Page 9 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 93, No. 3 Spring 2013

LETTERS
Missing Bond
I was fortunate to know Jim Bond (“Avian
Adventurer of the Caribbean,” AH Winter
2013) toward the end of his life, and
came to know his wife Mary (1898-1997)
even better. She was quite a character
and I still miss her. [Editor’s note: The
writer was a valuable source for the
Horae article.]
David R. Contosta
Philadelphia, Pa.
April 13, 2013
The Birding Life
James Bond was an almost next door
neighbor in Philadelphia. His wife, Mary,
also wrote To James Bond with Love and
Far Afield in the Caribbean: Migratory
Flights of a Naturalist’s Wife as well as
various novels. My father, George ’18, was
in James’s class, but, like Bond, graduated
school elsewhere.
JB was especially fond of Mt. Desert
Island, Maine, known to many of us as
“Philadelphia on the rocks” because so
many MDI summer people were from that
city. He wrote a booklet, Summer Birds of
Mount Desert Island. Bond took pride in
the number of warbler species’ nests he
had found there. They’re hard to find!
Back in the 1950s, many naturalists
were known for their expertise on cer-
tain parts of the world. S. Dillon Ripley ’32
for Asia, esp. India; Rodolphe Meyer de
Schauensee for South America. Knowing
of my interest in birds back then, Charles
C. G. Chaplin asked me to have dinner
with Bond and de Schauensee at his place.
Son Gordon W. Chaplin ’58 was then and
still is a close friend.
Chaplin’s area of interest was the Ba-
hamas and their fish. At dinner someone
asked what my area was. My reply was
the birdlife of Chesapeake Bay. No one
choked on the food, but this of course
impressed nobody, least of all me, but it
was and still is true. By way of contrast,
naturalists now often specialize in discrete
subject areas: genetics, behavior, vocali-
zations, et al., rather than geographical
distribution.
SPS turns out some graduates who
become ornithologists, including Will
Russell ’59, founder and director of WINGS,
a birding tour group with worldwide desti-
nations. Many leading birders consider Will
to be the best birder in North America. Seth
Kellogg ’58 is especially concerned with
birds of prey and has long been a leading
Massachusetts birder. Nathaniel Wheel-
wright ’70 has been an ornithologist at Bow-
doin College. John Hay ’34 wrote evoca-
tively about terns in the Cape Cod area.
At SPS in my time, masters Charlie Buell
and John McIlvain were mentors to Will
and me. They would take us to Bald Head
Cliff, Maine, and Newburyport, Mass. We’d
do something on Sundays (early com-
munion?) so we could be excused from . . .
Evensong? . . . so as to have ample time to
go to the coasts on these exciting forays.
Will Russell is a co-author of a book on
rare North American birds to be published
by Princeton University Press next year.
Me? I am glad to continue as an amateur,
with many of my formative birding incli-
nations nurtured at SPS.
Henry T. Armistead ’58
Philadelphia, Pa.
April 7, 2013
War Buddies
I was saddened to read of the death of Sam
Yonce ’49. I didn’t know him all that well
at SPS, but of all things I ran into him at
Williams AFB in Arizona in 1955.
I had been in pilot training for about a
year and got into jets (the T-33) for about
120 hours. I was the Ice Man, or top pilot,
in my squadron and jets were exciting, but
I learned of several of my friends who had
been killed doing that flying stuff, includ-
ing Waddy Wheelwright ’49. Evidently,
Waddy was flying an F4U Crusader – a
prop job with an enormous engine and
wings the size of a football field – in Korea.
His plane was so overloaded with ordi-
nance that when he tried to pull up after
a bombing run, he went into a high-speed
stall and couldn’t pull out.
Despite my being a top pilot, my absent-
mindedness caused me to make some
really dumb mistakes at 400 mph, so I
decided to live a bit longer and quit the
flying gig, reverting to A/3C for the last
six months of my enlistment.
One day at Williams, I was pleasantly
surprised to run into Sam, who I guess
had taken ROTC at Yale and had been
assigned to Williams as an MP officer. We
really hit it off despite the fact that I was
a lowly enlisted man, and we hung out
together all the time. We even found some
wood for a telltale and converted an old
handball court into a squash court –
surely then the only one within a thousand
miles in the unwashed West.
One day in the enlisted men’s lounge, I
met a young lady named Bonnie Driver. I
grabbed onto her, but before long I intro-
duced her to Sam, and that was sayonara
to Bonnie for me. Sam was good looking
and had a great personality, but the clincher
was that he also had the Officers’ Club, so
I didn’t stand a chance.
Anybody else, and I would have been
really mad at losing Bonnie, but Sam was
such a sweet guy and the situation was
stacked against me, so I had no hard feel-
ings. We remained good pals and continued
to play squash. I know that Sam’s now
hitting the old ball around in that great
squash court in the sky. And charming all
the Angel-ettes.
Joseph G. Clarkson ’48
York, S.C.
April 12, 2013
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