Education: Men of ’36

As every Yaleman knows, Yale is more than a great university; it is also a school for success. Last week in Harper’s Magazine. Novelist John Hersey (Yale ’36) offered some lively proof: the 830 members of his own class, 15 years out.

At an average age of 37, Hersey’s classmates have attained a total earning power of $9,000,000 a year. Over & above that, they get some $6,000,000 more from investments. Since graduation, each has held an average of 3.12 jobs, but only 47 will admit they were ever fired. They have gained a total 9,710 pounds, 23 Cadillacs, 61 Buicks, ten Packards, five Lincolns, 19 “assorted foreign automotive showpieces.” Three out of four vote Republican.

Only one man has ever been in jail; one is a single-taxer; one is a yogi (“I meditate on the foibles of a disintegrating society”). But on the whole, says Hersey, the Yalemen are “utterly dependable and respectable.” They read an average of two books a month; in a year they goto twelve movies, 3.22 concerts, 4.24 plays, 1.2 art galleries, and 2.7 lectures. They drink a bit more than when they were in New Haven—an average of about 11.8 cocktails, highballs or beers a week. In the last five years they have managed to take 913 trips abroad.

Three of the men of ’36 have become publishers or editors of big newspapers (William Block of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, William K. Blethen of the Seattle Times, Whitelaw Reid of the New York Herald Tribune). Two are columnists (Stewart Alsop and John Crosby), and one (Richard N. Harris) invented the Toni. “We have a man who is coming to be recognized as the foremost ornithologist of our country [Sidney Dillon Ripley II] . . . We have a famous Fifth Avenue florist [Max Schling Jr.], the entrepreneur of a famous commercial language school [Charles F. Berlitz] . . .

“Like the troubles of our times, we crop up everywhere. A member of our class was one of the team of three who first made contact with the Communists at Kaesong . . .; another was among the last American officials to be ousted from the U.S. consulate in Peking . . . Another is a big corporation executive in the newest country in the world, Israel . . .

“We help edit the Voice of America . . . We are the president of the Reliable Springs and Wire Forms Company, and we have been King of the Memphis Cotton Carnival. We are the man in charge of complaints at Macy’s . . . One of our .gogetters has made a big thing of selling power-driven potato-peeling machines . . . We have won Arthur Godfrey’s ‘Talent Scouts’ Contest, sung Pimenn in Boris Godunov, played Ravenal in Show Boat”

Politically, the Yalemen have lagged a bit. “Our most successful politician is the man who got himself unanimously elected mayor of Dellwood, Minn., where a total of seven votes was cast.” But in another field, the class of ’36 has proved more enterprising. Among the books it has written: Search for the Spiny Babbler, A Pattern of Politics, Collective Bargaining and Market Control in the New York Coat and Suit Industry, Alkylaminoalkyl Esters of Aminonaphthoic Acids as Local Anesthetics—and The Wall.