President's Letter
CLASS MEMORIAL INITIATIVE
April 11, 2025
Dear Classmate,
2025 marks another important milestone in our experience together from 1963 entering the university to 1967 graduation to our 50th Reunion in 2017. We have all had many other special anniversaries: marriages, births of children and grandchildren, and career highlights. For most of us, this year will mark a different but important milestone. As we turn 80 years of age, we reflect on how grateful we are to be alive and enjoying family, friends, classmates, and memories of the past together. But we are also saddened by the awareness of the loss of many ’67 classmates. We are also more conscious of our own mortality, and sadly the suffering some have undergone in illness and the sorrow experienced by surviving spouses and family members.
In recent discussions the class Officers and the Communications Committee have noted the fact that over the next decade we will incur the loss of more than 200 classmates. To prepare for this eventuality and better honor, record, and communicate the passing of ’67 as a cohort, a Special Committee has been formed to achieve 4 objectives:
1 Rapidly communicate when a classmate dies.
2 Attempt to have classmates know how, where, and when a funeral or memorial service is to be held permitting them to attend either as a personal friend or representative of’67 to honor the classmate.
3 Provide more rapid communication of the formal Memorial written for the Alumni Weekly through the Class Website and other mechanism given the often-long delays involved in PAW publication.
4 Provide greater support and honor from ’67 to surviving family demonstrating the special bond we have with all classmates having survived 4 years together at a formative period of our lives.
Spring is often a time of renewal, seasonal revival, and hope. The poet Alexander Pope in his “Essay on Man” wrote the often-quoted line:
Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blest.
The Enlightenment optimist poet Pope met a more pessimistic sensibility of our own century of birth in the opening phrase of T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land:”
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land…
Most of us have lived—and prefer to live—in the world of Pope. But we need to begin preparing for this last stage of our cycle of human life. This memorial project of the Class of 1967 is a step in that preparation. We will be sending out further information, and requesting assistance from all of you, in the next weeks and months as this project expands. We appreciate volunteers, ideas, and cooperation to accomplish the goals.
Let me close by sadly noting the most recent passing of a classmate. On March 27 James T Avery died while in hospice care in Durham, NC where he had been living near his daughter. Jim was an Army ROTC graduate and earned a Bronze Star and Air Medal as a Ranger in the Vietnam War. A Harvard law and business graduate, he switched careers in 1979 working for Cambridge Research Institute consulting before founding his own consulting firm in 1985, the Avery Company. He is survived by his wife Nancy and three children. A more complete Princeton focused memorial is in work.
