 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||
|
CLASS NOTES
Columbia
College Today
Paul
V. Nyden
Murray
T. Bloom I received a letter from Warner Henrickson of La Mirada,
Calif., filled with much that’s worth repeating here to stir
our recollections of campus days. He asks the simple question, “In
what ways do you remember those College days?” He cites a few
memories that stand out. He recalls that phenomenal lecturer, Dwight C. Miner ’26,
flipping his coattails to indicate the chill winds blowing through
the castles at the time of the Crusades. When Miner left, the students
were visibly stunned by his eloquence. Then, Warren writes, there
were two professors who led him through the great books — Jacques
Barzun ’27 and Lionel Trilling ’25. Trilling, ever the
critic, complained that the English language has only one unsatisfactory
word for sexual intercourse. Warren also recalls when Bill Weisel was playing all the
variations of “The Carnival of Venice” on his trumpet
in the lobby of his dorm and Herman Wouk ’34 was writing a
varsity show with the hit song “Have a Cigar” with the
other hit song “You Can Bring this Country Back to Par By Learning
to Say ‘Have a Cigar.’ ” Then there was that upset Rose Bowl game in which Lou Little’s
underdogs shut out Stanford. Stanford had four downs to make that
one yard. In Miner’s next class, when Al Barabas was
present at its conclusion, Miner shut his book and said, “Every
Columbia man was on the one-yard line.” Ruth and Ed Rickert, who lived for several years on Long
Island, sold their Rockville Centre house in September. They moved
to a retirement facility in Mill Creek, Wash., near Seattle, to
be closer to their children. They flew out of Kennedy Airport very
early on the morning of September 11, a few hours before the World
Trade Center disaster. They got out without incident. However, the
moving van with Ed’s grand piano and their belongings took
a couple of weeks to arrive, having encountered a roadblock in Illinois
and a subsequent search for explosives or other contraband due presumably
to intensified security. They are happy with their home with its
retinue of services. Catherine and Bill Sitterley, who, after Bill’s retirement
several years ago moved from the Bethlehem, Pa., area to Naples,
Fla., have now moved to a retirement facility in the Naples community.
Last spring, they attended all of commencement week from baccalaureate
Sunday to Class Day, Commencement and our 65th reunion. One of their
granddaughters, Meredith, was a member of the Class of 2001. A grandson,
James, has been accepted for the Columbia M.B.A. program. He will
be the sixth member of the Sitterley family to receive a Columbia
degree, truly a great record. Lorayne and Charles Stock left Vermont several years ago
for the Florida Keys and are now permanently living there. For the
past six or so years, Charlie has been teaching Spanish to adults.
Last summer, Charlie and Lorayne went to Spain and found that they
could converse with residents in a half-dozen cites with different
dialects. Charlie is writing a compact textbook of Spanish designed
for adult managers who need to learn the basics quickly. It should
be ready for the printer by early summer. Congratulations to an
enterprising octogenarian! Paul V. Nyden, your class correspondent, would like to add
a couple of names to those mentioned as great lecturers by Warner
Henrickson above. Professor Carleton Hayes (Class of 1904) had
an inimitable style of lecturing in his field of modern European
history and nationalism as he paraded back and forth across the
lecture hall to keep us spellbound. During World War II, he was
appointed ambassador to Spain with the express purpose of keeping
Spain from entering World War II on the Axis side. Another great lecturer was Charles Woolsey Cole, an expert on 18th
and 19th century British and French mercantilism with emphasis on
Colbert. One of the great privileges that we had in our days at
Columbia was that many full professors taught our courses —
not so common in later years. With this column of Class Notes, I conclude almost 25 years as
your class correspondent, a task bequeathed me by Al Barabas.
It’s been an interesting assignment, and I have enjoyed the
contact with many of our readers. [Editor’s note: The staff of CCT thanks Paul Nyden for more than two decades of service as the ’36 class correspondent. We will miss his devotion to Class Notes, and we wish him all the best in retirement. Please send any future notes to the CCT office.]
Dr.
A. Leonard Luhby Nothing
to report at this time.
Columbia
College Today
Seth
Neugroschl Harry Schwartz was a Pulitzer scholar and our class valedictorian,
with a subsequent distinguished and high-visibility career. His
direction was set in place by some graduate work in agricultural
economics before he was drafted. After Harry completed basic infantry
training (with what he recalls as particular ineptitude), he was
assigned to the OSS in Washington, with a focus on Soviet agriculture
and food needs. He remained there, with his wife, Ruth, for the
balance of the war. Completing his Ph.D. at Columbia, he briefly
taught here, at Brooklyn College and Syracuse, until he was hired
by The New York Times in 1949. It was to be a 90-day assignment
— and continued for 30 years! As a Times correspondent and
member of the editorial board, he became a noted writer on Russia,
and, later, on medicine. One groundbreaking book, written in 1953,
described how the Soviet economy worked. Another, the highly lauded
The Case For American Medicine, grew out of extensive and tragic
contact with the medical system — particularly P&S —
in the course of his children’s illnesses. In all, he’s
written 23 books. Retiring in 1979, he continued to write and lecture. I asked Harry if he knew the name Simeon Strunsky, Class of 1900,
columnist and an editor of the editorial page of the Times for many
years. “He was a legend” at the paper, Harry replied.
Strunsky was my father’s closest friend at Columbia and afterward.
My father also graduated in 1900, and his yearbook is inscribed
“co-owned with Simeon Strunsky” on the flyleaf, I assume
to share the cost. Dad had a Pulitzer scholarship, $350 a year plus
free tuition. Each student had two pages in the yearbook: one for
a photo, and on the facing page, an essay. Dad wrote a witty bio,
from his 1879 birth in Austria-Hungary and his arrival in the U.S.
at age 3, through his father’s failed attempt to establish
the family as farmers in Kansas — in the face of “Indians,
coyotes and tornadoes” — to life at his schools, including
his seven years at Horace Mann and Columbia via the Pulitzer. Alvin Turken and I had not been in touch for years, until
my recent call. We were close friends at Columbia and for some time
afterward, until his move to Beverly Hills. Alvin was another Pulitzer
scholar and probably the youngest member of our class. He went on
to earn an M.D. at P&S, following in the footsteps of his dad,
a dedicated family physician in the Lower East Side. Alvin chose
orthopedic surgery as a specialty and still practices 52 years later.
He and his wife, Debby, have three sons and four grandchildren;
I was very touched as he recalled that one of their sons is named
after me. For many years, Alvin has been actively involved with
Israel’s Institute of Technology in Haifa. He described some
of their outstanding current work, including stem cell research. Ed White is an active and much appreciated e-mail correspondent,
with an amazing memory for nostalgia-evoking events and studies
60-plus years ago, on campus or at our pre-engineers’ Camp
Columbia. Ed graduated as a chemical engineer and had a distinguished
career as a civilian with the Navy, as I’ve previously reported.
In post-retirement, he’s continuing his professional involvement
with ASTM International on petroleum products and lubricants matters.
“It could keep me busy 24 hours a day!” he says. It sounds
as if he’s in excellent physical shape as well, helped along
by an active exercise program that includes curling. I learned it’s
a competitive sport that involves pushing 42-lb. rocks from one
end of an ice rink to the other.
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
