James Boster
— 10th — (1982) Ronald Reagan
I spent the last five years (and then some) becoming an anthropologist, studying at Berkeley and Wampami, an Aguaruna Jivaro community in the Departamento de Amazonas, Peru. I wrote a dissertation on how the Aguaruna classify and cultivate manioc, their major crop. (You probably know it in the form of tapioca pudding.) The dissertation was signed a few days before Christmas, 1980.
I spent the rest of that winter and the following spring teaching a couple of courses at Berkeley and then came out to the Bluegrass to teach Kentuckians linguistic anthropology. (Even though I didn't know at first who the Wildcats were, none held it against me.) I like it here, the countryside is pretty and the pace is relaxed -it's a funny mix of the South and the Midwest. It seems as good a vantage point as any to watch Reagan lead us into an arms race and a depression. After all, a state whose economy is based on tobacco, bourbon and horses should survive the anxious eighties fairly well. I hope all of you fare well too.
— 40th — (2012) Barack Obama
Life is good. I married very well to Cornelia (Nina) Dayton '79, a professor of colonial history. I enjoy teaching and research — my job offers me more freedom than practically any other career I can imagine. (I am a professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological anthropology at the University of Connecticut.) Our house during the academic year is in the middle of the woods, a benefit of the origin of the university as an agricultural school. Our summer cottage is perched on a cliff looking over Penobscot Bay in Maine. My field research sites have shifted from small communities in the South American tropical forest to European cities; I far prefer drinking beer at open air cafes to dealing with mosquitoes, scorpions, and poisonous snakes. My favorite activities include tending the forests around our two homes (work that produces a lot of firewood), walking in the woods, and playing with our dogs (two Australian shepherds and a corgi mix) The only sports teams I follow are the Red Sox and the Lady Huskies; Nina inexplicably likes to watch golf tournaments. My politics are predictable: I am a yellow dog Democrat and a member of the Ashford Democratic Town Committee. The major disappointment of life has been not having children. Other details of my life are Googleable. I hope the rest of you are also living well. I send my greetings especially to my former comrades at Jordan J.
— 50th — (2022) Joseph Biden
My life's trajectory isn't unusual for our class: seven years of gradual school toward a PhD in linguistic anthropology followed by posts at various universities as assistant, associate, and full professor and a quest for the perfect companion and mate. After a long search, when I was at the University of California, Irvine, I formed crushes on two women I never seemed able to meet, one a sparkling bright professor who would appear at our department colloquia, the other an emotionally intense dog-walker holding on to a black dog with striking blue eyes who I would see on my way home.
I finally met the history professor at a year-end convocation, all of us in our academic robes – hers from Princeton, mine from UC Berkeley – and contrived to introduce myself, sit next to her during the ceremony, and invite her out. She agreed but asked me to walk with her and her dog through university hills before our evening together. However, at the appointed hour it was Katie Skye, the blue-eyed border-collie-mixed-with-black-bear, who came bounding through the open front door. Although I had made the date with the history professor, it was the dog-walker who arrived; both were the same human – Cornelia Dayton, class of '79. After a long courtship in which she refused my many proposals, she eventually made one herself. We married on the autumnal equinox, 1995, in Deer Isle, Maine with Katie as the flower girl. Although she was exactly who I had been searching for, I found her too late to have children. We have had a long series of canine companions instead (Katie, Maggie, Petra, Isla, and Hannah), all but one named after or honoring mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and so on.
After some forty years as an anthropologist, I now realize that I don't like most humans very much and am more a virologist than a social scientist, fascinated by the life-form that only infects human beings called language. But I also realize that my greatest pleasure is as a designer, whether of websites, buildings, tide clocks, or whatever. So now in retirement, I've designed and we've built additions to our cottage in Maine – winter quarters and the Fibonacci Studio. The three buildings form a series of golden rectangles linked by sublime triangles; they have lengths and widths proportional to adjacent steps in the Fibonacci series; 13/8, 8/5, 5/3 and are the first three steps in a logarithmic spiral, like that of a nautilus shell. Fibonaccistudio.org shows it both as a design concept sketched on a satellite image and also as a realization seen from a hovering drone. The website also shows what Penobscot Bay looks like from the cottage and what the cottage looks like from Penobscot Bay.
The studio is where I am fulfilling my life-long ambition to carve stone and work with the second of the three elemental media -- wood, stone, and iron. I have worked with wood for years, have just begun to cut and craft in stone, and have acquired the wherewithal to shape iron, the heartwood of stars forged just before they become supernovae. What trade is more appropriate to take on in Stonington than stonecutter?
So after 28 years of coming up to Deer Isle as an "away," I have become a Mainer. I officially reside here, pay my taxes here, register my truck and license as a driver here, site my new enterprise here, and vote here where it might make a difference. (Alas, recently, despite my best efforts, Susan Collins was re-elected and Trump won the Maine second district although not the state and the presidency, glory be.)
The world is a very different place than the one I think we all imagined it would be. All of the futures conceived of then (e.g. 1984, Brave New World, Blade Runner, etc.) haven't panned out but other inconceivable things (e.g., personal computers, smartphones, robot vacuums, digital assistants, self-driving cars …) have. Back then the revolution was right around the corner and although my politics were moderate and not in the vanguard, now, unchanged, they land me somewhere to the left of AOC. (Ironically, David Ignatius, also '72, who at the time was a genuine radical has in the years since become famous and much more conservative. And Jill Stein shifted left.)
It's somewhat sad that the culture moved on from vision-quest drugs we used like cannabis and mushrooms to drugs of mania (cocaine and methamphetamine) and oblivion (opiates and alcohol). But it's downright scary that the nation has lurched against science and towards fascism. I'm angered that my fond associations with the January 6th birthday of my late best friend, Frank Longstreth (also '72), have become sullied by the thuggery of Trump's brownshirts. I hope this too will pass.
Salutations to all of my former fellow co-operators in Jordan J. and to anyone else who might remember me.