This page is designed for tributes to those class members who died prior to July 7, 2004, when the this class website was inaugurated.  Before then, the only obituaries of deceased classmates conveyed to us were those that appeared in the columns of the Yale Alumni Magazine, where the obituaries were necessarily brief.  There was no opportunity, like those provided by email messages and space on this website, to post or send longer, fuller notices to everyone.  This page offers the chance to make up for that earlier deficiency.  Any classmate who wishes to write a memorial tribute to a classmate who died before July 7, 2004 is warmly encouraged to do so and to send it to jbanner@aya.yale.edu. It will then be posted here for all to read.

Peter R. Williams, by Dick Voigt (posted August 20, 2013)
Temby R. Argall, by Jim Banner (posted November 3, 2006)

Peter R. Williams, by Dick Voigt (posted August 20, 2013)

The quality of a person's life is often measured somewhat by the circumstances of the end of a life, by the way in which a person faces his or her own death. Pete Williams, the closest of my friends for forty years, faced his death from cancer of the bile duct with courage, grace, and determination to make every remaining day count until he passed on in my presence alone at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. His children arrived at the hospital ten minutes after Pete died. It would not surprise me if he chose the moment of his passing in order to spare his family the trauma of his final minutes.

I met Pete Williams in May of 1953 at a Jazz Concert at the Salisbury School in Salisbury, Connecticut as I was finishing up my final month at nearby Kent School. The concert was hosted by Hop Rudd (a Yale Alumnus), drummer and father of Roswell Rudd who graduated from Yale in 1958. Also present was Lee Lorenz from Greenwich, Connecticut who was attending Pratt in New York City. Lee became the original cornetist in Eli's Chosen Six, Pete was the original and only clarinetist and soprano saxophonist in the band. Hop was the original drummer and Roswell the original and only trombonist in Eli's Chosen. We were delighted to discover that Pete and I, plus Lee commuting from New York City, could begin to form a band at Yale the following September (1953) to be joined a year later by Roswell, who was then a student at Hotchkiss, and his Yale Classmate, Bob Morgan '58. Lyman Drake '57 became the band's regular drummer in late 1953.

The deep friendships formed by band members in the subsequent years at Yale provided the basis for lifelong relationships and musical collaboration up to the present time, excluding the loss of Peter to us in 1994. The five remaining members of Eli's Chosen Six meet to renew our friendships and make music together at reunions and parties at one of our homes.

Pete, whose father was Chauncy Williams, also a Yalie, grew up in New Canaan. Connecticut along with his brother Bill who also attended Yale in the 1950s. Pete married his New Canaan sweetheart, Margery Baker, in 1957, the same year many of our classmates married, wisely or unwisely. Pete and Margie, who soon moved to Wilton, became among the closest friends of my wife and myself who lived next door in Weston.

For a number of years, Pete worked as an engineer for Norden Aircraft, also in Wilton, while playing gigs in a number of Dixieland bands in Connecticut and New York. Pete was as good a reed man as there was at the time in spite of not being able to read music. While at Yale, he was a big fan of our football team and joined the Yale Marching Band in order to see all of the home games and get a free ride to the away games of our championship 1957 team. Anyone with a trained musical ear may have noticed that Pete tootled away, doing his own thing, as the band marched on down the field. His improvisations were never so far off the mark to get him fired from the band, but he was marching to his own cosmic clarinetist nevertheless.

Pete and Margie raised a beautiful daughter and two fine sons, but their marriage did come apart in the mid 1980s . In those years, they had moved to Newtown, Connecticut where a big jazz party was held every Labor Day Weekend. About that time, Pete and I were also playing at Arthur's Tavern in the West Village in New York City every Sunday night in Lee Lorenz' band, The Creole Cookin' Jazz Band. After Pete's divorce, he moved to Garrison, New York. On Sunday's, he would drive to New City, NY where my wife Elisabeth and I have lived for decades, join us for dinner , give us the " latest" news headlines which we had heard days before , and then join me for the drive to Arthur's Tavern.

Pete wouldn't mind my sharing the news that after a number of personal breakdowns, I did help him to get active in a twelve step recovery program which he maintained faithfully until he died. Sometimes, Pete drove us in to Arthur's on a Sunday night. He rarely drove more than 40 miles per hour. He had a sticker on his rear bumper which read, "Honk if You're A friend of Bill W's." Each time we crossed the GW Bridge, the cars behind us in our lane would honk repeatedly. Pete always said, "Boy, there are lots of people on this bridge who are in the program." I always said, " Pete, if you'd drive faster than 35 miles per hour, they'd stop honking."

I wouldn't say that Pete was crazy. I would say that he was different. On the way back from Arthur's, we'd stop at the same diner for breakfast at 2 AM. Our regular waitress, Kathy, also in recovery and a former hooker, would invariably start a dialogue with Pete which would have had both of them locked up if overheard by either a shrink or a cop.

Pete's final years were spent working for the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Nyack and the Rockland County Council on Alcoholism as a computer trouble shooter. With about three years of recovery under his belt, a doctor discovered cancer in his bile duct, which required frequent chemotherapy and eventually surgery, none of which could halt the ravages of his disease. Most of his final year was spent in our home, Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern New York, and in a small rented apartment in Piermont, NY. He was brave until the end, walking in and out of the hospital up until the last week of his life. We had all heard about the extraordinary care offered terminal cancer patients at Calvary Hospital. A county social worker arranged for him to end his days at Calvary without cost. He died in that extraordinary environment with a beatific expression on his face. I held his hand until he took his last breath. It was a privilege to remain his best friend to the end.

A few weeks after Pete died. more than 100 friends and family met in the Fellowship of Reconciliation's Peace Room to hear 20 musicians "play him off" as they have done in New Orleans for well over a century. Pete would have greatly enjoyed his own memorial service. His remains are buried on the grounds of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in an area overlooking the beautiful Hudson River.

Pete was one of a kind. I think of him often.

Temby R. Argall, by Jim Banner (posted November 3, 2006)

He was a very gentle man, and there were few who knew him who didn’t love him. I met him freshman year and became his roommate when we entered Branford College. He’d grown up in Lakeville, Connecticut, where his father cut the hair of generations of Hotchkiss School students. Not surprisingly, while living at home he attended Hotchkiss; and while I never heard it from this reserved, sweet man, I suspect that he suffered the subtle discriminations that "townies" always seem to have to suffer in a boarding school environment.

One would have thought that at the Yale of our days, filled with young men whom my own Yale son terms "triplets"-"guys with three last names," as he says-a man who carried the three names of Temby Richie Argall would have about him the whiff of aristocracy, wealth, and entitlement. Nothing could have been farther from the case. Of Scots origins, yes, but also of Scots simplicity. Firm at the core, he could be the easy friend to all, open to everyone, always good humored, and quick with laughter, especially at absurdity. And that gentleness: everyone who came upon him felt it and loved him for it.

But underneath that gentleness, sometimes appearing as reserve, worked other forces, forces that even Temby didn’t know or understand until after college. I don’t believe that as a collegian he ever fell into the depressions that would torment his later years. If so, he never revealed them. True to his caring nature, he went off to medical school and became a doctor. It was during his years of training and then service in the army that he was initially struck by the inner demons of what we now know of as bi-polar, or manic, depression. Though through two marriages, the first of which gave him three daughters, he was able repeatedly to pull himself back from the brink of despond and serve as general practitioner and family doctor beloved by all whom he treated, he was never free of the torments and dangers of periodic, deep depression. It eventually forced him to give up his general medical practice and to take up work instead as member of a hospital staff-a kind of occupational anchor that relieved him of the responsibilities of personal care when he just wasn’t up to helping others.

I thought that he had finally found surcease from depression with the aid of medical drugs and the comforts of a second marriage. When I would see him then, he seemed robust and full of smiles and laughs, the Temby whom I had known when at Yale. But when he attended a party for my 60th birthday, I knew that all again was not well. He didn’t look healthy, his eyes were glassy, he was struggling to be social. Not long after, one morning I received a call from Larry Kramer, another of Temby’s old friends, telling me that Temby had taken his life. He had not been able to battle back those demons after all.

His struggle cost him dearly, and his death cost his friends much anguish. A man of such richness done in by illness he wrestled with but could never conquer. Others have known that struggle. I never have. I can only imagine how terrible it must have been. And I can only marvel that, fighting it, Temby was able to give such love, friendship, and comfort to so many for as long as he did.