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CLASS NOTES
Alan N. Miller A brief note this time as NYC is still in a mild state of shock and your loyal, non-gambling president was stuck in Nevada after a family wedding. I really only went to see my cute and very determined grandson. After three flight cancellations, I used the old Columbia resourceful spirit and took two Greyhound buses to San Francisco, stayed overnight and finally got a plane to JFK. Great security, and I think flying is the safest means of travel currently. Was I happy to get back to NYC! By
the time you read this, Homecoming against Penn will have come and
gone. We will have spent a great day at Baker Field swapping tales
and family — especially grandchildren — stories,
including photos, and I will have have had a lovely French dinner
at a local restaurant I frequent and bring almost all my dates for
the charming owner to comment upon. Thanks to Larry Gill,
who, with computer skills greater than mine, offered to e-mail many
of our classmates to get greater participation. In addition to
Larry and Vera, I will have seen friends Steve Easten and
Danny Link, who have been captivated by new girlfriends Elke
and Eleanor, respectively. Also Lew and Anita
Hemmerdinger and probably Bill and Vicki
Gregory and Mike and Lisa Spett will have
joined in the wild festivities and Bob Siroty and others are
threatening to break the peace as of this date. The more the
merrier. Horace Givens retired in 1997, as did I, and splits his time between Maine and Arizona playing golf, writing fiction, etc. You can guess the seasons for each location. As with many of us, his children are scattered, California and Texas, and his wife is still active professionally. If Libby were alive, she also would still be working up a storm while I was retired and taking so many interesting courses at Columbia. This term the courses include a long overdue re-reading of Plato and Aristotle, a course of 19th century English literature and a course of various autobiographies. I've been doing this for 15 years, at night while practicing full time, and may finally consider myself educated one day. Danny Freeman lives near Columbia and promises to make the 50th. He judges NYC parking tickets, but with a handwriting almost as bad as mine, he should have been a physician. It took me years to develop my distinctive handwriting, if you could call it that. Anyhow, Danny, nice to hear from you and we want you and many, many more for the 50th, plus updates for our great yearbook. Guys, please contact me with news, stories and suggestions for class events and get togethers during the five-year intra-reunion period. Love to all and hoping to see many of you during the next four years. Also my prayers for our health, happiness and safety.
Herman Levy Ron Kushner shortly will be sending out our class questionnaire. Ron has been working on it for some time, basing it "mainly on [his] own ideas of what would be interesting," with additional input from our Senior Survey ('57 yearbook) and the Class of '55 survey. George Lutz has retired as director of health and wellness for Johnson & Johnson and established a consulting practice in integrative and mind-body medicine in Warren, N.J. George practices with his wife, Eileen, an RN and certified social worker; he specializes in primary care psychiatry and addictions, hypnosis and alternative medicine. His daughter, Michele, recently received her M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School, where she is a Dean's Fellow. Marty Fisher reports on telephoning class members to drum up advance interest in our 2002 reunion. At this time, he limits himself to four professors, a cartoonist, one minister, one businessman, four physicians, one dentist, and five attorneys — and a partridge in a pear tree. He is saving others for subsequent issues of CCT. Bob Alter, a Berkeley professor, has written many books. His most recent are The Art of Biblical Poetry and The Literary Guide to the Bible with Frank Kermode. Erich Gruen, our class valedictorian and Bob's colleague on the Berkeley faculty, has recently published Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of the Jewish Tradition and The Last Generation of the Roman Republic. Erich's roommate at Columbia, Jon Lubin, retired as professor of math at Brown. He has movedto Pasadena, Calif., where he writes, consults and teaches. Mac Gimse retired as professor of art history at St. Olaf's College in Minnesota. Ed Koren, whose unique cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker for about 35 years as well as in past issues of CCT, sends them in from Brookfield, Vt. Remember Gary Angleberger and Ed Heiser? Gary is a Presbyterian minister in Beaver, Pa., and Ed retired as a top executive of a Fortune 500 company and lives in Savannah. Physicians: Former quarterback Claude Benham is in Chesapeake, Va., Joe Karp retired as a Westchester urologist and Joe Ferragamo retired in Nassau County, N.Y. Bill Friedman, senior associate dean for academic affairs, UCLA School of Medicine, is a leading cardiologist. Dentist and successful inventor Gene Wagner lives in Los
Angeles. Al Anton experienced what he described as "a day like no other" on September 11, when he was at the World Trade Center for a seminar instead of at his midtown office. He was having coffee with a friend and enjoying the view from the north windows on the 44th floor when the first plane struck. All he could see was a blur above him. "The building shook, making it hard for me to maintain my balance," he related. In a most moving three-page account of the day's events, Al tells of his descent on the smoke-filled stairway, passing firefighters and security people, and his subsequent odyssey through the financial district, Chinatown, Little Italy and Greenwich Village. All the while he was unable to reach his wife, two sons and daughter; only in the afternoon did they learn that he was safe. Seared in his memory is "the image of the young firefighters and security people heading up the stairs... in all likelihood going to their deaths." Al thought of this passage from John 15:13: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man may lay down his life for his friends." He added, "The hate that inspired the raid has been eclipsed by the love and compassion and devotion to duty that has characterized New York and, indeed, all America in the past few days. If we can retain this spirit, all the loss and suffering will not have been in vain."
Barry Dickman Earl McFarland has retired as a professor of economics at Williams College. Earl joined the faculty in 1968 and has primarily taught development economics courses. For much of his professional life he has done research on Africa, and he also has been involved with the Center for Development Economics, having served as its chair. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the College, Earl earned his Ph.D. in economics and international law at Columbia. In the '80s, he spent two years in Botswana, where he was the chief economist of the macro division of the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning. (Readers of this column will remember that Ralph Stephens also spent a couple of years in Botswana.) Stan Meyer's 13-year old fencing prodigy son, Brendan, won six gold medals and two bronzes this past season, and is national champion in three categories: youth 12 (where he is ranked first nationally); youth 14; and cadet (under 17, which he won at the Junior Olympics). He also took a bunch of medals at the Summer National Championships. Brendan is the only youth 12 men's fencer to compete and earn a ranking in Division 1, the senior group. Perhaps prophetically, Stan recently ran into Bart Nisonson '62, who is an orthopedist at Lenox Hill Hospital and the brother of Ian Nisonson, a '58 fencer. Stan's daughter, Adara, attends Marymount High School in Manhattan. Stan and his wife, Eileen, conduct a psychotherapy practice, and, yes, he still has his glue business. Once again New York magazine's list of the best doctors in the city and suburbs includes a number of classmates: Stan Goldsmith, a specialist in nuclear medicine at the N.Y. Weill Cornell Medical Center (isn't it time they retired your number, Stan? You're on the list every year!); Mark Hardy, who performs kidney transplants and deals with parathyroid disease at Columbia-Presbyterian; Bob Waldbaum, a urologist at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset; vascular surgeon Steve Konigsberg, who practices in Highland Park, N.J.; as well as Charles Goodstein's wife, Carolyn, an allergist at Englewood (N.J.) Hospital and Medical Center. Here's our reminder about the class lunch Scott Shukat hosts on the second Tuesday of every month in the Grill Room of the Princeton/Columbia Club, 15 W. 43rd Street ($31 per person). You can let Scott know if you plan to attend (up to the day before), by phone at (212) 582-7614; by fax at (212) 315-3752; or by e-mail at scott@shukat.com.
Ed Mendrzycki It was great to hear from so many of you. Please keep the cards and letters coming, because with CCT changing to six issues per year, we can almost keep up-to-date with your news. Roald Hoffmann, our Nobel Laureate, continues to explore new worlds beyond chemistry. Besides publishing several collections of poetry and nonfiction, he recently has written a play, Oxygen, with Carl Djerassi. Oxygen is about competition and discovery in science and was to open November 14 for a three-week run in London at the Riverside Studios. Roald also reports, "I just spent six months on a sabbatical at Columbia, sitting in the same Havemeyer Hall rooms I sat in 45 years ago..." Lou Kushnick is director of the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Archive at the University of Manchester (England). Until recently, he was senior lecturer in the department of sociology there. His two most recent books, Race, Class and Struggle: Inequality and Racism in Britain, the U.S. and Western Europe (Rivers Oram Press, 1997) and A New Introduction to Poverty (New York University Press, 1998) are still in print. Mike Tannenbaum tells us that the project he has been working on at the Brookhaven National Laboratory for nearly the past 20 years (!), the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, went into full operation last summer and led almost immediately to results that Mike had the honor to report at two international meetings in France. The talks were in English, but, according to Mike, "thanks to Mr. Brody's French class freshman year, I could have given them in French." Yeah, right. Ray LaRaja's youngest son just graduated from the College, and Ray has just retired from the twin posts of director of surgery and director of the residency program at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital. Bob Koor is semi-retired from the practice of law in Indiana, though he continues to be active as a Chapter 7 bankruptcy trustee working out of Muncie, Ind. Bob and his wife live in Carmel, a suburb of Indianapolis. Last year, Steve Kallis wrote a book, Radio's Captain Midnight: The Wartime Biography (McFarland & Company). The book is a retrospective of the old-time adventure radio program, Captain Midnight, presented as a biography of the title character. Steve says, "Sales have been OK, but it isn't on the NYT bestseller list, yet." Maybe we can help. It was one of our favorite programs as kids. It's available from the publisher and online, but must be special ordered at bookstores. Ken Miskow spent six years as a Marine Corps pilot, then joined Pan American. When Pan Am sold its Pacific Division to United in 1986, Ken went with them. Ken has been based in San Francisco for his entire career, except for four years in Honolulu. He's retiring next year after 36 years of flying and says that after retirement, he "plans to loaf and play lots of tennis. Extensive traveling is not really in my plans (you can probably guess why)." Steve Buchman "retired from the active practice of law seven years ago and became a career consultant/counselor at Columbia Law School. My role includes working with current law students and alumni of the school. In addition to the two days a week I spend at Columbia, I maintain an office at Chadbourne & Parke, where I am the firm's ombudsman. The work in both positions, complementary in many ways, is extremely rewarding, and the opportunity to be on the Columbia campus twice a week is just icing on the cake." Remember that class notes duties for this column are now shared with Bennett Miller, who can be reached at 7805 Fox Gate Court, Bethesda, MD 20817. You also can e-mail him at miller_bennett@yahoo.com.
Robert Machleder Elegance, grace and style have marked David Farmer's columns these past 14 years as our class correspondent. Thank you, David, for performing so admirably — your columns always were a joy to read and your devotion to the class and the College deserves our gratitude. David is looking forward to reducing his commitments, which include service as founding director of the Dahesh Museum on Fifth Avenue near 48th St. (a small gem above street level and across from Barnes & Noble) and teaching a course at Pratt. He and his wife, Pat, plan to spend more time at their home in Maine where they will be able to see more of their 112-year-old grandson and their daughter in Portland. Although David may have put down his pen (if only in regard to this column), Peter Glassgold's pen remains prolific. Peter's latest book, Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth, was published in May by Counterpoint Press. This is Peter's 35th book, as author, editor or editor/translator. Congratulations to Bob Berne, recipient of a 2001 Alumni Medal given by the University's Alumni Federation. Bob chaired the Columbia College Fund with outstanding success, served as vice president of the Alumni Association, served on the Board of Visitors, and has long been active in class activities and reunion organizing. Special recognition should go to Bob and his wife, Steffi, for hosting the cocktail party at their beautiful home in the Dakota as the kickoff to each of our recent class reunions — events that are always highlights. Finally, I assume responsibility for this column with humility and modest talents. I follow in the footsteps of Dave Farmer, Steve Lerner and the late and much beloved Billy Goodstein (apologies if I failed to mention any other prior author) with the hope that I will engage your interest, as did my predecessors. I write this piece uncomfortably close to its publication deadline in a jet-lagged state upon returning from a fascinating tour of China and disembarking in a New York cloaked in mourning following the tragic events of September 11. It is my hope that each of you will let me know the events in your life — whether past, present or future aspirations — that you would like to share with members of the class, and that this finds you in the best of health and with spirits restored.
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