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CLASS NOTES
Columbia College Today Kudos to Herbert L. Nichols Jr. ’29, of Roswell, Ga., who at 93 has been recorded as the oldest individual to plunge into the waters of the North Pole and earn a place in the elite Polar Swimmers Society. Diantha Horton, wife of another Roswell denizen, William Horton ’50, sent an article from the Roswell/Alpharetta Neighbor detailing Nichols’ unusual summer vacation aboard the Russian Icebreaker Yamal on a North Polar Expedition. Nichols flew from Newark to Oslo to Spitsbergen, the northernmost port in Norway on the Arctic Sea. He then reached the Yamal by helicopter for the trip sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History. In 1932, Nichols left New York for Greenwich, Conn., where he acquired a large abandoned farm and began operating a topsoil excavation company. At the outset of World War II, he worked for about six months at an airport in the Bahamas, and, soon after, joined the Seabees, where he was principally assigned to a maintenance battalion in Adak in the Aleutians. Shortly after, he was promoted from first class to chief and was given an island sub-base in Tanaga. Following the war, Nichols returned to the United States and went back to the excavation business. He self-published Nonsense, it’s all in your mind, and wrote several more books, mostly pertaining to excavation and science-related subjects. Nichols says he often would write when traveling; the two activities were complementary because the train or freighter would allow him uninterrupted time.
Paul V. Nyden
Murray T. Bloom Within the next few months, you’ll be getting full details on our 65th Reunion in May 2002. As a member of the Class Reunion Committee, I marvel that so many of us are still around to say hello to one another. Please try to make it. The Reunion Weekend will be from May 30 to June 2, 2002. You’ll receive full details long before then. Regardless of whether you will be attending, why don’t you give as generously as you can to help us reach our goal of a $60,000 class gift?
Dr. A. Leonard Luhby
Ralph Staiger Do you remember when John Siegal used to catch Sid Luckman’s long passes with his big hands? After graduation, John played for the Chicago Bears in their heyday. He used his time off the field to attend Northwestern Dental School and told me that he appreciated football’s enabling him to become a dentist. I had the mistaken notion that he invented the tooth protector that most football players wear, but he discreetly told me who invented the device. John’s brother, Joe, who recently celebrated his 80th birthday, left Columbia for the service after two years. John’s son, John M. Jr. ’77, also graduated from Northwestern Dental School. In the 1992 Columbia College Alumni Directory, there was confusion about John Sr. and John Jr.’s addresses and phone numbers; John Sr. was listed as living in New York. I am glad to report that the error has been corrected and that John Sr. can be contacted via the address and phone number in the new directory.
Seth Neugroschl As you may recall, our September 2001 Class Notes attempted to summarize our class’ history (as we’ve lived it, separately and collectively, including our WW II experience and our class’ tragic casualty record), as context for the Class of 1940 Legacy Planning Committee, now in process of formation. Three New York members, Hector Dowd, Bill Feinberg and I met on September 6 for a preliminary planning meeting in Hector’s Fifth Avenue office. Jim Knight was out of town (see below); Bob Ames and John Ripandelli had been active for many months, by phone and e-mail, in earlier discussions; and a number of other classmates have already expressed a strong interest in joining the committee as we move ahead. We discussed Robert McNamara’s description of the narrowness of our escape from nuclear disaster during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the urgency of understanding current major threats to peace in the light of the different world we live in today, including the growing access to weapons of mass destruction by “rogue states” and non-state terrorists. Even more fundamentally, we need to address the kind of world we hope (or fear) we and our children are building for our grandchildren, and whether they are doomed to repeat — or worse — the bloody 20th century in the 21st.” A conceptual starting point: In answer to our 60th reunion question, “Must history repeat the great conflicts of the 20th century?” Dean Nye of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government asserted, “It is a mistake to use historical metaphors for complacency or despair. History does not repeat itself — our future is always in our own hands.” We agreed that as a first step toward establishing our C’40 legacy at Columbia, we needed a high visibility wake-up meeting on campus, which we tentatively scheduled for late Spring 2002. As we were closing the planning meeting, I think it was Bill Feinberg who said, “We’re talking about the future of the world.” Bill said he planned to be out of town for the weekend, but that I could call him to continue our discussion the following Tuesday, September 11, at his home at Battery Park City (directly across from the World Trade Towers) or at the Second Circuit Federal Court, where he was scheduled to hear a case. The Twin Towers disaster that morning provided a grim wake-up call very different from the spring campus wake-up meeting we had discussed. My scheduled phone call to Bill took more than two weeks to complete, with phone circuits out and the Federal Court building closed. When we finally connected, Bill described leaving his apartment, which faces the Hudson, away from the Towers, at 9 a.m. that morning, discovering people already streaming out of the buildings; running back to get his wife, Shirley; running north up the West Side Highway; and finally locating a cab to take them to friends uptown. Many days later they were permitted 15 minutes back in their undamaged apartment (except for heavy layers of dust) to get some clothing. He told me he felt we should go ahead with a (rethought) spring wake-up event. As I write this, we’re about to reschedule a follow-up meeting of our committee; you’ll be kept abreast of our deliberations, and we strongly invite the participation of all interested classmates. Jim Knight was unable to attend because he was still at his Long Island summer home, grieving the loss of our classmate and his close friend Ed Rice, who died on August 18. They had been collaborating for years on a book-in-process on their colleague Tom Merton ’38. You may recall the dozen-page article on Ed in May’s CCT. Jim’s note about Ed included a tribute that will appear in the next issue of CCT, along with an obituary. It closes with the words, “Goodbye, sport; oh, how I will miss you!”
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