Class News

Owen O’Donnell ’64 hosts discussion of the last 80 years

June 22, 2022

Owen O’Donnell ’64 hosted the monthly Zoom call for 1964 classmates in the California Bay Area. As he often does, Owen asked the group to think about a question. This month it was: “Some of us have started our ninth decade and others will soon. 80 years is a long time. What, in your opinion, is the most significant event of the last 80 years?”

Six classmates attended the call and others contributed online:

Ron Sipherd responded: “Besides our arrival, that is ... ;-). No one has mentioned Dylan going electric...”

Joe Wishcamper regretted: “I’ll be at a conference in Washington DC so must miss the meeting. But your topic is intriguing. My entry is the defeat of Nazi Germany in WW2 which insured the defeat of Japan, secured the countries of western Europe, and established the position of Russia as the second great power. The effects of the post-victory arrangements are present seventy-five years later.” Joe added later: “I weighed in earlier saying that the end of WW2 was the most important world event. In my life, the most important event without question was getting into Yale (with financial aid). Yale changed the course of my life completely.”

Owen O’Donnell replied: “Joe, you and I agree totally. We were not very aware of what was going on when we were little, but it was momentous, and it set the stage for what followed in the 50s and 60s.”

Steve Bingham also regretted: “Will miss this as it will be midnight in France. I agree with Joe but 9/11 is a close second as its effects will continue to redefine our relations with the non-European world for decades to come. Tied for third is the rise of China and the war in Ukraine.”

Tony Lavely responded: “I’m not sure whether to answer this as a world event, or a personal event. The early returns seem to suggest the former. In this regard, I feel the assassination of JFK was the most significant to me. It was the end of the Age of Innocence. In more personal terms, it would be my marriage in 1973 and everything that flowed from it.”

Mike Sherwood emailed: “Although the end of WW II with the defeat of Germany and the nuking of Japan happened while I was alive, I remember nothing about those events as I was only 2-3 years old, so I'm not counting them. The most important event I do remember is the assassination of JFK, which shook not only the country but me personally and awakened me politically. The second most important event during my life, I think, was 9/11, which changed everything — how America looks at the world and how the world looks at us, how we get onto airplanes — and led to two ill-begotten wars, not to mention the on-going ‘war on terrorism’ still being waged by the United States, mostly in secret, in various countries around the world.”

John Wylie: “The most influential cultural event was the development of the Internet. The most influential personal event was proposing to my wife in 1971 on a sweet summer evening on the wide-open tabletop of the WTC North Tower, where I was a construction-site physician. As all Manhattan glittered beneath us, she said, “Yes!” Some months ago, I gave the group a primer on my perspective that, since the Big Bang, the cosmos has been a one-way street toward amalgamation and association of entities into increasingly complex relationships, which I call Mind. At the subatomic ‘particle’ level, matter itself can be understood as a relational matrix in which everything alters everything else. On Earth, as amino acids amalgamated into DNA, DNA into cells, and cells into multicellular organisms, Mind has become nested and more concentrated — and, over the past six million years, associations between human individuals are similarly undergoing this process of amalgamation into Mind. For example, in the shorter term, transactional relationships between the individuals in this group have been progressively transforming into the relational (and transcendental) being of our collective Mind. In the context of this view, the establishment of the internet in 1989 was the most important event in the last 80 years.”

Russell Sunshine: “My answer is the political disruption of America. I'm intrigued by the range of preliminary responses to Owen’s historical-highlights question. A snapshot of elder recollections. I'd like your permission to include a paragraph or two about this upcoming conversation in my June 30 Agile Aging blog post. The potpourri theme will be ‘Starting Summer.’ Probably five miscellaneous topics will be covered, in 300-500 words each. I'd prefer to name the participants mentioned in this vignette. But if you prefer to preserve privacy, I can keep ideas and opinions anonymous.”

Ray Haas: “The invention of the microprocessor.”

Mike Brodsky: “The development of the Internet.”

Owen O’Donnell: “Gene editing with CRISPR.”

Bob Archer: “World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union.”

Chip Nielsen: “The Civil Rights Movement.”