OBITUARIES

1924

George M. Jaffin '24

George M. Jaffin, attorney and philanthropist, Scarsdale, N.Y., on December 23, 1999. The son of Lithuanian immigrants who ran a women’s clothing store, Jaffin grew up in Harlem. He began his career as a real estate investor while still a law student, by working with his father as a developer in the Bronx, and he set up his own law firm, now called Jaffin, Conrad & Pinkelstein, a year after he graduated from the Law School in 1927. Jaffin once summarized his approach to life as “do good, make some friends, and make some money, in that order,” and even though he spent virtually his entire adult life as a lawyer and real estate investor, he became best known for his philanthropic work. For his many contributions — as well as the gifts that he solicited from others — Jaffin is remembered as the financial founder of the Hospital for Joint Diseases and the HJD Research and Development Foundation, and he was honorary chairman of the Board of Trustees for both institutions. (When a wealthy friend asked Jaffin, who served for many years as chairman of the HJD Development Committee, what he wanted for his birthday, Jaffin suggested a $1 million gift to the hospital, which was promptly made.) Disillusioned with the emphasis of many young lawyers on pursuing high-paying careers, in the early 1980s he contributed $1.5 million to the Law School for the establishment of a loan repayment program for any lawyer who remained in a public-interest position for 10 years. The George M. Jaffin Program in Law and Social Responsibility was one of the first such programs in the nation. Jaffin later endowed a chair at the Law School dedicated to public interest law. He also raised money for the University’s Meyer Schapiro Chair in Art History. Jaffin developed close friendships with several prominent artists, some of whom he represented, and often donated art to institutions he supported, including sculptures by Israeli artist Yaacov Agam which Jaffin donated to Hebrew Union College, MoMA and the Juilliard School. Jaffin was a member of the Society of Founders of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a member of the Board of Governors of the Hebrew Union College, honorary chairman of the board of the American-Israeli Cultural Foundation, and a board member of the UJA-Federation of New York. His many services to Columbia included membership on the board of the Jewish Campus Life Fund and life membership in the John Jay Associates.

Lawrence W. Schwartz, rabbi, White Plains, N.Y., in 1999.

1926

Wesley C. Baylis, communications engineer, Pasadena, Md., in March 1997. After a brief stint for the New York Telephone Co., Baylis worked for many years at the Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. in Albany, N.Y. In the 1970s, he became managing director and then president of the Microwave Council in Washington, D.C. At the time of his death, he was president of Micro Com Industries in Maryland.

George A. Henke, retired attorney, Centralia, Ill., on March 11, 1997. A Brooklyn native, Henke graduated from the Law School in 1928. He practiced law at Duer, Taylor, Wright & Woods (1929-35), Shepard Citations (1935-1948), and American Insurance Associations (1948-69). Henke moved to Centralia after his retirement in 1975.

1930

Rolston Coles, Vero Beach, Fla., on February 14, 2000.

1931

Victor Perlo, Marxist economist, Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., on December 1, 1999. A native of East Elmhurst, N.Y., Perlo earned an M.A. in statistics from Columbia in 1932. Except for a stint with the Brookings Institution (1937-39), Perlo spent the years from 1932 to 1947 working in government agencies charged with implementing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. At the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), he became one of the economists known as Director Harry Hopkins’s “bright young men.” During World War II, he served as a department head of the War Production Board and in the Office of Price Administration. Perlo was a long-time member of the Communist Party, and he became a target of anti-Communist backlash in the U.S. after the war, never gaining permanent academic employment. From 1947 until his death, he worked as an economic consultant and writer. In the 1960s he became chief economist for the Communist Party USA, as well as a member of the party’s national committee and chair of its Economics Commission. As an economist, Perlo contributed the concept of the “profits of control” to Marxist economic theory and developed Marxist analyses of the political economy of United States capitalism, comparative economic systems, and the economics of racism. A prodigious author, he wrote 13 books — including American Imperialism (1951), Empire of High Finance (1957), Economics of Racism (1973), Superprofits and Crises (1988), and Economics of Racism II: The Roots of Inequality (1996) — as well as many articles and countless pamphlets. Perlo received the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America “for the outstanding work on intolerance in North America” for the Roots of Inequality II. He contributed a weekly column, “People Before Profits,” to the Communist Party’s People’s Weekly World newspaper, dictating his last column to his wife and frequent collaborator, Ellen, just days before his death.

Herbert N. Plage, retired salesman, Delray Beach, Fla., on February 12, 2000. Plage, who left the College before graduation, worked at the New York Stock Exchange and W.S. Tyler & Co. in New York before joining the McGraw-Edison Co. as an account executive. He retired in 1972 and moved from Flushing, N.Y., to Delray Beach.

1932

Emil G. Punzak, retired, Pittsburgh, in 1998.

1933

Julian L. Wishik, retired physician, Montgomery, Ala., on February 19, 2000.

1934

Julian S. Bush, retired attorney, Charleston, S.C., on May 16, 2000. A member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Epsilon Phi, Bush became James Kent Scholar at the Law School, where he also edited the Columbia Law Review (1935-36). He graduated in 1936, practiced law in New York, and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Bush became a partner in the firm of Leventritt, Bush, Lewittes & Bender and later at the firm of Shea and Gould, both in New York. He served as research counsel for the New York State Commission on Estates, an adjunct professor of estate planning at the Columbia Law School, and professor of law in taxation at the NYU Institute on Federal Taxation. He authored numerous articles and books, including Best of Trusts and Estates: Estate Planning (1965). After moving to South Carolina, Bush became a member of the Charleston Tax Council and the Estate Planning Council, and a founder and director of the Estate Planning Institute of the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). He was a director of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra, a member of the President’s Advisory Council on Planned Giving of the MUSC, and a member of the Society of American Magicians.

1935

William V. Fritz, retired commodities broker, Oak Brook, Ill., on December 15, 1999. Fritz worked for many years at the Chicago Board of Trade. 1936 Arthur H. Dubin, retired teacher, Delray Beach, Fla., in September 1996.

1938

Hewlett F. Ladd, retired, Sudbury, Mass., on May 12, 1999.

Richard C. Rowland, retired professor, Portland, Ore., on March 14, 2000. Rowland, who was a Kellett fellow from the College, received a second bachelor’s degree from Oxford in 1940 and a D.Phil. in 1957. He taught at the College from 1946 to 1953, then at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., from 1955-57. He joined Sweet Briar College in Virginia in 1957, where he established the Asian Studies program, served as chair of the English department, and eventually became Charles A. Dana Professor of English. His many honors included a Ford Fellowship in Asian Studies, a Fulbright lectureship in Taiwan, and election as an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa, the only honorary membership in the Sweet Briar chapter’s 50-year history. He retired to Portland in 1998.

Burtis F. Vaughan, Jr., retired educator, West Palm Beach, Fla., in September 1998. Vaughan, who was the son of Burtis F. Vaughan ’08, received a master’s from Columbia in 1940. He had taught in several New Hampshire high schools and had been chairman of the foreign languages department at Winnacunnet High School in Hampton, N.H., before his retirement.

1939

Lawrence Eugene Goodman, engineer, College Station, Texas, on April 17, 2000. The son of Joseph Goodman, a 1898 School of Mines graduate who became N.Y.C. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s Commissioner of Water, Gas and Electricity, Lawrence Goodman entered the College at 14 after graduating from Townsend Harris High School. At the College, he was president of the Jewish Students Society. Goodman completed a B.S. at the Engineering School in 1940, and one of his first engineering projects was a pedestrian footbridge (still in use) connecting Ward’s Island with Manhattan. He earned a master’s in engineering from the University of Illinois in 1942. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 Goodman returned to Columbia, where he worked with Professor Ray Mindlin to develop the radio proximity anti-aircraft fuse and its radar-controlled director. As a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, Goodman helped install these devices — which provided the first nighttime defense against kamikaze attacks — on the battleship Missouri, and supervised their use during the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. (The devices were also used successfully in the European theatre.) Goodman completed a doctorate in applied mechanics at Columbia in 1948. He taught at the University of Illinois and then at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis, where he became the James Record Professor of Civil Engineering and chair of the Civil and Mineral Engineering Department (1965-72). With William Warner, Goodman published two books on Newtonian mechanics. In 1990, the American Society of Civil Engineers awarded him the Newmark Gold Medal for “outstanding contributions in structural engineering and applied mechanics” and for “his special dedication both in teaching theoretical advances and in instilling professional responsibility in his students.” Goodman, who had retired from the University of Minnesota, was active as a consulting engineer for the Xerxes Corporation at the time of his death. A loyal alumnus, Goodman had attended his 60th reunion at Arden House in October 1999.

1940

Howard L. Powell, retired executive, Orlando, on January 5, 2000. Powell, who had an MBA from the Baruch Graduate School of Business, was retired as director of procurement for CARE, Inc., of Atlanta.

1942

Kermit Irving Lanser '42

Kermit Irving Lansner, retired editor, New York, on May 20, 2000. Lansner was one of the trio of editors who revitalized Newsweek magazine in the early 1960s, helping shape the direction of American weekly newsmagazines in the following decades. Lansner, who did postgraduate work at Columbia and Harvard, was an assistant professor of philosophy at Kenyon College in Ohio from 1948 to 1950; he then spent a year at the Sorbonne in Paris as a Fulbright Scholar. He became managing editor of Art News in 1953 and joined the Newsweek staff in 1954. When Osborn Elliot was chosen to edit Newsweek in 1961, he selected Lansner and Gordon Manning as executive editors, and the three became so successful in balancing multiple duties as they reshaped the magazine that they became known as the “Flying Wallendas,” after the famed circus high-wire act. (The nickname is still used for senior editors at the magazine.) Under their guidance, Newsweek moved away from the model of Time magazine, increased cultural reporting, and introduced bylines for stories. From 1961 to 1969, the magazine’s circulation grew from 1.4 million to 2.4 million. During his tenure, Lanser never became a typical news editor; with his wife, Fay, he socialized with Abstract Expressionist painters on Long Island rather than confining himself to journalist colleagues, and when he was appointed editor of Newsweek in 1969, the magazine’s cultural coverage increased even further. The magazine’s circulation also increased, rising to 2.6 million by 1972, the year Lanser stepped down. He continued at Newsweek as a contributing editor and columnist, and as director of the (now defunct) Newsweek Books, until 1974. Later he became a columnist for The New Republic, and in the 1980s he became editor-in-chief of Financial World magazine, for which he wrote a column until 1996. Lansner’s service to his alma mater included participation in the John Jay Associates as a fellow.

1943

Harold Davidson, consultant, New York, on October 15, 1998. Davidson, who also had a degree from the Engineering School, had been an application specialist and then a senior analyst for IBM in White Plains, N.Y., before becoming an independent consultant.

1945

Douglas F. Hirsh, retired physician, Boynton Beach, Fla., on February 11, 1999. 1948 William D. Ryan, retired sales executive, Medford, N.J., on May 6, 1999.

1952

Eric Bogedal, retired advertising executive, Stanardsville, Va., on February 28, 2000. The son of Danish immigrants, Bogedal attended public school in Queens, then Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. After military service, he joined Mutual Benefit Life Insurance in New York as editor of in-house publications; he later served as public relations manager at Corning Glass and American Brake Shoe. He entered the advertising field in 1962, when he joined BBDO, Inc. as an account manager. In 1978, he joined James Jordan, Inc. (now called imcp.inc), rising to become a senior vice president. Upon his retirement in 1989, Bogedal moved to Virginia, from where he continued to work as a consultant. He was a member of Mensa, the Madison Avenue Motorcycle Club and the Long Island Sports Car Association.

Stanley Hanfling, physician, Hillsborough, Calif., on May 9, 1996. Hanfling, who received his medical degree from Cornell in 1955, maintained a practice in San Mateo, Calif., until shortly before his death, was a staff physician at four California hospitals, and taught health education at the College of San Mateo. He also hosted “Medical Update,” an award-winning medical information program on a local television station. Hanfling was a board member of the California Music Center at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, Calif.

1953

Edison Rawle Borah Hosten, retired executive, White Plains, N.Y., on September 20, 1994. Hosten was retired from the Office of Employee Benefits at IBM’s world headquarters in Armonk, N.Y.

1954

William M. Hagemeyer, innkeeper and retired sales executive, Seattle, on March 6, 2000. Hagemeyer had been director of international sales and marketing for Steffen, Steffen & Associates in Westport, Conn. After retirement in the 1980s, he moved to Seattle where he became owner and innkeeper of the Chambered Nautilus Bed & Breakfast.

1956

Milo Vesel, investment banker, Divonne, France, on March 22, 2000.

2000

Puneet Bhandari, student, North Brunswick, N.J., on April 20, 2000. Bhandari, who had transferred from Rutgers University in 1997, was a pre-med student with a minor in Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures. He had been vice president of Club Zamana (the South Asian culture society), worked as an adviser at orientation, and served as a peer tutor. A memorial service was held on campus on April 24.