Greetings Classmates,

Welcome to our class website, that will serve as a vital link among ourselves and a means for us to communicate effectively and efficiently. My thanks to Ned Dougherty for taking on the management task, organizing the material and mastering the technologies that will enable us to share this information, link to addition sites useful to our class and stay up to date through announcements, articles and photographs.

We hope this portal will be enjoyable as well as practical and that everyone will feel motivated to access it, as well as contribute to it.  Our objective is to provide a channel to information of all types and eventually include linkages to additional classmate data, under password protection, and where you, the data owner, feels comfortable with sharing that information. Linking to Facebook, Linked-In data and Google Groups could subsequently be provided, at your discretion, allowing your friends to see what you are doing, if that is your choice.

Those planning reunion activities, class notes, trips, exhibits or fund raising efforts will use this site to provide background on schedules, their volunteer teams and aspirations, to the extent they wish to employ it. The site is ours to manage in whatever way we wish so I encourage you to explore it as it develops and suggest additions and new directions to Ned or any of the other class officers whose email addresses are listed under "Contacts."

So, no matter where you live and travel we can meet each other “on the web”.

Enjoy,

 Spike Kellogg

Class President

1962 Fall Mini-Reunion

A mini recap of a wonderful weekend:

Those of us fortunate enough to be in Williamstown this past weekend were treated to a great program arranged through the auspices of the 50^th Reunion Staff with some miniscule amount of guidance from your class leadership.

The events were all very enjoyable, of course, but the mixing of people within our class and our surrounding classes was delightful. A number of our group started the weekend by playing the Taconic Golf Course on Friday afternoon, but everyone was taking in the incredible fall foliage that covered the Purple Hills. All the class meals were outstanding and on Saturday Williams requited itself very well in athletic competition, beating Bates 31 – 7 on the gridiron and shutting them out 4 – 0 in soccer.

Two extraordinary highlights were dynamic seminars by gifted faculty members. Harry Sheehy ’75, the Director of Athletics and former basketball coach, gave an insightful and quite humorous review of the changing landscape of college sports, during which he reviewed challenging  issues such as parental pressure, specialization problems, commercialization, recruiting and performance enhancing substances, to name a few.

The second seminar was delivered by Magnus Bernhardsson from the History Department who captivated the audience with a stimulating assessment of the situation in the Middle East. His expertise, particularly in Iraq and Iran, provided excellent insights into how all these countries have been trying to cope with fundamental questions related to their secular governance, mixed with Islamist voices and changing economic realities.

On Sunday, we were treated to a view of the college from the Interim President, William G. Wagner, who will be guiding Williams until the newly named President, Adam Falk, becomes the 17^th college leader on April 1^st. With a good deal of wit, he explained his role and a number of current initiatives the college is undertaking, while managing under the stress of an injured endowment.

The enjoyment of this weekend speaks volumes for encouraging us all to look forward to next year’s event, 15 - 17 October  2010,    As we get closer to our own 50^th reunion, two other major events are appearing on the horizon, the Mt. Hope Colloquium in April of 2010 and the Oxford-Exeter Program in the UK during June of 2011.

Also, during the upcoming years leading to our major reunion, a committee of our classmates will be planning on how our 50^th gift to the college will be structured. Your opinions will soon be solicited and shortly you will be hearing more on this, via mail, e-mail and posted information on our website:  www.tinyurl.com/williams1962.