 or so was all it took to get the whole chain rolling. No doubt there may be other scenarios for the origin of HIV in the gay population but this one can never be discounted.

I have also recently discovered that the first cases of AIDS in America were not in gay men. Five cases of extreme immune deficiencies were discovered between 1975 and 1981 in heterosexual women. They were reported by Dr. Henry Masur (et al.), then of Cornell and now of NIH. For very puzzling reasons, this report was not published until October 1982. Had this vital information been published when the discoveries were made, as it should have been, and before the July 1981 New York Times report of “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” (and let us not parse here Dr. Altman’s repellently loaded and inaccurate, homophobic prose in that announcement), HIV/AIDS would not have been forever labeled, with such disastrous results, as a gay disease. From this very first announcement in the Times, the gay population of the world has been and continues to be targeted for extinction.

Because the world hates homosexuals, the world is dying and will continue to die from HIV/AIDS. This plague is the result of a series of individual acts of commission and omission, a huge number of them intentional, that killed people, and were committed by and continue to be committed by people who knew better. Many of the same people who were around in the beginning are still around committing the same actions today. Perhaps Nuremberg Trials would sort such awful behavior out.

It has proved impossible to get any reputable and honest historian or journalist to write about any of the above (with the exception of Laurie Garrett). Telling the truth about this plague has so far proved impossible. A large number of straight publications declined to publish this piece. Seventy million-plus infections later, HIV/AIDS is still not called a plague. Eighty thousand people now die of the disease every day. That is 2,920,000 new dead people every year.

Sean Strub, Rodger McFarlane, and Will Schwalbe contributed information to the above. This piece was published in the August-September 2006 issue of Gay and Lesbian Review.

Dave Johnson: A Tale of Yale (posted July 31, 2006)

Elihu Yale

No doubt most Yale alumni know how Yale University acquired its name—from the eminent Elihu Yale, Governor of the East India Company in Madras, India in the 17th Century. Upon solicitation, Governor Yale contributed a trunk of books and cloth to the struggling Collegiate School in Saybrook. The School elders hoped he would add to his gift in subsequent years, pleased to have the institution named for him. It was a modest price to pay for immortality since his expected largesse never materialized.

Most of us know these facts, but not much more. This was the extent of my knowledge when in 1982 I was touring on the English-Welsh border with my family. I noticed we were near Wrexham and made a successful plea to detour to the Yale estate. I had remembered that Pierson College tower had been modeled after the chapel in Wrexham near the final

Elihu Yale tomb, Wrexham, England

resting place of Elihu Yale as indeed it was. We had an interesting visit and paid a call at Yale’s tomb. He had written his own curious epitaph:

Born in America, in Europe bred, In Africa travell'd and in Asia wed, Where long he liv'd and thriv'd; in London dead Much good, some ill, he did; so hope all's even And that his soul thro' mercy's gone to Heaven. You that survive and read this tale, take care, For this most certain exit to prepare: Where blest in peace, the actions of the just Smell Sweet, and blossom in the silent dust.

My curiosity had been aroused by the intriguing sentiments on the tomb but I did not have a chance to investigate further until 1988 when I received a Fulbright grant to take a group of faculty from my University (Tennessee) to learn about city development in India. Our affiliated Indian institution was Anna University in Madras

David Yale tomb inscription

(now Chennai). So now I had my chance to track down the elusive Mr. Yale in India.

Our group stopped in Delhi en route to South India and the US Ambassador, John Gunther Dean, kindly invited us to a reception at the American embassy. I mentioned to Amb. Dean that, as a Yalie, I was looking forward to visiting Madras where ElihuYale had been Governor. The ambassador replied that as a Harvard graduate he had been frustrated in gaining attention in New Haven to a Yale-related problem in Madras. Amb. Dean had contacted Yale to see if the University would help rescue the decaying last resting place of David Yale,

David Yale Tomb in Chennai, India before restoration

the son of Elihu. No response. Would I look into the issue, the ambassador asked. How could I turn down this challenge from a Harvard?

When I got to Madras I immediately contacted the American consulate there and was taken to the tomb by a delightful Indian lady who worked for the consul-general. The tomb was a 40 foot high obelisk, worthy of Christopher Wren, brown with age with a tree growing out of the spire—very romantic, except for the latrine smell emanating from its base. The lady from the consulate provided me with a perfumed handkerchief to hold over my nose so I could get closer to the inscription at the base. There was the plaque describing the sad tale of David Yale, dead at the age of four from one of the many fatal diseases endemic in 17th C. India.

My Fulbright program over, I returned to the States and

David Yale Tomb in Chennai, India after restoration

paid a call in New Haven to Eustace Theodore, the AYA director at the time. I laid out the situation to Eustace, a resourceful and enthusiastic man who was sympathetic to the cause. Eustace lined up a couple of well-heeled, anonymous alums who agreed to underwrite the preservation and restoration of the monument. This was done, though it took a year or so. The Archeological Survey of India, protector of Indian heritage, was put in charge of the project. David Yale now rests in protected peace.

I returned to Chennai in 2002 on another project and inspected the results. The tomb was now glistening white and protected from the street people with a fence. It seemed a perfect metaphor for the change from the old decaying, romantic India, to the new, gated Silicon Valley India of nearby Bangalore. In a way I preferred the romantic ruin.

Bob Rosefsky: Touring Help Solicited (posted January 24, 2006)

Let me be one of the first to Muse, and ask for some guidelines from classmates. I've started thinking about our 50th reunion next year (wouldn't miss it for the world) and also trying to set our leisure travel plans for the next 12-24 months. Eureka!  If the details all work out, we will drive to (and from) New Haven for the reunion. This might not seem like much of an effort to you ice-encrusted '57s who live in the snow belt, but we live in Palm Springs, CA (as I write on Jan. 23: sunny skies, mid '70s, humidity 14%) so we're going to take upwards of 4-5 weeks for the whole trip.

We've long wanted to do a major "road trip" throughout the US. We've been fortunate to have seen so much of the rest of the world, but not that much of our own land. If we do the trip counter-clockwise, we'll head through Phoenix and Albuquerque, then on into the murky unknown of the south. We'll dip down into Florida to visit family, and then head up the east coast until we reach New Haven.   Returning, we'll take a northerly route until we reach the Yellowstone region, then head south back to Southern California, catching the Utah canyons on the way. Or vice versa.  Only one required stop along the way will be Morgantown, WVA to visit our son and his family there.

We would welcome any ideas as to interesting places to visit along this as-yet-tentative routing. We don't mind straying somewhat from the primary routes. I suspect we'll spend from one to three nights in given stopping places, and shoot for about 300 miles per day when we're rolling along. Send your thoughts to me at rrosefsky@dc.rr.com.  (The address has fooled some;  note that it begins with two 'r's.) We will be most grateful for your ideas, and happy to hear from you in any case.

Addendum (posted July 22, 2006)

My deep thanks to all those classmates who responded to my call for touring guidelines set forth in my Jan. 24 class musing (below).  If we had taken everyone's counsel, we would have driven roughly 26,489 miles in two weeks, and would have had 32 Yale homes to stay in.   Your hospitality and friendship are most appreciated, and we shall reciprocate here in Palm Springs.  (Not today, though.  It's 120 F.  But it's a "dry heat."  17% humidity.)

However, a recent drive to and from Phoenix swayed us against driving to New Haven and back.   Something about older bones being immobilized for days at a stretch made us rethink the whole plan.   So we shall fly east for the reunion, and we look forward to seeing a good crowd of you there.   We've enjoyed past reunions immensely, and this one should be the best of all.