President John Sawyer was a distant figure to most of us, the more so because he was not the best of public speakers and seemed to have a certain reserve in gatherings. It was rather paradoxical, really, on a campus where the Mark Hopkins ideal of professors and students engaging in lively discussion in a very personal educational process was the norm.
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Whitney Stoddard
I doubt that upon hearing mention of Prof. Stoddard many Williams alumni from our era, will think first of his important scholarship in engaged sculpture of medieval French churches or his parallel interest in modern architecture. Nor will many be reminded immediately of his broad service as advisor to pre-architecture students, administration counsel on architecture […]
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Lane Faison
Lane Faison: A great teacher, he taught in his own distinctive way. Lane swept the boards with his grad school teaching at Yale and Princeton and then later at Williams. The Williams grad degree in Art History didn’t exist before him. He helped bring over Henri Focillon, a famous art historian from France, who influenced […]
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Chafe and Coach Ralph Townsend — new tributes
Chafe coached 3 sports. Doug Rae has written about his prowess as a soccer coach, Jon Weller now adds his recollection of Chafe the squash coach (to come: Trav Auburn on Chafe as a tennis mentor. Ted Ragsdale skied for the Williams Ski Team and knew Ralph Townsend well, and kept up with him after […]
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Tony Plansky
Editor’s note: Bob Lux organized this tribute, reaching out to classmates Rod Maynard, George Schelling, and Peter Naylor (who first proposed the tribute). Bob also contacted Pete Farwell ’73, track coach at Williams for many years. Pete’s comments appear as a scanned image of a 1979 article published in the Williams Record. Phil McKnight ’65 also […]
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David Park
Who is on the other end of your log? If I were to return to Williams in a learning frame of mind, whom would I ask to be on my log? For me it would be David Park. I would like to tell you about the impact he had on me, first at Williams and […]
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Benjamin Labaree
It was not until Winter Study in my senior year that I experienced the first stirrings of what I would later call my intellectual awakening. The scene was Ben Labaree’s home. There was a welcoming fire in the fireplace on a bitter cold January day in 1968. His son, Ben junior, would appear and re-appear, […]
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