Ev Tate

— 25th — (1999) Bill Clinton

LIKE many of my cohort, I'm in the Internet business now. We're building products that will speed up the core of the Internet — once our gear is in the network, you won't see us directly, but your downloads should be faster and more predictable. My previous job involved a lot of travel, primarily to Tokyo and Hong Kong. It was a great experience, but constant travel made it hard to keep up with other activities, so I'm content to be working in one place again. Randy and I continue our project to see a baseball game in every major league stadium. With the post-strike renaissance of new ballparks, we're stuck at about halfway, as new stadiums get built about twice as fast as we manage to travel to the existing ones. This looks like a lifetime project. I still sing in a chorus and play clarinet every year in the Harvard summer pops band. Randy (piano) and I work on Schubert and Cole Porter songs together.

My mother took up shooting when she retired, and she got me interested in the sport. After years of competition rifle shooting and teaching others to shoot, I finally achieved master ranking in highpower rifle. The next level sometimes seems out of reach; I wish I'd taken up this sport years earlier, when my eyes were better. An interesting side effect was the unanticipated (for me, anyway) tie-in between sports and politics. Responsible gun ownership today requires not only the traditional discipline and concern for safety, but also the negotiation of a maze of illogical and counterproductive gun laws, made by legislators who jealously guard their ignorance about firearms.

When I look at the direction society has taken over the last twenty-five years, I see a tendency to cede control of more areas of everyday life to some "authority" — to sell out the American birthright of personal freedom for assurances that the government will take care of us. We are losing sight of what Benjamin Franklin knew: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

— 40th — (2014) Barack Obama

After several more high-tech mergers, I retired from my telecom engineering job in 2010. Now, I volunteer with Learning Ally, an organization that makes audio recordings of textbooks for students with visual or reading disabilities. Since I spent my career in the computer industry, most of what I record are computer-related textbooks.

I do a lot of rifle shooting and coaching. I had to take a year off from competition due to some vision problems in my shooting eye, but after the final surgery, my prone shooting has been better than ever. At one of my sportsmen's clubs, I run an introductory firearms class for women several times a year. We have a great group of instructors and coaches, and the classes have become very popular. Many of the students come back, and bring their friends and daughters.

I still read science fiction, root for the Red Sox (and for the home team in whatever city I visit during baseball season), and sing in a local chorus. Last year, my chorus performed Britten's War Requiem, one of my favorite works. I hope to sing the Berlioz Requiem someday.