Notes & Asides

WFB’s contribution to the recollections offered at Christie’s auction house in New York City in honor of the late Nan Kempner, September 23, 2005

I thought, apropos of my duties here, to ask myself when did I first meet her, and of course the answer was: I cannot remember. It seemed, on reflection, to be an idle question: When did one not know Nan Kempner? By contrast, her rather aloof husband I could very well remember first encountering. It was at the gymnasium in New Haven, filing through the obstacle course designed to record individual physical weaknesses, so that Yale University could, in pursuit of corpore sano, address such problems while simultaneously moving whole landfills designed to remedy our intellectual ignorance. We were freshmen; it was September 1946, 59 years ago.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

WFB’s contribution to the recollections offered at Christie’s auction house in New York City in honor of the late Nan Kempner, September 23, 2005

I thought, apropos of my duties here, to ask myself when did I first meet her, and of course the answer was: I cannot remember. It seemed, on reflection, to be an idle question: When did one not know Nan Kempner? By contrast, her rather aloof husband I could very well remember first encountering. It was at the gymnasium in New Haven, filing through the obstacle course designed to record individual physical weaknesses, so that Yale University could, in pursuit of corpore sano, address such problems while simultaneously moving whole landfills designed to remedy our intellectual ignorance. We were freshmen; it was September 1946, 59 years ago.