Stephen Wagner
Stephen's Latest Interactions
Posted on: Jun 28, 2020 at 2:02 PM
Dear Connie,
Happy birthday! Lots of good memories of you. I'll try to send you a private message later today.
"Laissez les Bontemps roulez" indeed! My wife's father and her mother's parents were Acadians, but from the francophone north shore of New Brunswick instead of southern Louisiana.
Posted on: Jun 19, 2020 at 9:35 AM
A very happy birthday to you, Linda! I'll add a private message.
Happy Birthday, Herb! I just tried to add a comment but it didn't "take". If you would like to swap e-mails, please send me your current e-mail address. Your profile makes it looks like you're now in Florida full time. Is that right? I think It's been a year since we were in touch. My e-mail address More…
Happy Birthday, Herb! It looks like we haven't been in touch for a year. This time last I was busy with office moves for two professors and myself at Harvard Law School. This time the last five weeks of the Spring semster at HLS had to be conducted remotedly, with all of us away from HLS and classes taught using Zoom. Especially considering that one prof I work for still hasn't learned how to use a computer, that was challenging. If you'd like to swap e-mails, please send me your current one. (Are you now in Florida full time?) Mine is still swagner@law.harvard.edu All the best, Steve
Posted on: May 26, 2020 at 9:15 AM
Nancy, Happy Birthday!
I remember a funny incident quite early in our ninth grade Latin class in junior high when you were called on by a teacher substituting for Mr. Chandler, who was out sick. The sub was a Mrs. or Miss Mabon or Maybon -- that's how her surname was pronounced -- and she was very definitely from the Deep South. You didn't do anything wrong, but, like the rest of us, you had trouble understanding her accent. (At Oakmont we'd had a fifth grade teacher for most subjects who was from the Boston area, and when we had spelling contests with another class they were given a handicap!) If you're interested, I can provide details. Pardon me if I've told you this story already.
Posted on: Oct 14, 2018 at 8:42 AM
Dear John -- and this is obviously not a "Dear John" letter -- Happy Birthday! I hope you and yours have come through the recent horrible hurricane okay.
Sooner or later I'll send you a private message replying to your latest. For now two things that others might also enjoy:
While doing coursework for my MAT at Harvard in 1968-1969 I heard Alex Haley give a talk. This was after the publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X but long before Roots was published, let alone became a TV miniseries. Before telling us about the research that led to Roots, he told us how he had become a writer. While in the Coast Guard in the Pacific during World War II, he wrote love letters for some of his fellow servicemen. One, at least, had received a "Dear John" letter from his girlfriend, i.e., one in which she broke up with him. The reply Haley wrote for his comrade was so effective that she changed her mind!
A few minutes ago I heard "Finlandia" on the one remaining classical music radio station in the Boston area. Do you remember playing that with the HHS orchestra in a brick-walled gym or auditorium in a small state school (Lebanon Valley?); the reverb in that room was amazing. The same trip included a tour of the Hershey Chocolate factory and a visit to the state house in Harrisburg. Roy Stevens led a bunch of us on a walk on that building's roof; a cop or guard yelled at us to come down. When we did the Gershwins' Girl Crazy shortly after JFK's assassination, Roy, after hypnotizing the baddie and getting him on all fours like a dog, yelled out, "25! Get 'em!". The girls and parents in the audience may have been mystified, but every male senior roared with laughter, recognizing Sid Young's standard punishment for supposed misbehavior in Senior Health class. I remember one time when the whole class had to do it, in shifts!
Herb, a slightly belated Happy Birthday! I meant to send it yesterday evening after watching two British mysteries on TV with my wife. She went to bed before the second was half over, and I fell asleep watching it. I woke up just in time for the ending and figured I'd better get to bed myself. I'll send you a longer e-mail a bit later!
Just now sent a birthday message to my younger son, born June 14, 1980. He missed Friday the 13th and Father's Day by one day each, arriving on Flag Day. Hmm, was June 13, 1946 a Friday? If so, was Walt Kelly already writing "Pogo", where one of the characters -- Aloysius Alligator, I think -- would have been stressed about it?
[Answering my own questions: June 13, 1946 was a Thursday. Walt Kelly created the characters, Pogo and Albert -- not Aloysius -- Alligator in 1941 and first drew the Pogo comic strip in 1948; it went into national syndication in 1949. The only instance of graffiti on my model railroad is "I Go Pogo", which I added to a kit I built while an HHS student. SW]
Al l the best! Steve
May 10, 10:32 p.m., EDT
Joanne, Happy Birthday, rather late in the day! I'd have liked to written earlier today, but have been very busy working for three professors at Harvard Law School and then at home, except for watching two British "whodunit" shows.
If you'd like, as a present I could send you a couple of true stories connected with playing the cello in high school. Were you in the orchestra for our senior play, "Girl Crazy" by the Gershwins? There were a couple of funny stories and some sad ones connected with that.
I'll recommend two things I used to love to read to my students at Wayland High. One, which I read in psychology, is a short story by an Irish writer who used the pen name Frank O'Connor, entitled "My Oedipus Complex", related by a young boy who grew very close to his mother while his father was a soldier in World War I; the boy and his dad had some difficulties afterwards. At one point the father snarls to the mother, "He wants his bottom smacked!" and the boy yells back, "Smack your own!" When I reached that point one year, a colleague opened the door to the classroom to see what was going on!
The other, which I read to students in the one-quarter-long "Immigration and Americanization" U.S. history course I developed, is an autobiographical essay by Mario Puzo, famed for writing The Godfather. It's "Choosing a Dream: Italians in Hell's Kitchen"; I think he wrote it for a volume edited by a man with the surname Wheeler called something like The Immigrant Experience. But it was reprinted in a collection of pieces by Puzo called The Godfather Papers. Though I found The Godfather so enthralling that I read it in one night, I agree with Puzo that his best book was The Fortunate Pilgrim, largely based on his family's experiences.
One of my much older colleagues at Wayland (born in 1910), at whose home I roomed and boarded for two years and was like a second mother to me, used to spend her summers in Estes Park. (I've never been to Colorado or any of the Rocky Mountain states myself, though in the summer after our graduation from HHS my family camped in all but one of the national parks in the Canadian Rockies en route to the Pacific.) I could relate hilarious stories about her trips West incident and an almost miraculous one about one of her cats somehow surviving for a month on his own in the wilds of Rocky Mountain National Park.
Nancy, Happy Birthday! I have happy memories of you from classes and Latin Club.