WITHIN THE FAMILY
Stories Behind the Names
By Alex Sachare

Interesting people die in The New York Times. Just about any day you pick up the paper, when you turn to the obituary page you'll find a write-up of someone of noteworthy achievement, unusual interest or singular accomplishment. I suspect the same may be true for the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and many other major metro dailies, given the size of their audiences, but I can't be certain; I can vouch that it works for The New York Times. If you're skeptical, try it. Pick up the Times at random, turn to the obits, and more often than not you'll read about at least one person you might like to have known.

It's also true for Columbia College Today. Someone who is relatively new to the magazine tells me she turns to the CCT obituaries first because she is fascinated by the interesting people who went to the College. That's one of the reasons we print detailed obituaries for alumni whenever possible rather than one-line death notices, which is what many other school magazines do. These accounts of the interests and accomplishments of this slice of our alumni body, taken together, paint a revealing picture of the remarkable nature of Columbia alumni, and of the impact of the College experience.

Lars-Erik Nelson '64, a columnist for the New York Daily News, died on November 20, and a memorial service was held in his honor on campus last month. I knew him only from his distinctive byline and his elegantly clean style of writing, a style I admired. "His writing always sparkled," wrote colleague Pete Hamill in a tribute in the New York Review of Books, a publication to which Nelson frequently contributed. "He liked concrete nouns and active verbs, and each paragraph was as solid as a brick. He avoided pyrotechnics, because the goal was lucidity. The writing only appeared to be simple. It was about as simple as a Matisse. Try doing it."

Hamill went on to observe that Nelson's "tone was always marked by that form of restraint that we sometimes call grace. In this case, the style was the man." And he noted that Nelson was an independent thinker who could not easily be pigeonholed. "None of his work was predictable, because Lars simply refused to take his ideas off the rack. He hated the glib sneer, no matter who was doing the sneering," wrote Hamill. For anyone familiar with Columbia College, the influences are unmistakable.

One of the things about being a writer is you leave behind a body of work: good, bad or indifferent. Nelson left behind a sheaf of newspaper columns, the last of which appeared in the Daily News on November 21, the day after he died at his home in Bethesda, Md. It was about the dispute over Florida's electoral votes, which Nelson had tied into the Clinton impeachment process, and it reflected both his style and his way of thinking.

"Exactly two years ago," it began, "lawyers were trying to take a President away from us. Yesterday, they were trying to give us one. And both times, we, the voters in this great democracy, could only watch."