25th and 30th Reunion Report
Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1969
Twenty-fifth and Thirtieth Anniversary Report
Lee Smith '69
25th
Harvard was a wonderful place to grow up. I did not know what I really wanted to do
when I left, except that I was never going back to Texas. I worked as a photographer
in New York that summer. I had the passion and the talent to be a professional, but
real artists have a thing for suffering that I don't share. So I moved to Seattle and
enrolled in Law School.
After law school I took an extended trip to Morocco and then set up a solo law
practice in downtown Seattle. I wanted to make the world a better place, so I initially
tried to make a specialty out of suing bad cops. This did not pay especially well and
there were no real good guys so I settled into a general trial practice which I
thoroughly enjoyed.
Watching the sun rise over the Atlantic was to die for until I saw the sun set over the
Pacific from a primitive beach on the Olympic Peninsula. I spent a lot of time
backpacking in the rain forest and on the coast of the Olympic Peninsula in
Washington. I bought a '53 Chevrolet and spent a lot of time taking it apart and
putting it back together again. I learned how to shoot pool and on weekends when I
wasn't off backpacking, I played harmonica with a jug band in a variety of small town
grange halls and taverns.
I spent ten wonderful years in Seattle. Oh, there were set backs here and there, like
my best girl that I left behind in Cambridge taking up with my best friend, like my x-
best friend deciding he was AC/DC and dying of Aids, like my dear friend who was
also my x-best girls' brother putting a shotgun in his mouth and turning his lights out,
and stuff like that. I think it helps if you like rain.
I met my wife, Michelle, in Seattle. She is a wonderful woman and I love her dearly.
Shortly after we became an item, so to speak, I had an opportunity to go back to
Dallas as a Regional Civil Rights Attorney for the Federal Government. I had been
thinking about a sun break. Texas was segregated when I left. I thought going back
was somehow part of my destiny. It was. I did.
When I was managing editor at the Harvard Yearbook, a publisher that I worked with
said I had a mind like a steel trap. That description fits.
Over the next five years I disassembled a one hundred year legal deception by which
the State of Texas deprived Prairie View A&M University, a black public college, of a
share of a 3 billion dollar endowment. I worked out a deal whereby the two schools
that had taken the money, the University of Texas and Texas A&M University, would
pay Prairie View $120 million.
I spent $50,000 of my own (and Michelle's) money and devoted nearly every waking
moment of my life to that case. Prairie View never offered me a dime. They didn't
even say thanks. They just wasted away the money. I guess they had their own
destiny. I can't remember another event in my life that combined such highs and lows
except for when I saw Jack Kennedy in Dallas the day he was killed.
Michelle and I spent the next five years in Austin. Michelle was an executive for Hyatt
Hotels and they transferred her to the Hyatt Regency Austin. I worked for the U.T.
System General Counsel who hired me because he said he never wanted me on the
opposite side of the University of Texas on a legal case again. Michelle and I both did
well. We made good money, had nice cars, and traveled to Hawaii regularly. Life in
Austin was nice, and pleasant, and all the things you say when you really can't point
to a single thing that is wrong in your life except that it isn't very special.
Enter Allison. In 1987 our lives became very special again.
In 1988, Hyatt transferred Michelle to Seattle and I took a job as counsel to the
Director of the State Department of Wildlife. I truly love that part of the country, and it
was great to have a job that paid me to go places and do things that I enjoy so much.
It is not possible to describe either the magnificence of the ancient rain forests or the
enormous destruction that clear cut logging has caused in Pacific Northwest.
In 1991, Michelle, Allison and I returned to Austin where we are now. I have become
something of a computer junkie. Michelle is mom. Allison is Allison. We are all very
happy, doing well, and having a wonderful time.
I have no regrets, just a few wishes: I wish I had written a book. I wish Harvard had
done as Derrick Bell asked. I wish just one of you had called to ask me who Marie
was. I wish the rock opera "Tommy" had been about the pinball machine at Tommy's
Lunch. I wish I had known that the old codger I got drunk with in Big Sur and argued
with about food additives was Ansel Adams. I wish someone had told me about the
undertow at black sands beach before I nearly drowned. I wish I could get Al Gore to
return a phone call. I wish there was a word for that delicious orange sherbet color in
a Seattle sunset. I wish I could run on a beach where the waves glow and
luminescent sand sparkles under my feet. I wish everyone found this joke funny:
Waiter: How did you like your soup sir? Customer: Well, I'm sorry I stirred it.
Lee Smith '69
30th
There have been very few changes in my life since our last class report...
and that's a big change. I am still at The University of Texas at Austin,
although my title has changed to Associate Vice-President for Administration
and Legal Affairs. Michelle is now at Omni Hotels in Austin where she is a
Human Resources Director. Michelle and I are coming up on our 20th wedding
anniversary and we are both expecting many more to come. Allison is now at
the St Stephen's Episcopal School where her volleyball team was undefeated.
Whenever we find the time our favorite family "get away" has been to spend
three or four days stargazing at the McDonald Observatory deep in the heart
in Davis Mountains in West Texas. The stars are still bright there. When I
was growing up you could see the milky way from just about anywhere in Texas
on a clear night. I miss that.
Allison is doing really well. When she turned eight, I decided she was old
enough to carry a back pack, so Michelle and Allison and I went backpacking
to a primitive beach on the Olympic Peninsula where the sun sets over the
Pacific are unforgettable. I took Allison there again when she was ten.
Great stars by the way. Ten was also the year that Allison built a laser
for her science fair project. She got an introduction to wave theory and
quantum physics (without the math of course) and came away with a surprisingly
good grasp of the basic principles involved.
Michelle and Allison and I had just a great time at the 25th reunion. Somewhere
between the new memories you shared and the old ones you made me remember, the
four years we were together in Cambridge came alive again. I was surprised by
the enormous size of our "grape" group and that leads me to my single regret
about our upcoming 30th reunion. I think it's just too bad that no one has
come upon a way for our children to build on those acquaintances now while
they are still in their pre-teens.
Our 30th class reunion coincides with the kickoff of a year long celebration
of the 50th anniversary of the Harvard Yearbook. I think the friends I made
and the experiences we shared at Harvard Yearbook has a lot to do with why I
had such a great time at Harvard. For those of you who don't know, a few years
after we graduated, Harvard banished the Yearbook from it's spacious offices
at 52 Dunster Street to the basement of Cabot Hall in the Radcliff Quad.
Since 1955, the officers of the Yearbook had been depositing their operating
surplus into a building trust fund so that some day the Yearbook could own it's
own building like the Crimson and Lampoon. It is something of a marvel that
40 classes of Harvard students, most of whom could have never met each other,
could share, and eventually realize, a common dream. It's also kinda neat to
have been a part of it. At the time of our 25th class reunion, we celebrated
the purchase of a new Yearbook building with a reception in the penthouse of
William James Hall that brought together a 40 year span of Yearbook alumni.
I am looking forward to celebrating the Yearbook's 50th anniversary which will
officially begin when the class of 1969 arrives in Cambridge this October with
a "Hell's Aardvark's" alumni reception at the new Yearbook Office at 2 Brattle
Square (behind the Brattle Theater).
Perhaps the saddest moment for me these last five years was when I learned of
a shocking art theft from one of my favorite museums. I'm not talking about
the barbaric removal of the Rembrandt, Degas, Vermeer and Manet paintings from
the Gardner Museum in Boston. I'm not talking about the deplorable removal of
the entire art collection from the Bush Reisinger museum at Harvard. No, I am
talking about the fanatical removal of Rodin's most famous work, The Kiss, from
the Rodin museum in Philadelphia. Any of you who traveled to Philadelphia to
see the greatest Rodin collection outside of Paris will remember this majestic
white marble center piece of the Rodin museum. Well, it's gone now. It seems
that some time back, the Philadelphia Art Commission was hijacked by a gang of
tyrannical art puritans who, undaunted the fact that all Rodin collections are
copies, singled out this piece for excommunication from original collection
donated by the Museum founder Jules E. Mastbaum. In order to erase any visible
signs of their dirty deed, these zealots replaced The Kiss with The Burghers of
Calais and reprinted the museum catalogues to make it appear that it was in the
original collection. A casual visitor to the Rodin museum will find no evidence
of this crime, unless you visit the museum store. There, the museum storekeeper
secretly maintains fidelity with the The Kiss by stocking an abundance of books
and cards and assorted replicas of The Kiss on the shelves. For any who want to
witness this sickening episode for yourselves, last summer I traveled to Philadelphia
and uncovered The Kiss forgotten like the man in the iron mask sitting on a bare
concrete floor, alone and unprotected behind a doorway of Memorial Hall, which is
one of the many empty buildings leftover from the Philadelphia World's Fair in
Fairmont Park. Shame.
What else can I tell you... humm… I have become something of a women's volleyball junkie.
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