 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||
|
CLASS NOTES
Henry S. Coleman I received an e-mail from Harold Samelson ’45 with the sad
news that Harvey Winston died on February 5 after a long
illness. I wish Harold had included some news about himself. Those
wishing to contact him can try samelsonh@juno.com. Also received a long letter from Ted Smith, who is listed
as ’47 but should be ’46. Ted was my first roommate at
Columbia in July 1943 as the V-12s took over the USS Hartley and
USS Livingston. He had come from the fleet and was much more
Navy-savvy than the rest of us poor civilians. I last saw Ted at
the 55th reunion. He reminisced about our engineering classmate,
Jerry Harris. Jerry and Ted were best man at each others’
weddings. Ted and his wife, Kay, split their time between New
Hampshire and Florida. For the past few falls, he has thoroughly
enjoyed the Columbia football team’s victories over
Dartmouth. To Ted, I say, “Many thanks for your New
Year’s greeting.” Howard Clifford checked in from All Saints, Mont., where
he is conducting special tours of the Rodeo Grounds for the little
old ladies who come to the area to retire. He says he is much in
demand. Howard remembered how Ted used to gross out our other V-12
roommate, Jim Eliasoph, by lying on the lower bunk smoking
foul cigars. That was Ted’s privilege for being an “old
salt.” This column is supposed to be written every two months and your
class correspondent needs some help from his fellow
’46ers.
George W. Cooper This is written during the brief interval betwixt two cataract
operations (one eye corrected; the other still passably useful). No
sympathy cards, please — just another sign of increasing age
while retaining youthful cheer, neither uncommon among our
classmates, I should imagine. Ed Gold has chaired a fund committee, which is about to complete
its work after allocating $1.6 million for capital projects in
respect of social service, educational, environmental and cultural
organizations in his Lower Manhattan district. He has written
several articles for his newspaper, The Villager (which
recently engaged Ed Koch as its movie critic) about the impact of
disasters we’ve lived through, up to and inclusive of 9/11.
Ed recalls being on the Spec managing board when FDR died. As he
remembers it, members of the board to whom FDR was the devil
incarnate insisted on retaining the planned editorial about a
College dance, limiting mention of the president’s death to a
front page box in which it was remarked that FDR had an impact
— no more, no less. Need one add, “O tempora, O
mores!” Ed has heard from George Borts, still teaching history at
Brown. George lives in Providence with his wife, Dolly. Andy Lazarus’ latest literary oeuvre is a novel,
The Street of
Theodore Melnechuk My thanks to those of you who took the trouble to let me know,
by letter or e-mail, that you didn’t want me to stop writing
these notes, as I indicated that I might do. Besides David N.
Brainin, Charles D. Cole and Fred W. DeVries,
whom I wrote about in the March issue, I heard from Raymond G.
Auwarter, Robert Silbert and Jean Turgeon, whose
e-mail about my work as your class correspondent was short and
sweet, and I thank him for it. Raymond G. Auwarter began commuting to the College in
1944. Among his campus friends were Marshall Mascott, Ken
Bernstein, Bill Vessie and his Varsity C lockermate,
Bill Swiacki ’49, for Ray joined the varsity basketball team.
Later, his brothers, Henry and Richard, were captains of Columbia
swim teams. The three brothers may have set a Columbia record for
one family in one decade. Ray’s education was interrupted by his enlistment in a
special Naval program. On returning to campus, he played only one
basketball game under Gordon Ridings before deciding that the
accelerated postwar program he had elected required total
commitment to studies. He was encouraged to make this decision by
his advisers, Harry Carman and Lawrence Chamberlain. Earlier, Ray
may have been present at the origination of the three-point shot,
when he was sixth man off the bench after forwards Norman Skinner
’50 and Tom Wood ’49, center Howard Dobel ’45E
and guards John Profant and Al Garcia in a game with
Fordham at the Columbia gymnasium on February 7, 1945, under
Columbia coach Elmer Ripley, an original Celtic. The game was
played under new rules proposed by Howard Hobson, Oregon coach, and
Julian Rice ’40, intended to give the longer shot greater
worth, eliminate the zone defense and decrease the emphasis on big
men in basketball. If you want to know who won the game, you can write Ray at the
home to which he and his wife, Roberta, moved two years ago, after
30 years of living in Brookville, Long Island, and in an apartment
at Beekman Place. His address is 60148 Davie, Chapel Hill, NC
27517. If you do write him, ask him for a copy of Where Was I?, his
account of how he and a colleague witnessed both of the 9/11
attacks on the Trade Center Towers and then escaped from the 24th
floor of a nearby building, 195 Broadway. As Ray puts it, “We
were more than lucky; we were blessed.” In January, Robert Silbert M.D. sent me a pleasant
e-mail, and my reply led him to favor me first with a heartwarming
follow-up and then with one of the most welcome phone calls I have
received since Lewis Kurke called me a year or so ago.
However, when Bob called, I wasn’t at my desk (where my phone
log is), and now on deadline day, to my embarrassment, the detailed
notes I took at the time on a loose piece of paper can’t be
found, so I am not able to tell you more about Bob other than that
he is a practicing psychiatrist in New York City and a very nice
guy. I hope to soon reestablish contact with Bob, with logbook at
the ready, in time to write about him more thoroughly in the next
edition of these notes. By the way, I learned to keep a detailed phone log in 1963 from
my boss, subsequent mentor and eventual friend, the late Dr.
Francis O. Schmitt, institute professor at MIT, when he was the
founding director of the MIT Neurosciences Research Program and I
was his right-hand man as communications director. Schmitt, who had
coined the term “neurosciences” in 1961, advised me,
“Record every call you make or get, if only to know every
promise you made and” — he added with a twinkle —
“every lie you may have told.” He also took copious
notes of lectures at the interdisciplinary workshops we organized
on research vanguards, using blue ink on the right-hand page to
record findings and red ink on the left-hand page to record
original ideas inspired in him by what he’d heard. He later
rated each speaker’s talk by the ratio of red-ink notes to
blue-ink notes, believing, as the English physicist Ernest
Rutherford said, “Data is evidence of
something!” My ego also got a boost from George A. Swisshelm, who
began a letter by saying he had enjoyed my November Class Notes in
verse. The main body of his letter was about his “latest
hobby” — his WWII memoirs, which, in reply to an ad in
the Darien Times, he sent to historian William O. Oldson at
the Institute on World War II at Florida State, apparently at about
the same time as Durham Caldwell’s compilation but
before the recent publication of War Letters by Andrew Carroll
’93 and the current collecting of such memorabilia by the
Library of Congress. What George sent the institute were his memories, not his war
letters, which he can’t find, even though his family saved
every However, by that time (late 1944), the Luftwaffe didn’t
have enough big bombers left to gather into large formations but
did have “Red Baron wannabees” piloting fighter planes
that swept in low and fast, too fast for the big guns that Max
fired, but “red meat” for the less complicated guns
that George fired. Though Max’s sophisticated four-gun unit
had worked itself out of a job, he got a million-dollar wound and a
Purple Heart, while George did not, in all of his 36 months in the
Army. George can be written to at 37 Philips Ln, Darien, CT
06820. Reflecting on Ray Auwarter’s Where Was I?
and on George’s 1000-word letter, I wish that when I received
them, I had thought to send copies to the editors of CCT, for
possible verbatim publication in an expanded Letters column, if not
in a new section of writings by alumni. But I thought of it only
now. If later I learn that either manuscript has been published, I
will let you know. Meanwhile, Happy Spring! P.S.: Jay C. Fernandez ’49, would like to get back in touch with Frank Jay MacKain, of whom he lost track in the late ’70s. Jay receives mail at Apartado Postal 26, 6100 Cuidad Colon, Costa Rica and at Unit 2513, APO, AA, 34020-9513, USA, and his e-mail address is jaygrace@racsa.co.cr.
Joseph B. Russell Our esteemed past president, Bill Lubic, has, with his
wife, Ruth, announced semi-retirement — which means they will
each continue what they have been doing, but on a 50 percent time
basis with a lot less of the commuting that they have been doing
for the past eight years. Time will be divided between their
Manhattan brownstone and a condo in Washington, D.C. The event was celebrated with two-and-a-half-weeks of travel in
Italy, mostly Florence, during the Christmas/New Year holidays,
quartered at a former Rockefeller villa in Fiesole and traveling
with a Georgetown faculty/student group, revisiting the Renaissance
(really the Rinascimiento, no?) where it all began. Humanities A
readings came floating back, notes Bill, with a renewed sense of
curiosity and public responsibility. In October, Ruth was awarded
the Lienhard Award by the National Institute of Medicine (former
awardees include Bob Butler and former Surgeon General Everett
Koop) and designated a “Living Legend” by the American
Academy of Nursing. Bill enclosed with his letter a copy of The New York Times obit
for Lou Kusserow, who died last June, and of course it
mentioned Bill Swiacki’s spectacular catch to win the
Army game 21–20. Swiacki, too, is sadly no longer among
us. Having heard nothing else from or about our members beyond the above, one follows the advice of Lewis Carroll: Begin at the beginning, continue until you come to the end, then stop. Best regards to all of you!
Mario Palmieri Ray Annino has updated his Web site to feature a gallery
show of his watercolors. Go to http://pages.prodigy.net/raya1
and take a look at some nice art by a classmate. Desmond Callan has retired from medical practice but is
still involved in health care in Columbia County, N.Y., where he is
devoting himself to nonclinical health care boards and committees
and a community health center. His wife, Georgene, also helps the
community by being active in Habitat for Humanity. Desmond has two
children and two grandchildren. Ralph Gray, a psychotherapist in New York City, wondered
if there was a message for him in the events of 9/11; he was close
enough to hear a loud bang as he talked on the telephone. He said,
“Later, I figured it’s for me to get busy living.
Particularly to deepen my relationships, make them more
meaningful.” Ralph, now semi-retired, is still busy planning
workshops on relationship problems. John Iorio has retired from the faculty of the University
of South Florida and devotes his time to writing fiction. And, no
doubt, politics will take up some of his time. His daughter, Pam,
will be running for mayor of Tampa, Fla. Ed Kessler, whose career was in meteorology, retired as
director of the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Oklahoma. Ed
is active on the political scene in Oklahoma; another interest that
keeps him busy is managing his 350-acre tract of prairie and
wilderness with cows, sheep, chickens and abundant wildlife. Farm
work, he says, is a “sanitizing balance” in a high-tech
world. Ed has two sons and four grandchildren. After 21 years as director of the Greenwich, Conn., library,
Nolan Lushington joined the faculty of the library school at
Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven where he became
associate professor. He also had a career as a library building
consultant and has worked on some 200 public library improvement
projects. This spring, Neal Schuman, a library publisher, will
publish Nolan’s third book, Libraries Designed for
Users. Nolan mentioned, “It would be nice to hear from
some of my rifle club buddies.” Do you like ceramics? With a computer you can get an eyeful of
colorful pieces created by the daughter of Bob Siegel. Take
a look at www.woodsidepottery.com. It’s nice to have medical expertise right in one’s
own family, and Arthur Thomas has done well in that regard. His
wife, Charlotte, has been honored with the Marian Nowak Award of
Greenwich (Conn.) Hospital for her outstanding work there as a
registered nurse.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
