Keeping Current '06
Dave's Digressions

Mr. Meyers,

I would like to thank the Norman D. Kurtz '58 Fund for funding part of our club's efforts on sustainable engineering solutions for the third world.  The funds will be used to deploy a module on lowcost ceramic filters to a rural community in Brazil. 

Ishani Sud
Global Development Network

December 1st, 2006
Fifty years ago we all remember the dangers of crossing Washington Road. Having lived in 1879 Hall, your faithful servant witnessed some pretty close near misses, and heard of some real accidents. Well now John Striecker '64, who has three progeny who went to Princeton has given a gift that will build a graceful pedestrian bridge joining the science buildings on both sides of the road. In case you hadn't noticed, the center of the Campus is moving further away from Nassau Street all the time!

More on this on our 50th Reunion Page.

December 1st, 2006
We changed the layout of the front page, and an archive page is forthcoming. We hope you like it! Let us know what you think by emailing us HERE, your feedback is invaluable.

November 20th, 2006
An astounding Reception in The Art Museum at Princeton of all The Davis Scholars presently enrolled was held on Thursday, November 17th. Shelby and Gale Davis invited all of them, and Shirley Tilghman addressed the very large group of extraordinary undergraduates from all over the world. A wonderful and dinner was held later at Prospect honoring the seniors. The social polish and intellectual maturity of that group was inspiring. When you see up close and personally what 4 years at Princeton can do, one can't help but be reinvigorated with the spirit of Princeton and it's quest for bringing out the best qualities of extraordinary people. We will shortly give you the website where you can read more about what Shelby has created for thousands of students in many great American Universities. I have never been as proud of a Classmate and what he has done for society.

November 16th, 2006
There is a marvelous exhibition marking President Emeritus Robert F. Goheen's 70 year association with Princeton in the Firestone Library Lobby. President Goheen first came to the University as a 17-year-old freshman in 1936 ; the year most of us in the class of 1958 entered the world. In 1957 he became one of the youngest Presidents in Princeton history. He assumed office on January 1, 1957.

October 31, 2006
We've had a couple of suggestions about "speakers" we should feature at our Reunion. Readers should remember that the Alumni Faculty Forums that are put on by the University are extraordinary events. They go on for three days mornings and afternoons at Reunion time. We have a representative who will help decide what the topics are and who our Class would like to nominate to represent us at these events. We're certainly interested in all your ideas, but this is not sponsored by the Class of 1958, nor is it a Class of 1958 event. It is a University-wide event, and it is really quite superb.

The Class by itself will not have any "private" sessions. The goals of the Class at the Reunion are to socialize with each other, meet old friends, to make new friends, and to become close to people who you have seen but never spoken to before. It never fails to happen at Reunions, and it is one of the things that amazes us all, no matter how many times we've done this.

October 19th, 2006
Sarah and Jim Adler have recently returned to their home in Los Angeles after a trip to New Orleans. Sarah attended a meeting of the Association of Arbitrators; she and Jim do this kind of work and are quite well know in that field.

While I was taking Jim on a tour of New Orleans, he was very enthused (and at the same time saddened) with what he saw, but was very excited at the prospect of our upcoming 50th Reunion with the theme "New Orleans Comes to Princeton." We discussed that rooms choices are assigned in the order that registrations are received, and he immediately handed me a check, making him the first official registrant of the Reunion. He now has the first choice of any rooms that our Class reserves.

Even though the registration forms have not yet been published, feel free to send us a check, to hold your place in the registration list, to our Reunion Treasurer Irwin Silverberg at: Burnham Securities, Inc, 1325 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10019 . The early sign up fee at this time is $550.00 for members of the Class, and $250.00 for significant others. We are working on finishing the registration form so that it can be posted on the Website soon.

October 5th, 2006
The students at Princeton seem to get brighter every year. We were just interviewing some brand new freshmen for Reunion positions, and they are unbelievable - one's better than the other.

You'll see the results of some of their work as we approach our 50th. They are extraordinary people, and every year Princeton seems to find brighter and more extraordianry people. There are students at Princeton from all over the world. One person I interviewed was a Davis scholar, and is supported through the good graces of our classmate, Shelby, who sponsors this scholarship. What a phenomenal thing he does to give these great people that opportunity.

Please check out the 50th Reunion page - important news is there.

September 27th, 2006
We get a a lot of requests and thoughts about our 50th Reunion, and all input is welcome and appreciated. Please keep your ideas coming!

A recent suggestion, and a very timely one, is described on the 50th Reunion page. Please take a look!

September 17th, 2006
The Staff and Volunteers of the 1958 Reunion team are meeting again towards the end of this month. This is not the first time we have gotten together and you can tell that the planning and execution of this event is really well on schedule and intense. We have heard from some of you and listen to all of you to be sure this is a 50th Princeton Reunion for the record books. Please send us your thoughts and suggestions. There is more about this on our 50th Reunion Page.

September 15th, 2006
Dick Weeder called us from Lawrenceville this morning. He said he will be signing his new book, "The Key to Cancer", on Friday, Oct. 13 at 7:00 at The Princeton University Store.

He noted that "The Key to Cancer" goes more deeply into the causes of cancer than any other source, and it is therefore better able to offer specific suggestions for both prevention and cure. It is also available at Micawbers and Amazon.com Good going Dick!

September 15th, 2006
Many of you have called and asked me why we were out of commission at this site for so long, but technical infrastructure did not work as it should have. We are assiduously working on this to correct the situation, and hope to be operating in a timely fashion in the future.

September 11th, 2006
The Class can be very proud of our own Bill Zabel, who was just selected by The American Lawyer magazine as one of its eight 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award Winners, along with other luminaries such as Warren Christopher and Dick Thornburgh.

August 31st, 2006
You might be interested in comments found on the New Orleans page, which we still keep active, as many of you (especially those who visited New Orleans) are interested in the city. The news that we published earlier (after Katrina) has been correct, and we are proud of that. We're glad that the national media is finally catching up!

August 24th, 2006
On October 20th, (the evening before the Princeton-Harvard game) we have been cordially invited by the Class of 2008 to meet with them to discuss their futures.

They are eager to get some ideas about careers based on our experience . One principle of the meeting will be: "Ask any question you want; none are out of bounds." The Class of '83 is part of the team that will be there to assist. We look forward to this being a wonderful bonding experience.

As you can imagine, with our 50th Reunion and the Class of '83's 25th Reunion coming up at the same time, these three classes will have a tremendous amount of interaction. One of the great rewards of working on Reunions and becoming involved is meeting these phenomenal young people with such extraordinary minds, potential, and personalities. Please contact us at : davida58@alumni.Princeton.EDU if you would like to participate. We hope to have so many people apply that we have to limit the number attending ! But don't worry - if you don't make this meeting, there will be others; this is an ongoing-team building exercise .

There is one possible fly in the ointment that we see and that is that we may not have sufficient time to really organize this as well as we should. We will get back to you as soon as we can to confirm the date. Even if we need to postpone slightly, we need to get your level of interest. In the Class President's letter that you will be receiving any day now, Bill Trimble: WilliamTrimble@msn.com will be asking you about this as well, and you can certainly respond to either of us

August 7th, 2006
We have had some wonderful discussions about the 50th Reunion where many classmates and friends are letting us know what they want with our 50th Reunion. We are listening to every one of them, and we will do our best to accommodate as many wishes as possible. Please contact us with your ideas.

August 6th, 2006
Dale Casto is still very involved in some wonderful design work. You can find what he does on www.wrightsds.com and get an idea of what he is up to. Dale says he is working out with a personal trainer about once a week, and then two or three times a week on his own. That a boy, Dale! Dale reports that we are certainly going to see him at the 50th Reunion in 2008.

July 18th , 2006
Our readers may be interested in looking under the Class of 1933 news and reading about Ernie Chamberlin, who was the Reunion Chair for his class for many years. He was great to work with. He then became President of the Class, but had to resign due to health issues. I have mentioned him many times in this column, and the meetings that '58 has had with '33 have been warmly reported by Ernie.

July 9th , 2006
Jake and Phyllis Barlow have just returned from a wonderful visit to London and then a magnificent Trans Atlantic experience aboard The Queen Mary 2. Jake described that voyage as "The closest to heaven I will ever get". Between the two of them, Jake and Phyllis have 8 Grandchildren and are really living a wonderful life.

July 7th , 2006
Please take note of the Letter on the 50th Reunion Page. It is the first of many giving Website readers a real heads up before we use Snail Mail. Snail Mail costs us a lot- this does not and is the real way to get information out quickly and efficiently.

June 29th , 2006
Today, while driving to New Haven, my cell phone rang : "Hi David, this is Josh" , and the rest of the conversation was memorable - I remember every single word. The call was from Josh Billings, the Secretary of the Class of 1933, just keeping in touch. He is an extraordinary man ; you may remember we wrote about his appearance and photograph on the front page of the New York Times a few years ago as this venerated surgeon kept up with the Class of '33 . We have grown attached over the years . We were supposed to get together recently, but our calendars did not mesh. We will, however, see each other at the Harvard Game. Josh wanted to make sure I would be there. So course I will ; and please join me and say hello to all of '33 there ; they are fantastic . In case you have not noticed, we have been close to this class for almost 25 years, starting when we adopted their jacket at the strong urging of Bill Fortenbaugh for our 25th. That , and many other things , have forged a real bond between our two classes. Now in just two years, we will be the 50 year Class, with our hope that '83 will be adopting the jacket at their 25th Reunion as well in 2008. That will really be fantastic.

June 25th , 2006
Within the next few days everyone in '58 will be receiving a Postcard about our 50th. We have promised that electronically connected class members will be the first to know about any events, and we will continue this principle as far as room selections and other early signup benefits with this, our last really big event. At Princeton today, if you're not electronically connected, you are not connected, period. Read what we are writing on the 50th Reunion Page today, and we are starting our informational notes for our Reunion now on a very regular basis.

June 17th , 2006
Shelby Davis has been chosen to serve on The Board of Trustees and that is another fine addition from '58. We have had a superb representation there over the years and Shelby will continue and enhance that tradition. The many scholarships that he has engendered are a testament to his superb feelings for, and his support of Princeton. He has also not done too badly in his field of endeavor. So boys, how about a long locomotive for Shelby!

June 11th , 2006
Reunions were especially colorful this year as the jackets worn by the seniors were very special and got a lot of attention on National Television. And another reason for real pride is that they were designed by our own Aaron Prescott '06, who has been the other half of the production of this website for the past three years. He also was honored to have had his senior thesis design prominently displayed (A radical new plane design) in The Engineering Department. Aaron is off on a real(!) round the world trip (with his love, Nell Coret' 05-with knapsacks!) for the next year or two. It was great working with him and we wish him all great joys in the future. He deserves it.

June 9th , 2006
Bruce Wilson writes about his dear friend Tom Tatum who we know fought a long hard battle:

"Tommy passed away on Tuesday. There is a memorial service in Dallas at 2:00 p.m. on 6/13 at the Church of the Holy Communion on Muirfield. I am so glad you were able to accommodate him on the boat trip ( The Natchez in New Orleans in early April at The Mini Reunion). Ainslie said it gave him a big lift for a while. The end apparently came pretty quickly."

May 23rd, 2006
One of the great satisfactions in doing this website is the astounding undergraduates we work with in Princeton who are the technical end of this partnership. On May 19th at The University of Maryland School of Medicine Convocation, Adam Daniel Friedlander became Dr. Friedlander. Adam started working with us as a Freshman in 1997; we formed a wonderful bond over the years and when he graduated Princeton in 2001, he asked me to come to Baltimore in 2006 to be at his Graduation when he completed Medical School. Adam was elected to The Humanism Honor Society and is now furthering his training in Pediatric Emergency Medicine at The University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, a world famous program. It was a magnificent experience to see Adam get his degree, and we had the opportunity to meet a number of his professors who had the finest things to say about this wonderful man.

May 23rd, 2006
The Class of 1961 (their 45th Reunion) has graciously invited us to join them at their Reunion site. The Class of 1958 has accepted their invitation. They will be in Holder Hall, which is far more convenient than where the 50th is presently held. You might want to go visit the 50th site, as you will see what they (1956) are doing for their " Big " Reunion, and we can get some more good ideas from them. You will also get somewhat of an idea of what "we're going to look like" in just 2 more years.

There is an excellent lead for you on this website. Go to the Noteworthy Links and look under Alumni Council. Go to Reunions and look for all the events that are going to be held at the Reunion. You might be able to plan your day more specifically when you see this. This is a good opportunity to meet all the people that are on the committee for our 50th, and to discuss any thoughts, ideas, or concerns that you have. We always like input, and no matter how many times we've done these things, each one is always a new one, and it's always valuable to listen to you.

May 20th, 2006
We have a bed available for this year at Reunions. If you are interested, please contact Bill Trimble. His address is on our Email page.

May 12th, 2006
For those of you who were at the mini Reunions in New Orleans, you might want to look at the "New Orleans" page.

April 28th, 2006
The second large meeting of the Reunion Committee was held on April 22. Those attending were: Vitaliy Ebert'08, Natalie Kim'08, Mick Hagan'09, Brian Telesmanich'08, David Greenberg, Jim Farrin, Bruce Carrick, Irwin Silverberg, Hugh Fairman, Lockie Proctor, John Kuhlthau, and Bern Deichmann. Natalie Kim, our undergraduate manager, took notes of the entire proceedings. We will be meeting again in September. Many projects are underway, deadlines have been set, and we are certainly on the move. This is exactly the same thing that we had reported to you previously, but you can see that "We mean business!"

The 50th Reunion will be the largest reunion that this class has ever had. It will be a huge event, with what we expect to be record breaking attendance for any 50th Reunion that has been held before us. The superb spirit at Princeton is "palpable" and you can feel it as you walk the campus.

April 23rd, 2006
You'll note some interesting things going up under the 50th Reunion Page and still some comments regarding the Mini Reunion on the New Orleans Page. If you turn to those pages we think you will enjoy them and find them of interest.

April 12th, 2006
The notes coming in, and the enthusiastic response of the people who came to New Orleans is overwhelming. We have told you previously on these pages that the response to Katrina by Princeton, most particularly it's association with Dillard in New Orleans, has been overwhelming. Follow this on our New Orleans page, which will soon be put in our archives, as the 1958 association with New Orleans will soon be at the end, as The Mini is now over and we must move on. We hope to forward you a lot of what we have received in about 10 days. Your humble servant is now off to the Fiftieth Reunion of The South Frisco Jazz Band, who have been at most of our major reunions. They are, as you know, excellent.

April 10th, 2006
With the advent of the return of our access (and yours), to this website, we hope to send you some amazing stuff that has gone on while we were "blacked out" due to the failure of the Princeton System. We've been busy running a "Princeton Comes To New Orleans" meeting for the Class, which is a precursor to "New Orleans Comes to Princeton" in 2008 at our Fiftieth. We have almost 50 "acolytes' who left New Orleans loving it, and we hope that they spread the word to you, and we will publish a lot of what they said to us in notes in the future.

April 9th, 2006
As you might have noticed, there were no entries here since March 31st. The servers Princeton use went down that day-we tried to get through over that weekend to effect some corrections to no avail, but at last we are back in business. Repairs were attempted with no success, and finally two servers had to be replaced. This is the first time in ten years we have had a problem of this nature, and we hope it does not happen again. I think that the tech people and The Alumni Council learned a valuable lesson in seeing the weaknesses in communication that they have, especially over a weekend, and then when it was finally brought up to a level of high importance the inability to respond quickly and notify the people who do all this work. It was not a fun experience and I hope things like that don't happen again.

March 23rd, 2006
Senior Theses are due beginning April 6th and ending May 4th, so a lot of pressure is on at Princeton, and our own Aaron Prescott '06 is gradually handing the reins of this site over to Mick Hagen '09 as we write this. We will write more about this process after the deadlines have past, and at that time give a little more insight to our readers on how this all works.

March 23rd, 2006
This week, attendees should be receiving the itinerary for The New Orleans Mini, which was sent out this Monday. This is an ongoing project due to the ever-changing conditions in New Orleans, so it is hard to put anything "In Stone" when it comes to events there, but it looks like we are ready to go! In the meantime, check out the "The New Orleans Page" where the itinerary is already posted.

March 19th, 2006
Once again, we have received a letter from our great friend in the the Amazing Class of 1933, John Harman '33. You can read it in the '33 Letters Section, along with the bittersweet final edition of the '33 Tiger Cub News. These guys are Truly Incredible!

March 11th, 2006
In the next few days everyone in the Class of 1958 will be receiving an exciting letter from Bruce Carrick outlining the plans for the yearbook he will produce for our 50th Reunion. He really needs your participation in this publication. There is a great deal of work that goes into a project of this scope, and Bruce has the skills and experience to make it all work, as he so ably demonstrated at our 25th. You'll be pleased to read some of his plans.

March 10th, 2006
Those who live in Princeton, and for those at Alumni Day, this disturbing news was right in front of you with a notice on the door when you tried to go down to one of your favorite places, but here is the news for the rest of you. It was really a great place.

See the article here.

March 4th, 2006
As seen in previous news notes below we told you about the wonderful Service of Remembrance on February 25th. For all who were there it was more than one could describe here, and each year it seems to be even more touching. The Class of 1958 had seven members added to The Memorial Roll, and 1933 had fourteen.

February 24th, 2006
Today, Bill Fortenbaugh is going to be inducted into The Haverford School Athletic Hall of Fame. That requires a long locomotive for Bill! We can all do it separately, but it will be heard!

February 22nd, 2006
Peter Lewis '55 has given $101 Million to support a Major New Initiative to Advance the Arts. Now that is a really nice thing to do, isn't it! So far he has given $220 Million, which is not too bad! Thanks Peter!

February 10th, 2006
On February 25th, Alumni Day will occur once again. Over the years this day becomes more and more meaningful, particularly the Service of Remembrance in the Chapel, which is as beautiful an event as one could imagine. If you are in the Princeton area at this time, do try to attend this.

At the end of April there will be a phenomenal conference on Woodrow Wilson. As we get more information on it, we will let you know. The program is not completely in place yet, but for those of us who are "Wilson Fanatics," this should be a wonderful few days.

February 8th, 2006
Sometimes we notice someone in our midst who is never really totally appreciated. The following is quite an impressive article forwarded to us by Jerry Porter about Kal Ruttenstein '58 that should be of interest to all of us. We knew him, but we never could have predicted the tremendous influence that he would acquire. He obviously was an outstanding talent. See the New York Times article from January 15th below:

"An Empty Seat at the Shows"

Patrick McMullan Kal Ruttenstein, Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, Carine Roitfeld and Mario Testino at a party for Mr. Ruttenstein in June 2002.

Published: January 15, 2006
THE hooker was named Cleopatra, or so she said, and she was wearing clothing by Dolce & Gabbana, although not a lot of it. The scene was an ornate 19th-century necropolis in Milan, the Cimitero Monumentale. Hardly anyone without a burial plot bothers to visit this place during the day, situated as it is at the end of a wide avenue running away from the heart of the city.

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Mr. Ruttenstein's silver sneakers onstage at his memorial service.

But come dark the Cimitero Monumentale is one of the liveliest places in Milan, since it is there, on spooky lanes ringing the graveyard, that the city's bustling population of night creatures set up shop. The outlandish get-ups these intrepid people wear are generally on a par with their theatrical aliases, Cleopatra or Elettra or, of all things, Kate Moss. Like everyone else in Milan, prostitutes take fashion seriously, and so, of course, did the passenger in a limousine who was conducting a late-night tour last winter.

"What's your name?" Kalman Ruttenstein, the fashion director of Bloomingdale's, said in Italian as his longtime driver, Enzo, braked to a slow stop, and Mr. Ruttenstein rolled down the passenger window to greet Cleopatra, who was wearing a pierced leather miniskirt, thigh boots, a bustier and a fur jacket draped in chains.

"My apartment is nearby," Cleopatra said in Italian. "Do you want to see it?"

"No, grazie," said the ever-courtly Mr. Ruttenstein, whose interest in Cleopatra was strictly touristic. "But I think you look really chic tonight."

The fashion cycles that consume so much of people's lives in a business that never stops and rarely slows are often, to be frank, pretty deadly. As the Bravo hit "Project Runway" amply demonstrates, fashion is not as glamorous as it is cracked up to be. (Bitchy, silly and clueless, yes; also passionately creative and startlingly remunerative to roughly one in a million who take it up.) Yet there are those in the field who manage to infuse their life's proceedings with a sense of adventure, and also to maintain a sociologist's amusement at the folkways of the industry. Mr. Ruttenstein, who died Dec. 8 at the age of 69 from complications of lymphoma, was one of such people. Perhaps, as his eulogists suggested on a cement-gray day last week at a memorial program at Carnegie Hall, he was the last.

More than 1,000 people gathered, among them some of the most recognizable names in the business. Donna Karan was there, as were Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Helmut Lang, Diane Von Furstenberg, Vera Wang, Marc Jacobs, Sean Combs and Michael Kors. Few of these people would ever have been seen in the same room under ordinary circumstances.

Mr. Ruttenstein was a merchant of the old school. He had a Princeton degree and a Columbia M.B.A., but his real education was in the trenches of retailing, in the days when careers could be made on finding a single hot item (rhinestone jeans did it for Mr. Ruttenstein), when American stores routinely copied European designs line for line (Mr. Ruttenstein was the fastest knockoff artist in the business, Ms. Karan said), when labels were still worn inside clothes, and when people actually (this seems hard to believe) waited with excitement to see what act of outrageous theater the window dressers at Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale's, Bonwit's or Bergdorf Goodman would whip up next.

There were department store chains then, of course, but not the 800-store conglomerates we now know. And the improvisatory nature of the business reflected that, as well as the reality that the American rag trade had not yet substantially moved offshore. Fashion was smaller. It was more plausible for a fashion-obsessed kid like Marc Jacobs, as he explained on Wednesday, to know the name of every important designer by 13, of every important retailer by the age of 16 and to be clear that if he planned to succeed, there was one person he would need on his side.

Mr. Jacobs was lucky. Mr. Ruttenstein took him up. They became and remained friends for decades, a friendship that survived Mr. Jacobs's firing from Perry Ellis for producing his maligned grunge collection in 1992 (now generally judged prophetic and misunderstood) and throughout his battles with alcohol and drugs. That his protégé ultimately achieved great success did not really surprise Mr. Ruttenstein, who was well known as a mentor, but also as someone who knew where to place his bets.

"Talk louder" if you're bluffing, he told his associates. But few were blessed with an eye like his, one that even designers as established as Mr. Lauren continued to consult up until Mr. Ruttenstein's death. "I would never think of starting one of my shows without Kal," Mr. Lauren said.

Marc Jacobs spoke at Mr. Ruttenstein's memorial at Carnegie Hall last week.

The same was true of most designers, who would delay their shows however long it took until Kal Ruttenstein arrived. He always showed up, season after season, walking haltingly and leaning on a rainbow-colored cane designed for him by the artist Chuck Price. That he did so at all, following the fashion circuit through all of its cycles (men's wear, women's wear, haute couture) long after suffering a stroke in 1997 - he always said he'd had a snowboarding accident - had much to do with the affection people in his industry felt for him.

Their respect had something to do with his having been among the first to recognize a shift in fashion away from mere consumption and toward the main stage of a culture obsessed with surface. As early as the 1970's he saw that fashion would become as vital an element of our aesthetics as music or theater or film, and substantially it has. If Mr. Ruttenstein never got over his sense of astonished good fortune at having escaped Buffalo for the bright lights and front rows of the world's fashionable cities, he also never lost his sense of the absurdity of the world he so ardently embraced.

Like Andy Warhol, another gifted and star-struck youth from the sticks, Mr. Ruttenstein was and remained besotted with celebrity. He cultivated it in a delightfully random and Warholian fashion, rarely discriminating between the A-list people and the Z.

The motley casts he assembled for the movable feasts he held at restaurants in Milan or Paris or New York were remarked upon by almost all of his eulogists, who noted that the guest list at dinners held at Balthazar or Le Voltaire or Le Stresa or Bice were as unpredictable as a coin toss. One never knew whether fate would deliver Sean Combs to the table or Pharrell Williams or Raquel Welch or Michele Bennett, the ex-wife of the ex-president for life of Haiti, or else a handsome and obviously rented companion currently being passed off by some fashion designer as his or her latest flame.

That Mr. Ruttenstein passionately loved women may seem an odd observation to make of a gay man. Yet it is true. And it is by no means a given in a business that is rarely, as Michael Kors observed, "woman friendly." More than star-struck or stage-struck or fashion-obsessed, as people said of him, Mr. Ruttenstein was besotted with femininity.

He was a student of how women talked and moved and laughed and slouched, how they fixed their makeup, wore their jeans and held their cigarettes. His devotion to Carine Roitfeld, the editor of French Vogue who is to conventional fashion as italics are to the type on this page, was equally a source of amusement and frustration to his colleagues.

"I don't know what he sees in her," a designer friend of Mr. Ruttenstein's once told me. But that was easy. Whether with women like Ms. Roitfeld or else with Cleopatra, who was probably not a woman at all, Mr. Ruttenstein was able to go to the core of fashion, to understand clothes put to their best use, as conjurer's tools and props in the game of seduction.

Better than most, he understood that a beautiful dress is little more than an invitation to pierce the surface and uncover what, both literally and metaphorically, lies beneath.

February 7th, 2006
If you want to see a marvelous web page of one or our classmates, please go to: www.adleradv.com. Jim Adler is an extraordinary guy with an outstanding family. You can see it all on his site. It's wonderful to see what he's doing. I remember visiting with his family, a long time ago, in Los Angeles. His children were intellectually outstanding - the product of two extraordinary professionals who fell in love. It's always nice when nice things happen to nice people!

January 28th, 2006
Even though it is directed more to our classmates who are going down to New Orleans in April, you might want to look at The New Orleans Page for some interesting observations by an executive planning a meeting down there.

January 20th, 2006
There are many changes and updates going on with the New Orleans Mini Reunion. Visit the New Orleans page to stay up on the latest details.

January 20th, 2006
The Class of 2008 is very interested in joining us for mentoring and summer job studies or opportunities. This is a chance for the members of the Class of 1958 to do something exciting with the Class of 2008. We are very interested in passing your names along to their class officers if you wish to participate. If you have any interest, please do send us an E-mail, and we will forward it to the proper parties. They are a great class. We have talked about them many times on this page, and certainly be assured that you will have an exciting experience getting involved with them. We look forward to hearing from you!

January 13th, 2006
The meeting sponsored by The Alumni Council for Reunion planning is tomorrow in Princeton. Our Class will have representatives in attendance as well as some from the undergraduate team who will be working with us. So you see, even this far in advance, we are organizing and putting things in place for an extraordinary 50th. And while you are thinking of Reunions, read today's update on our Mini Reunion on the New Orleans page.

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