It’s the Day of the Dead for our neighbors in Mexico.
While cleaning up my mother’s possessions, I found a correspondence between my late father, apparently a friend of William Cowper Boyden III, and the young Mr. Boyden’s father. I couldn’t find much on the Web regarding the sad December 22, 1955 death of two young Harvard men, but the Crimson obliquely referred to them having been killed in a car accident:
The William Cowper Boyden III Scholarship and the William Stanley North III Scholarship, set up in memory of two College students killed while driving home for Christmas vacation, has a combined endowment of over $25,000.
I found the letters interesting because it seemed unlikely that a younger-than-average Jewish scholarship student like my dad (he skipped at least the last year of high school) would have been friends with anyone from such a well-established family, but also for the style of pre-email pre-ChatGPT correspondence. It’s also sad because so little trace is left of these two men.
Condolences, again, on the loss of your parents. It seems that you “chose” parents who were ultra-rich in everything but money. Imagine being raised by the opposite, e.g., Hunter Biden!
Thank you for posting these letters.
While the impact of LLMs is top of mind, I think that the demise of email in favor of SMS / XFormerlyKnownAsTwitter / Facebook / Slack / Teams / Discord is also very concerning because the best emails occasionally approach the depth and quality of these letters and the other forms do not, and likely cannot.
A comment, though hardly a worthwhile one, is that the two victims of this accident would probably have survived if seat belts had been brought in sooner.