DRAFT PA ’55 Class Notes Fall / Winter 2026 – 2027

The following is an unabridged version of the version limited to a 900-word count which will appear in Andover Magazine’s Fall / Winter issue. It’s significantly longer than usual for a reason: the rate of attrition among our number over the past year. 133 down to 124 and my being more proactive. The journalist going for the story rather than waiting for the story to come to him and classmates who have stories to tell.  If you haven’t already gotten my personal attention my intention is that you will. So, please, add my phone number to your contacts: (303) 746-5983. My intention is also to see that domestic alumni who don’t do computers, websites, and emails receive hardcopies of the unabridged notes. Foreign alumni when I win the lottery.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Fred Byron: Responding to my asking if it was he, the editor of The Phillipian, who had once stood at the top of the stairs facing the student body as it filed into Cochran Chapel. Reminding me of Mark Antony striking a pose from the steps of the Temple. “I have no recollection of the event you describe, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it didn’t happen. My ability to recall things that happened seventy years ago is much impaired, although your description makes it sound like an event I should remember. Mark it down as a mystery along with the great Route 28 detour caper!”

Phillipian headline March 5, 1954: FRED W. BYRON IS ELECTED NEW PHILLIPIAN EDITOR. Among “nine associates told of their appointments during a Friday meeting in the Rose Room:” Robert A. Pitts, Managing Editor; Stephen B. Clarkson, General Manager; Thomas Hale, Jr., Assignments Editor; Louis M. Bell, Sports Editor [and cartoonist]; Richard N. Smith, Copy Editor; and Fred A. Cooper, News Editor. Did the new editor make the sparks fly? PHILLIPIAN HITS RULES, by F. W. Byron Jr., ran the five-colunn headline January 13, 1955 above his incendiary editorial declaring the Academy’s new disciplinary system a “flop.” Why? “Constant faculty supervision” that “hits the ‘non-hacker’ too hard.” How about the uppitty Phillipian editor? With thanks to Jack Doykos for his donation of five issues of The Phillipian 1953 to 55.

Dil Cannon: I am now 89 years old, and have been retired from orthopedic and sports medicine practice for 12 years. But to my total surprise, approximately 4 months ago, I received an email stating that my name will be used for a new society at UCSF called the “Cannon Society”. Our first meeting will be on September 9, and I will be giving a short talk.

Steve Halsted: Thanks for the [Zoom] report, and I look forward to participation in the future–when life is not so busy!! I am happily settled in Santa Barbara with my wife Carole (in a second marriage of 29 years), four children, 10 grandchildren, and 4 great grandkids. We are very happily settled in a retirement community here in Santa Barbara and now sticking close to home after extensive travels in Europe and Mexico. Happy to be alive!!!

Dobie Jenkins: Thank you for the opportunity to share our memories from the early ’50s at PA. I was surprised and disappointed at how few of the ’55 survivors took advantage of this opportunity to visit [Zoom meeting August 9]. Other than my mates at [Clement] house on School St., I knew more students in the year ahead of us as I had spent the summer of ‘52 working on the  AMC’s trail with Dave Hayes, ’54, and Lex Thielens, ‘53, a friend from Alabama whom I knew when we were in the army together in the late ‘50s at the Army Language School in Monterey, CA, then subsequently when he visited California with his Chinese language fellow students in the 1970s until perhaps late 1990s – early 2000s.

A teacher-coach I liked during my year at PA was [George “Red”] Sanborn [math & biology], who offered outings off campus and up to the southern White Mountains. As for housemates, I remember Thos. W. Alexander [d. 1979]; Sam Kennedy [d. 2012]; [Peter] Metcalf [d. 2001]; Dave something; and a fifth student I cannot recall. No office at PA seems to have records of the house occupants over the years. My friend, Tony Costello, a day student from Andover, I was saddened to read, is also deceased [1983].

I will continue to read the class notes and look forward to a future Zoom encounter, hoping it will attract more students of 1955. I will also ask the alumni folks if there are other living PA-AA folks in this part of California [Santa Cruz, on the central coast].

The life and times of Bob Kohler, Professor Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania, got their first airing here when I called in September and he answered thinking I was either Jack, his glaciologist son in Norway, or Willy, his artist son in Chicago. My good fortune and yours that he didn’t hang up because his is a fascinating story. Like others among us, Bob started out in one professional direction, was blessed to be taken with another, and then found himself in something totally different that came along by accident. First it was organic chemistry (summa cum laude Yale, Harvard PhD), then on to what he considered the “world’s best job” at Penn: doing the writing and publishing alongside Arnold Thackray, founding Chair of the Department of History and Sociology of Science. In all, eight titles currently on Amazon including Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (2002). And from there to art collecting.

Still residing in Philadelphia’s University City near his old job, Bob is buoyed by family – three grandchildren in addition to sons who are good to him — while not letting himself be weighed down by current events. ‘Andover’ brings up the memory of Bob Spur, an Alaskan rock-climbing enthusiast and a close friend (d. 1995), whom I remembered as the straight-shooting captain of the rifle team. Otherwise what he recalls of his four years there was that it wasn’t easy. The thirteenth Kohler to attend Andover, he came into his own when, at the age of 21, he married Frances.

You can read more about Bob, his late wife of sixty-three years, and Professor Thackray on my website. Where I’ve posted a separate addendum to this note with descriptions from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Woodmere Art Museum of “Bodies and Souls: Robert and Frances Coulborn Kohler Collection,” concurrent exhibitions last spring in Philadelphia. A great leap forward from when I visited Bob in the adjoining room at Rockwell House, seventy-five years ago, and admired his non-regulation easy chair. A clear sign, I thought, that this guy would someday make a difference.

Fritz Okie would have been a dominant presence on Mike Bell’s Phillipian sports page, a six-time varsity ‘A’ stud, a fleet-footed track star who whipped Exeter and captained lacrosse and soccer. A talent for performance and leadership that served him well afterward in Pittsburgh, where he could help his hometown ‘modernize’, as he put it to me. Get out from under the shadows of industrial heavyweights like Andrew Carnegie by reviving faded institutions. Give them a new purpose, bring in new management, and replace fusty male-chauvinist orthodoxy with more inclusive humanitarian values.

A cause that called upon him to serve on various boards and take on executive responsibility when the need arose.

• As it did when he volunteered with East Liberty’s venerable Presbyterian Church. An experienced banker with an economics degree from Princeton, Fritz helped the Church expand its endowment while serving as its business manager, organized its security force for protection in a tough part of town, and volunteered, at its request, to head East Liberty’s storied Regent Theatre. Once an incubator for entertainment greats Dick Powell, Gene Kelly, and Billy Strayhorn, while it transitioned into an arts theatre and incubator for musicians among the underprivileged.

• And as it did when, as its president, Fritz overhauled the bylaws of Sewickley’s Allegheny Country Club to bring it into the 20^th century, so women would have a vote on its board among other things.

He had the time because he’d retired early. Before 2007, when his former employer Mellon Financial Corporation merged with Bank of New York to become BNY-Mellon. A blow to Pittsburgh’s reputation for business competence and integrity brought on by leadership compromises that wouldn’t make it in his dad’s time or ours. “A world gone to hell,” in Fritz’s words, short on morality. He’s not sure what to make of Artificial Intelligence but he is sure that we need another president. Meanwhile, he’s enjoying retirement, still in condition to venture off to the Bahamas every December with Cynthia Ingram, his girlfriend, and to the Caribbean or the Seychelles every year for saltwater fishing with his stepsons.

He stayed connected for a time with Fritz Cooper (d. 2011), his dormmate at Clement House, with Dick (John) Pille (d. 2023), his roommate in Day Hall, and with Tat Hillman, his Princeton roommate, whom he recalls seeing at our 25^th reunion in 1980. Cooper and Hillman both native Pittsburghers who, like me, followed their bliss elsewhere. Were it not for G.G. Benedict, PA’s dean of students, Fritz might not have gotten into Princeton nor I into Harvard on the strength of our academics at Andover. Interesting question: how many of us should be thanking Mr. Benedict for our prospects after Andover? Don’t all speak at once!

“The best experience of my life” is how Al Polk recalled his four years at Andover when we talked in September. Particularly his lower year at Andover Cottage where he was among ten or so friends and stayed connected with two for good: John Palmer and Peter Bradley. A demanding English instructor also made a lasting impression – Walter Gierasch, – as did football and basketball that aspired to varsity but never quite made it.

As for the present “it’s a different world now.” Middle Eastern money put his occupation out of reach years ago. Thoroughbred horse breeding in Lexington, Fayette County, Kentucky. Horse country, where “the best-looking stallion I’d ever seen” sired Temperance Hill, the mare who won the Belmont Stakes at 53-1 odds in 1980. He’s upset that the Republican Party is no longer conservative but, as he put it, there’s good and bad. He’s happily retired with wife Mary by Burt Lake in northern Michigan where they’re visited by family in the summer. Four children and five grandchildren, most settled in California except for a grandchild in South Carolina. A spirited daughter took up the feminist cause and struck out on her own when she experienced discrimination at Autodesk, a San Francisco software business. She and all of Al’s talented offspring are doing well.

Once an avid small boat sailor Al gave it up last year. Travel and even getting outdoors for walks cut back, but Burt Lake is still beautiful every fall and spring. And he hasn’t lost interest in Andover. The family whose doings he checks regularly in Andover Magazine and now on my website, where there’s no word count and no waiting for publication. A different world for sure but, in this case, for the better.

Mike West was busy retiring when we talked early in the fall semester of ’26. So busy that he didn’t have time for a complete class note which will have to wait for the Spring issue. One of the oldest tenured faculty at the University of Pittsburgh Mike had so far enjoyed teaching English, but now that Artificial Intelligence had become the default for many students the pleasure had gone out of it. Honest students were being disadvantaged by cheaters. A problem best left to professors more electronically gifted than a “hardcopy guy” like himself. There were minor health issues and other complications, but to my ears “hardcopy guy” summed it up. Not so much a limitation of ability as doing the work to get it right. Strength of character that attends to fundamentals – our legacy from Andover. Which puts Mike on the front lines of a pressing issue and his decision to retire on the right side of it. A gift to the next generation from the spirit and pride of ’55.

Also posted to my website:

Recap: Inaugural Virtual Reunion: Zoom Meeting August 09, 2026 (hosted by Walt Howe and Hope Tillman)

James Boxley Cooke September 15, 1936 – July 15, 2026
George Christian Crosby 1936 – March 21, 2026
Harold Francis Donnelly Jr. July 25, 1937 – May 11, 2026
Dr. Thomas Hale Jr., October 1937 – July 22, 2026