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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.
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