MIT
Class of 1963, Class Notes for September 2001 issue of Technology Review:
Our two class heroes this month sent newsy E-mails about their families and recent activities.
It occurred to Larry Krakauer that though he's often quoted as class president for reporting about others, he hadn't sent news about his own family in years. That omission is rectified in this column. Larry recently finished 22 years at Kronos Incorporated, where he is Vice President, Research and Development. He's been with Kronos since before the release of their first product, through years of growth and a public offering in 1992. Larry is interested in foreign languages. Over the years he's learned French, Spanish, and Italian, and he still remembers some of the conversational German he studied at MIT (Dankeschön, Frau Pan). Now that his children have left home, Larry and Margie have done some vacation travel to France and Italy. Margie left her earlier career as a Social Worker, and is now an artist. She teaches art courses to adults and children through the Wayland, MA Parks and Recreation department. The Krakauer's older daughter, Elissa, attended Brown University, and after a couple of years off, is now studying primates in grad school at Duke University. In the course of her studies, she's had a conversation in sign language with a chimpanzee (the famous Washoe), and traveled twice to Madagascar to study lemurs. Younger daughter Sara graduated in June 2000 from Northwestern University. At the end of that summer she answered an ad in the Boston Globe, and got a job as a private tutor to two young children of a family that was traveling the world. The job took her to Nepal, Thailand, South Africa, Pakistan, and India. She was in India when the job ended and stayed on. After attending lectures by the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, she toured a bit (couldn't miss the Taj Mahal), and volunteered in a remote school/orphanage in the northern state of Sikkim, returning home this spring. Larry noted that during his years at MIT, Building 20 was always about to be torn down imminently. Nevertheless, he worked in it as a graduate student, and after he left, that "temporary" building persisted until last year. But its number has now been permanently retired, and what remains is a "minus seven story luxury hole", to paraphrase a sign on the old Tech Model Railroad Club layout. Work is well underway on the enormous and innovative Ray and Maria Stata Center, which will be largely devoted to Computer Science. When Larry started MIT in 1959, computers were multi-million dollar vacuum tube-based mainframes. "Now," he writes, "conversations about computers permeate the lives of even non-technical people. When MIT admitted its first students in 1865, I don't think the founders could have anticipated how important technology would be to our society, and how intertwined with our culture it would become."
Dick Males writes from Cincinnati. "We've been mostly homebodies for the past 8 months, as a home renovation (now that the kids are gone, why not add on) has consumed much of our attention and finances. It is largely complete, Barbara finally has the kitchen she has deserved all of these years - we have been spending much time there, cooking for friends. Such travel as we have done has been to the east coast (New York, Boston) - I continue to go to Washington, D.C. frequently on business with the Corps of Engineers. We attended the wedding of Bruce Eisenstein's son in Philadelphia last September, very enjoyable, saw Dan Ross. We will be going to Sal Mazzotta's son Matthew's wedding in July 2001, in New Paltz, NY." Dick and Barbara's son Matthew has finished everything but his dissertation at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and will be moving to Minneapolis for the next year, to write and get a teaching job. Younger son Nathaniel continues happily in the Internet world in Chicago. The dot-bomb situation actually seems to have helped the company he works for (Townsend Analytic), as many other companies have turned to them to service clients. Dick's work with the Corps of Engineers involves various kinds of Monte Carlo simulations, risk analysis, and decision support systems – all of it interesting. He maintains his usual sports activities, and has been teaching beginning fencing at the Cincinnati Fencing Club for the past few years (shades of Maestro Silvio Vitale, fencing master at MIT, where Dick tried, but failed, to make the freshman fencing team - a good call on their part, he now realizes). He recently purchased a mountain bike, to add to his skis, snowboard, kayaks, windsurfers, and road bikes. Dick's motto is "you cannot have too much gear, " and he promises to report later on the injuries he suffers from mountain biking. Much of his time is devoted to music, playing the accordion in a local contradance band, and participating in occasional jam sessions on traditional folk music. He's been playing in the band for about a year and a half, playing for dances every month, with occasional gigs in between. Always outspoken, Dick writes, "I am absolutely appalled by George W. Bush and the activities of the Republican-dominated Congress. I was, of course, a partisan for Al Gore, put in a little time doing precinct work around election time, even though Ohio was not in play. I feel that terrible things are happening now on behalf of the grandchildren I hope to have, from taxes, to social policy, to religion, to energy, to civil liberties, to the environment, to the judiciary, to women's control over their bodies. Unfortunately, living in a conservative area, with solid conservative congressmen and senators, I have nowhere to turn."
In the last year your class secretary has become an avid stargazer and amateur astronomer. My interest was sparked by my six-year-old grandson, Ted, who is very into space, the planets, and astronauts. I've been reading about astronomy and astronomers and two books I recommend are "Galileo's Daughter" by Dava Sobel and "Coming of Age in the Milky Way" by Timothy Ferris. "Coming of Age…" even has an MIT '63 connection. There's a quote about stellar production of heavy elements from Frank Shu's outstanding astrophysics textbook "The Physical Universe." I last saw Frank in 1988, when we had dinner in a Mountain View, CA restaurant, and talked about old friends and our then upcoming 25th reunion. Frank was chair of the Astronomy Department at UC Berkeley, so I decided to snoop around the UCB web site to see what he's been up to recently. Quite a bit it seems. In 1998 Frank was named University Professor, one of only 19 in the nine-campus UC system. That title is reserved for scholars of international distinction who are also recognized and respected as exceptional teachers. Recently Frank has been teaching Astronomy 160A, Stars and Stellar Structure. His research involves the dynamics of spiral galaxies and their interstellar media, the mechanisms of mass, energy, and angular momentum transfer in interacting binary stars, and the structure and dynamics of planetary rings.
Good work, classmates – keep those E-mails coming in. You can reach me at: Mike Bertin, 22 Gillman St, Irvine, CA 92612. E-mail: MCB1@aol.com. If you want to schmooze, call me at (949) 786-9450.