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CLASS NOTES
Henry S. Coleman Your Class Secretary got a wonderful needle from Paul Barenberg about a great goof in the March notes. Paul had been looking for classmates from DeWitt Clinton and mentioned that Fred Kavaler had died. In my column, I asked other Clinton grads to write to Fred instead of Paul. Once again, Paul’s e-mail is a3624c@aol.com. Paul gave me a great bit of history of Chester County, Pa., where he lives. West Chester, the county seat, has been known for many people and events. Samuel Barber was born and raised there. Bayard Rustin sat in school next to a friend of Paul’s. Lincoln stopped off once and gave a speech on Market Street, and, in 1825, Lafayette reviewed the troops on East Lafayette Street after a visit to the battlefield. The local historical society must be very proud of Paul. Howard Clifford had asked what had happened to Herb Gold. Herb, obviously a careful reader of this column, responded with a wonderful letter. He enclosed a column he had written for the Los Angeles Times in which he takes the publishers to task for such words as “debut” for a first novel or play, the word “riveting” when applied to mysteries and other novels, and finally, “hopefully.” Herb says that to use “hopefully” to mean “I hope” is the death of language. He states, “At our age, we have a right to curmudgeoness, don’t we?” Herb added that he has “great nostalgia for Columbia days, just a moment ago.” I sent Herb’s material to Howard, who is settled in Bent
Forks, N.D. He is trying to start a croquet league but says it is
hard to find a flat surface that isn’t sand. Howard mentioned
some other classmates he would like to hear from: Pete
Miller, Mike Pincus and Norm Cohen. Send your
news to me and I will pass it along to Howard.
George W. Cooper By the time these notes have been edited, printed and mailed to classmates anxiously waiting to devour every delectable item, many of us will have attended our 55th reunion. The news here related may be stale, well past its “use by” date, but your correspondent must fulfill his bimonthly obligation to our charming yet insistent Class Notes Editor. Therefore, in order of receipt, the first note is from Bob Pease, who has sold more than 21,000 copies of his books. Two titles, Dead Ahead and O.I.U., are going into their fifth printings. Still, he seeks a major publisher and hopes one or more classmates can give him a good contact. His address is in the Alumni Directory, or can be supplied by your correspondent. Dan Hoffman, who appears to have found good publishers, relates that the Louisiana State University Press has issued his ninth book of poems, Darkening Water. Dan is Professor of English Emeritus at Penn and lives in Swarthmore, Pa. Finally, setting aside personal views, your correspondent is constrained to pass along, in brief, the cri de coeur received from B. James Lowe ’51, who asks all concerned to join him in urging the College administration to reinstitute the NROTC at Columbia, “evicted” (his term) during the Vietnam War period. Personal note: This is being written on an antediluvian word
processor, as your correspondent “don’t know from the
Internet.” Apologies are hereby offered to our Class Notes
editor for the extra work involved. Must wonder: Am I alone, or are
any other classmates in the same predicament?
Theodore Melnechuk Once again, I’ll report on classmates in the reverse alphabetical order of their surnames. This lets me start with Thomas H. Weyr, whom I remember as a very likeable guy. At Columbia, Tom and I began a lifelong friendship with the late Mark Strage ’49, who, after retiring early from magazine editorship, wrote three wonderful books, Cape to Cairo: Rape of a Continent (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), Women of Power: The Life and Times of Catherine De’Medici (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976) and, most uniquest, The Durable Fig Leaf: A Historical, Cultural, Medical, Social, Literary, and Iconographic Account of Man’s Relations with His Penis (Dorset Press, 1980). In the Lion’s Den, Tom, Mark and I used to play gin rummy with each other and others at a quarter of a cent a point, the going rate in those days. Tom became an international journalist, covering the building of the Berlin Wall for ABC in 1961. In the ’80s, he wrote a book about Hispanics in the United States. Last July, he left DM News International, a monthly trade paper that he had edited for seven years, to work full-time on his second book, under contract with Oxford University Press, about Vienna under Hitler. Accordingly, he lives half the time in Vienna, doing research and writing, and now is well into the book. Tom credits me with unwittingly affecting his life by telling him at the 10th class reunion — by which time my wife, Anna, and I had already had our four children, whereas he was unmarried — that no, he wasn’t single, as he said, but a bachelor, a thought that he says led him to marry the first girl who would have him. His second marriage lasted 25 years, and his third is going on 11. His wife, Nancy, makes his half-years alone in Vienna bearable by taking trips with him — most recently to Berlin — when she can get away from her job as an editor at Reader’s Digest books. Tom’s daughter, Garret, has her third novel coming out and has sold her fourth, and his youngest child, Tara, makes movies in Budapest about dinosaurs. Tom’s address in New York is 6 Wildway, Bronxville, NY 10708; otherwise, it is Alserstrasse 35/24, 1080 Vienna, Austria. A brief letter from Jean Turgeon thanking me for my write-up of him in March 2002 said that “seeing it in print sort of makes me relive that period.” Perhaps it’s time for Jean — and all of us — to write our memoires! I use the French spelling because Jean lives at 452 Mt. Stephen Ave., Westmount, Quebec H3Y 2X6. In the last edition of these notes, I promised to have more information about Robert Silbert. I was kept from seeking it by the fatigue caused by a long bout of pneumonia, from which I think I am recovering, that triggered or exacerbated what is diagnosed as congestive heart failure (i.e., inefficiency), for which I am taking digitalis. I hope to feel stronger sooner and to get in touch again with Bob. As you may surmise, these notes are based entirely on e-mails and letters that originated with their subjects. One such welcome letter came from Burton R. Sax. Burt began by writing that he appreciated reading about classmates, then pointed out that each year, he and his grandchildren are the only ones who show up at Homecoming to represent the Class of ’48. He ended by asking, “How about some more attendance from you other people?” You can address your apologies, excuses, promises or whatever to Burt at 174 Birch Dr., Manhasset Hills, NY 11040-2322. An e-mail brought me the sad news that John B. Mazziotta died on March 6. John was born and raised in the Bronx, and, as a lifelong Yankee fan, was at the stadium on the day when Lou Gehrig ’25 said that, despite having to retire because of illness, he was the “luckiest man on the face of the earth” for having played with Babe Ruth and been a part of many great New York Yankees teams. During the Second World War, John served in the Navy and was sent to Okinawa to help prepare for the planned invasion of Japan that was precluded when the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb attacks quickly led to the end of the war. After returning home and enrolling at Columbia, John was a member of the Lou Little-coached football team that in 1947 ended Army’s 32-game winning streak. He wore number 74 and played tackle on offense and defense, as was common in those pre-platoon days. After graduating, John taught high school chemistry at Mount Vernon, N.Y., and White Plains, N.Y., high schools, where the students, who enjoyed his classes, called him “Mr. Mazz.” John retired in 1986 but taught a class at Westchester Community College until last year. In 1997, he attended the 50th anniversary celebration of the 1947 Lions’ victory. John leaves Adrienne, his wife of more than 50 years; two sons, John C., a professor of neurology at UCLA (whom I’ve known for 20 years as a leader in brain mapping), and Robert, a dentist in Bethesda, Md.; and four grandchildren. [Editor’s note: Please see obituary in this issue.] I’m sure that many of you remember Herbert Gold ’46, author of many books, the latest of which are Daughter Mine (St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Best Nightmare on Earth: A Life in Haiti (Touchstone Books, 1992) and The Age of Happy Problems (Transaction Pub, 2002). In a delightful letter, in which he enclosed a copy of his witty criticism of publishing cliches published in the March 24 issue of the L.A. Times, he corrected a grammatical error that I committed in the March 2002 notes, where I wrote “whom he says was” where I should have written “who he says was.” This correction made me laugh like hell, because I am a pedantic perfectionist who finds and corrects innumerable grammatical and spelling and other errors in every contemporary book I read, even in Jacques Barzun ’27’s recent magnum opus. (This seems like a good spot to recommend a book by two Richards, Lederer and Dowis, Sleeping Dogs Don’t Lay: Practical Advice for the Grammatically Challenged.) Herb was sweet enough to say that I must have made the error deliberately, just to elicit a moan from him. This gave me the idea of creating the term “most uniquest,” used above, in hopes that it will evoke from Herb not so much a moan as another letter and enclosure. For letterhead, Herb used a copy of a portrait sketch that shows him with a beard, something I don’t recall him having at our last get-together about 25 years ago, a meeting he kindly said it was now time to repeat. I think Herb was already living at his current address, 1051 Broadway, San Francisco, CA 94133. At that meeting, after discussing Herb’s championing of a local prostitutes’ movement for respect and legality, I had the pleasure of telling him that a next door neighbor he hadn’t recognized was not only another writer but also a Columbia alumnus of our era, Thaddeus Golas. Tad already was almost living on the royalties of an 80-page paperback he self-published in 1972, The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment, which he peddled daily to lunching office workers at the foot of Market Street. He added to that income by renting his apartment during the working day to a pornographic film production company, whose members shooed him out every morning before Tad could see anything other than that they were as emotionally close as a family. Tad and I became friends in 1947, when he liked a poem of mine in the Columbia Review that jibed with emotions he had felt while fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. After graduation, Tad worked for publishing firms in New York and then the midwest until he became an acid-dropping guru in San Francisco in the ’60s and wrote his book, which two decades later was being published by a commercial publisher and has since been translated into umpteen languages. He has lived on its royalties ever since. We stayed friends for about 40 years, until I annoyed him by teasing him as “Pan Golas,” which means “Mr. Golas” in Tad’s ancestral Polish but implied that I found his philosophy too much like that of Candide’s Pangloss, who agreed with Leibnitz that this was the best of all possible worlds, or, as Tad put it in his book, “love it the way it is.” Alas, he stopped loving me the way I was, and we’ve been out of touch for years. I think he recently moved from Sarasota to the east coast of Florida. Perhaps, if he reads this, he will resume writing to me, if only to bawl me out again for not taking his ideas seriously enough and to tell me how many copies of his book have been sold in how many languages. I hope so. Finally, you may recall that the March notes included an acrostic poem by Fred DeVries ’49 ’50E. In a subsequent e-mail, Fred asked whether, if his poem were not even doggerel, might it be catteral? I’ll close with the limerick I sent Fred in reply: “I regret there’s no genre called
‘catterel’ Your turn, Fred!
Joseph B. Russell I received a warm and welcome letter from Charlie Bauer, from which I quote in part: “I guess I’m lucky to be alive (74) today! I also am lucky that I was married for 40-plus years to a great gal who always was well but died three years ago from metastatic cancer. We had two sons and one grandson, who was born just before she died. My only advice to all of my classmates, and everyone else, is ‘Don’t give up; keep fighting. M.D.s often are mistaken (even if you go to Columbia and Harvard Med School).’” He adds a P.S. to the effect that he hopes that I can read his scribble, and one is happy to say that his hope is not misplaced. All the best to you, Charlie, from all of us! Congratulations are in order for another of our medical types: Dominick Purpura, dean of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, reported completion of the college’s 18,000-square-foot Gruss Magnetic Resonance Research Center, which he describes with pardonable pride as “the only facility in the metropolitan area, and one of only six in the world, to use sophisticated high-field magnets to provide imagery on the human body and its cellular components with precision and detail that is not possible with conventional MRIs.” A photo story appears on the front page of the April 21, 2002, New York Times Real Estate section. I had the pleasure of attending the 50th anniversary reunion of
my Law School class May 3–4, where it seemed that all but a
lucky few of us had grown quite older! All were astonished at the
changes, physical and curricular, that were described and
demonstrated to us.
Mario Palmieri Philip Ferro is busier than ever as a physician and teacher. Fortunately, his wife, Barb, a Realtor, also is a workaholic and both are going full speed in their careers plus some extracurricular activities. Phil not only continues his private practice of Ob/Gyn in Syracuse, N.Y., but also for 12 years has been a full-time member of the faculty at the SUNY Upstate Medical University. In addition, he teaches physician assistant students from LeMoyne College where, incidentally, his daughter teaches biology. Phil says: “I feel I have the best of both worlds with private patients and my academic duties.” All the foregoing is in the career realm. In their spare time, Phil and Barb have raised Morgan horses, competed in carriage-driving competitions and now breed and show Norfolk Terriers. (“Just to fill in our days!” Phil says.) He adds: “I often gratefully look back on my Columbia education and appreciate the broad area of knowledge to which we were exposed. So many of today’s students have a narrow, overly focused experience when they arrive at medical school.” Bernard Prudhomme occasionally travels to Colorado and California to visit family. He and his wife, Jackie, plan to tour Normandy this year where, he says, “I plan to broaden my French vocabulary and my waistline.” Bernard has a serious word of advice for classmates, based on his recent experience with prostate cancer which, fortunately, had a good outcome. “Do yourself and your loved ones a big favor and have your prostate checked at least once a year. I look forward to seeing you all again in 2005.” John Rosenberg, still active on the Columbia faculty, sent me a “quickie” because he had “lots of essays to grade” (it was that time of the academic year) to let us know that he has written an introduction to a new Modern Library edition of Thomas Carlyle’s great prose epic, The French Revolution. Gerald Weissmann combined his medical-research and literary careers in his latest book, The Year of the Genome: A Diary of the Biological Revolution, which was published in May by Henry Holt & Co. The book’s 35 vignettes, according to the Barnes & Noble review, trace awe-inspiring discoveries of 2000 and 2001 and lead the reader down the social and scientific pathways taken by the researchers. Detailed reviews are available online. In April, Gerald, John Hollander and John Rosenberg
attended the 200th anniversary celebration of the Philolexian
Society.
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