Ptolemy's updated profile for the Harvard College alumni records, November 4, 2013:
Themistocles George Michos. Home Address: 465 Tenth Street, Apartment 301, San Francisco, CA 94103 (415-703-0101; Mobile: 415-990-5850). Occupation and Office Address: Retired. 465 10th St Apt 301, San Francisco, CA 94103-4361 (415-703-0111). E-mail: michos@gmail.com.
Web/Social Media:niledelta.blogspot.com.
Spouse/Partner: Dare Taylor Michos.
Children: Three. Grandchildren: Two.
Military/National Service: SP3, US Army, Mannheim, Germany, 1956–57.
My wife and I are blessed with good health. We recently celebrated our 55th wedding anniversary. Our children and grandchildren are well and happy. I have been retired from the law for about five years.
We recently concluded a thirty year avocation of collecting contemporary art. In the course of that activity we owned a small apartment in Berlin Mitte, and we gained a substantial reputation among gallerists and curators internationally as knowledgable collectors. Berlin has been a big part of my life since my first visit in 1953 on a mission for Phillips Brooks House.
We have taken one to three bicycle tours in Europe almost every year since 1996, most recently last June from a 20 passenger canal boat that sailed north from Amsterdam to Texel Island and returned. Otherwise I am reduced to an unprepossessing weight lifting regimen and stationary cycling in a nearby gym, many of whose frequenters have muscles on their muscles and do twenty pull-ups just to warm up. They are kind enough to look past me, and I smile a lot.
I recently concluded a term as a trustee of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and as a Board member of my men's club in the City, the Family, founded 1902. I am now chief historian for the club, and periodically I mount small art exhibitions and do archival and preservation work. I am also scanning my personal correspondence and photographs to computer files, all the while pretending that someone might be interested in the future.
I belong to a men's book club that started with reading Joyce's "Ulysses" at 100 pages per month and went on to read the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Paradise Lost, all of Dante, Mann, Dostoevsky, Stendhal and Tolstoy and is now settling down to simpler, newer things, although the next assignment is Henry James's "The Golden Bowl," which I am told is not for beginners.
This Sunday we leave for the Venice Biennale, followed by three days in Rome for Michelangelo and mosaics and then 20 days on a cruise ship from Rome to Dubai. We are scheduled to spend Thanksgiving Day in Petra. Unless we are captured by Somali pirates, we will cruise next February from Tahiti to Sydney.
