Introduction: Notes on a Lively Half-Century

This piece has a rather parochial history. I was a member of the Yale class of 1936. We were a bumptious lot, one of whose spokesmen, in our freshman year; proclaimed us to be “Yale’s most distinguished class,” a statement on which a Scotch verdict can, at best, be pronounced. In 1985, as our fiftieth reunion approached, I was asked, along with some others, to provide a short account of what I had been up to over the interval. The resulting essay, which follows, has been published in a volume commemorating the reunion, edited by our classmate Oliver Jensen. It is the only autobiography I plan to write.