The meeting was called to order about 2:30 by Nancy Persily.
President Janet Spencer King was unable to attend due to an injury.
The minutes from the class meeting in 2006 had been
circulated on line and were not read.
Treasurer’s Report (Linda Meltzer)
Dues will be raised from $40.00 to $45.00 for an individual
and to $65.00 for a Cornell couple to cover operating expenses. This
includes subscription to
Cornell Alumni
Magazine as approved last year. Dues without the Alumni Magazine will be
$20.00.
We lost 25 dues payers this year.
During the past year we made a donation of $15,000 to the
Carol Tatkon Center
in Balch Hall, a learning resource for the freshman class which sees about
1,000 students per day. It’s the site of freshman seminars, peer advising
(counseling, tutoring), and presentations by professors. Our gift has become
part of the endowment for the Center to be used for programming. Rich Glick
spoke to us briefly and said there is a temporary plaque in place in
recognition of our gift (photo).
We discussed other ways we could donate money to the University. One
possibility is to provide seed money for interim grants. Rich Glick will
look into this.
We took several pictures of the meeting attendees.
64 at 64
There was a mini-reunion in Ithaca in June called “64 at 64"
with about a dozen people participating in a barbeque dinner at the Neumans’
house. We discussed having another event in conjunction with Reunion at a
different location (NYC?).
Lenni Weitzman spoke about an event for
Bob Filner '63 who is a
Congressman from the San Diego area. A successful event was held in
Washington DC where he was the speaker. This included members of classes
from the sixties.
Class Awards
JFK Award:
The award was not given this year as there was no suitable
candidate. We plan to raise the value of the award to $10,000, and we hope
there will be more and better applicants.
Cornell Tradition:
This award is $4,000 and is managed by the
University.
2009 Class Reunion
Chairs are Arnie and Mary Hammer and Stan Morgenstein.
Barbara Lutz Brim and Linda Cohen Meltzer have offered to help.
Class Newsletter
We would like Bev Feinberg Moss to continue in this position.
Class Website
The class webmaster is Bruce Wagner, and the website is
here. We discussed the possibility of having a class
communication on the Web such as My Space, but the facilities are not in
place to do this.
Bruce says that there is little input from classmates and
that based on site tracking data, people don’t go to the website that often.
We could try emails of the class column to try to generate more interest. We
suggested waiting until next year (closer to Reunion) to put
autobiographical material on the website. Lenni offered to interview people
who have done something interesting in their lives or made a substantial
change to put on the website. We could also have a new column in the
Newsletter about interesting classmates.
Fundraising
There will be a Council meeting in
NYC this summer. We need to start organizing fund raising for Reunion and
find people to organize Major Gifts. Stan and Grace offered to attend the
meeting in NYC.
New Business
We talked about sponsoring an event
in a major city such as New York or Washington DC, possibly including other
classes of the sixties. The suggestion was made that we get together to plan
this with Alice Berglas, class of ‘66. It might be at the Cornell Club or
another location to be determined. Lenni, in principle, will look into
planning another event for Bob Filner.
We discussed again sponsoring small
seed grants for faculty, not earmarked for a particular topic. Example:
Robert Harrison '76 recently
endowed the directorship of Cornell's Institute for the Social Sciences.
Lenni made a motion, which
was passed, to donate $5,000 to this project.
Cornell Reading Project
Next year’s book will be
The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer (this year’s was
The Great Gatsby). We could arrange to have the book sent to dues
payers and organize a book discussion as a networking function. This should
cost less than $5.00 per person. When/where we would discuss the book needs
to be decided.
The meeting was adjourned at 4:40
pm. We spoke to Janet Spencer King on the phone.
Nine of us had a very delicious
dinner at
Mosholu Restaurant.
