Alumni Gazette

Quotable

“It was a bit like Christmas in February, I suppose.”

—Dominick Argento ’58E (PhD) in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on winning his first Grammy Award last February. The Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, who is a professor at the University of Minnesota, won the recording industry’s top award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition for Casa Guidi from his 2003 album of the same name. Based on a series of letters written by poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her husband, Robert Browning, the composition was recorded by the Minnesota Orchestra under director Eiji Oue. Classical singer Frederica von Stade sang the piece at its debut and in its recorded version.

“You ask some of these people how they got to be 102, they say it’s because they drank three martinis a day. What do they have that protected them?”

—Thomas Perls ’86M (MD), in a story in The New York Times Magazine, on the growing population of Americans living past the age of 100. Perls, who is director of the New England Centenarian Study at the Boston University School of Medicine, argues there is a genetic component at work.

“Don’t give up. You’ve got to keep going no matter how bad it gets. Don’t ever give up.”

—Edith Keyes Harris ’20, in the Wellesley, Massachusetts, Townsman, after being presented with an award recognizing her as Wellesley’s oldest resident at age 104.