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CLASS NOTES
Everett Weinberger I recently shifted gears and left investment banking for the private client side. I’m a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch, where I began my career 15 years ago. I’m loving the 15-minute walk to work through Central Park and highly recommend a “repotting” to everyone not inspired by what they do. Thanks to the 30 classmates who posted notices on Columbia’s Web site letting us know they were safe after the 9/11 attacks. Of note, Bob Zifchak worked in 4 WTC, saw both planes hit the towers, saw the towers fall, and was evacuated via the Staten Island Ferry. Daw Warwick, who lives in Houston, recalled seeing the WTC just a few days prior from an airplane while flying back from Germany. Victor Bolden is doing well at Wiggin & Dana in New Haven, where he’s a partner. He was previously with the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. His wife, Jennifer Baszile ’91, is a professor in the history department at Yale. Paul Bacanovic works on the equity finance desk at Lehman, and was previously with Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank. He received an M.B.A. from NYU and a J.D. from Fordham.
Sarah A. Kass Thankfully, we have not heard of any members of our class who went missing in the September 11 tragedy. Many classmates went straight to the Internet to let us know they were OK, and the messages were circulated. If anyone would like to share stories with us, please e-mail me. My story is simply that on September 11, I was on my way to Heathrow Airport in London to board a flight to New York City when I got the word and then heard the announcement over the airport loudspeakers that United States airspace was closed until further notice. There is nothing new to say about the tragedy, but I do want to include one quote from an address given by my father, Alvin Kass ’57, at the Yankee Stadium memorial service for the families of the victims. He said, and I believe this wholeheartedly, “Surely these bereaved families must recognize that what their loved ones want most from the survivors is to live for what they died for — a society founded on justice and equity — that peace and security, happiness and prosperity, right and freedom will forever abide among us, a place where government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth.” Thank you, Dad! In the last issue, we were not able to include Lee Ilan’s report on the pre-reunion picnic in Central Park over the summer: “Janis Brody, Farah Chandu, Laurie Gershon, Judy Kim, Nancy Rabinowitz, Peter Ross and Rebecca Turner were among the attendees, along with various family members, friends and other 87ers who were keeping a low profile. “Amid the sharing of food, reminiscing and catching up on recent interests and projects, the big headline was Farah’s daughter Amina losing her first tooth, which we celebrated by attempting to teach her to throw a football. (Thank you, Laurie, for the good-humored coaching!) “My apologies to anyone who looked ‘for the blue and white balloons’ but couldn’t find us because we lacked this landmark. They were there for the first 20 minutes, but we’ll obviously have to get some folks who fulfilled their remoteness requirement with a balloon-tying course for our next gathering.” Bruce Furukawa is back in the Bay Area, where he was born. “I live in San Mateo with my wife, Lisa. We had a daughter, Miya Claire Furukawa, on June 15, and we are all doing fine. I am an attorney in San Francisco at Long & Levit, and I have managed to keep in contact with a number of alumni. After the horror in September, I made a few phone calls back east to see how everyone is doing. Fortunately, I have not had any bad news and all is well.” Bruce also reports: “I found out that Doug Cifu and his wife, Melissa Lautenberg, had a girl, Rachel Schwarz Cifu, on September 30. John Sun and his wife, Jane, live in San Mateo, two miles from my house, and have two kids, Cameron and Hana. Reino Truumees and his wife, Monica, recently had a boy they named Marcus. They already have a daughter, Heili. “Lydia Tzagaloff lives in Colorado and is working for the government as an attorney. Ed Ho lives in New York City and works for Merrill Lynch. Patty Katayama is living in California and working for Stanford Press. Irene Hamberger is married and lives in Japan. She just had a girl.” Garth Wingfield is back in New York City after a stint in L.A. “These days, I’m a writer of various things. I recently wrote three episodes of the Showtime series Queer as Folk (a wild experience). And I’ve also been writing plays off and on for years. Actually, one of my plays (Are We There Yet?) was done to nice reviews in London last winter. It’s been done as readings by various U.S. theaters, so hopefully someone here will soon want to produce it.” Garth mentioned that he wrote in because, “It felt important to be more in touch than I have been with former classmates in light of the awful stuff that’s been happening in NYC.” Jeff Elikan is married and living in Baltimore with his wife, Sarah, and two children, Max (3) and Eliana (1). He made partner at the law firm of Venable, Baetjer & Howard, where he practices intellectual property litigation. Pete Jablonski is trying to track down Luciano Siracusano. If anyone has any information, please e-mail me and I will forward the information. And back on my side of the Atlantic, Annemarie Coffman Lellouch dropped a note from her home in Marseille, France, where she is a staff scientist in immunology at a French government research institute. She writes: “I really enjoy my work. I’m currently making films of t-lymphocytes in action, which is pretty amazing (won’t be competing for any prizes at Cannes, but...).” She met her husband, Laurent, while doing graduate work at MIT. They have been married for nearly 10 years and have a 16-month-old boy, Benjamin (“In theory there will be more of these — we love it!” she said). They left MIT in 1992 and moved to Oxford. In a period of eight years they have lived in England and various places in France (Annecy, Grenoble and Marseille), with a few short working stints in Edinburgh, Geneva, and Copenhagen (“I spent two months working at the Carlsberg Breweries research center — free beer in all the labs.”) Annemarie adds: “But now, after all the hop scotching across Europe in the name of science (Laurent is a physicist), we have settled down in Marseille where we have staff positions in our respective areas of research. Marseille is a great place — lots of sunshine, wine, olives, beaches, crazy football teams and no tourists (yet). It has a lot of history and character, and thanks to its love-hate relationship with the rest of France, has never developed into a tourist destination. Of all strange coincidences, my Danish grandparents lived in Marseille in the ’30s, where my grandfather worked as an engineer in a ceramics factory. They would have stayed had the French not expulsed all its foreign workers just before World War II. I am not French, and have a strictly Scandinavian family background, but I have discovered my Latin heart. I love the Mediterranean lifestyle (food, sun, taking it slow when you want to), my six weeks of paid vacation, subsidized childcare, and so forth. I read The New York Times on the Web each day, and follow CNN on TV at home.” Annemarie also says that she spent two days last July with Esther Chung in her home outside San Francisco when she was visiting Stanford medical school. Esther is a pediatrician and is on the faculty at UCSF. She also consults privately. She is married to Dennis Lee (Columbia Ph.D.) and has two young daughters, Marissa and Emma. Annemarie also saw Carla Cerami in New York around New Year’s 1998, and they now exchange e-mails every six months or so. Carla has left medicine for the world of biotech, where she is a scientific director at Ceramicorp. She got married last fall in California to Jeremiah Hand, who happened, oddly enough, to be an Amherst classmate of Annemarie’s husband. Annemarie adds that she would love to hear about more people. “Where have all the Super-Orgo nerds gone to?” she asks. “And,” she says, “I am thinking seriously of dragging the family to New York for our 15th class reunion. I last visited the campus at Christmas of ’98 (my brother-in-law was at Columbia B-school and we crashed in his dorm room). How it changed!” As I said earlier, please write in and share your stories of how your life has been lately, particularly in light of world events. And if you have happy news about how life really can and does go on, by all means send that, too! We can never have too much joyful news!
George Gianfrancisco As these words reach you, we find ourselves living a world much different from the one lived in just a few months ago, a world eerily similar yet subtly trembling from the aftershocks of tectonic shift that has occurred right beneath our feet. Armed infantry men with M-16s stand as human window dressing in our airports, intimidating only those who would never dream of committing crime. Fear seeps into daily lives, finding cracks in the foundation of our most mundane tasks. Yet still, we own New York. And with that in mind, I am pleased to relay to you that Mike Bogacki is in the 82nd Airborne Infantry. May he serve his country proudly. Former Light Blue gridders John Miller, Dave (Slave) Putelo and Nick Leone all ran marathons on the same day this year. Putelo, ever the load option, finished with the worst time. Maria Roglieri wrote me, answering my plaintive plea — whatever happened to Gloria Trillo? Aside from the fact that she did not win a belly flop contest in Ft. Lauderdale over spring break freshman year like Matt Sodl did, she is doing just fine, practicing dentistry on the Island. She says that Jade Tzeng is married and living in Portland, Ore. Maria is an associate professor of Italian at St. Thomas College and just published a book on Dante. She and husband Dan have three kids... and many cantos. Her plea to me: What is Kathy Wenner doing? Jon Bassett was appointed chair of the history department at Newton North HS in Massachusetts. He has two children, Benjamin and Sarah. He’s creating a history all his own. He tells me that Jon Rosand is a neurologist at Mass General, married with two boys. He continues that Jon Weiss and wife Abigail live in Philly. Jon is an architect, and he and Abigail have a boy and girl, Ned and Amalya. Steve Sagner, with his wife Jen Tower, and his daughter Denali, took time off from LISC, a national housing NPO, to visit. Melanie Marin is in the NYC, in private practice and raising daughter Adara, while Giuliana Dunham lives in D.C. and prosecutes fraud for the Justice Department. And it sounds like Jon Bassett needs a break from keeping up with so many alums. Thanks, Jon. Willie Williams sends his regards from Miami where he is a lawyer. Returning from a visit to the Vineyard, where he met up with Pam Perry, an ER doc in Atlanta and voracious traveler, he tells me that Carlos Cruz is working for Banana Republic in San Francisco, a position that has allowed him to travel no less voraciously than Pam does. Claudia Rimerman (née Kraut) gave me the joyous news that she has left gainful employment after 10 years in the managed care industry. Every Friday she and her two sons spend time with Laurence Holzman and his two boys in NYC. Having forsaken the law, like any sane individual, Laurence is a full-time lyricist now. Not to be outdone on the sanity scale, Rebecca Wright is a world-renowned Ph.D. in computer science and has a 2-year-old son. The aforementioned Dave (Slave) Putelo, ex-roommate and quarterback of the football team, did actually finish that marathon — that was not a misprint. He and his wife, Sue, are living in the most ironic of contradictions... a suburb of Syracuse. He has two daughters, which just goes to show you that there is justice in the world. He still works for Merck and is still blissfully domesticated. Durc Savini, ol’ #33, Baby Finster, the dinosaur himself, model of rectitude that he is, now has two bambinos... Isabella was joined by Nico. I expect his wife, Janeen, regrets having joined that dating service way back when. Ed Cespedes is living in Pacific Palisades, Calif., and his wife, Kara, just had their first child — Caroline Grace. Doug Wolf excitedly announced the birth of his third child, Jason Andrew. Of course, Rob Daniel and his wife have five kids, so you better stay busy, Doug. No throwing in the towel. Frannie Giordano, ’88 Barnard, sent me a wonderful letter (of course I remember you, Frannie). I’m sure I cheated off you in a class somewhere along the way without you knowing it. As my Barnard counterpart, she took the liberty of filling me in about that little Greek boy, baseball captain John Stamatis. Well, the little Greek boy is doing just fine, living in Connecticut and working for Pepsi where he manages their NASCAR account. Everybody turning left, John, with everybody seeming to turn right lately. We probably should all take a moment to reflect on the turmoil of the past year, the past month and even past day, depending on where you live. Let’s all be grateful for what we still have. For what we still can have. And for what we always will have. And as you can see, from the sounds of it all, one thing is certain: We still damn own New York.
Amy Perkel It was good to catch up with Josh Krevitt. He and his wife, Marcy, were living in the Bay Area for nearly three years until just recently. Although they enjoyed the area very much, Josh noted that ultimately the pull of family, among other things, proved too much for them to resist, and they moved back to New York in July, where Josh is a partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, doing intellectual property and media litigation. The couple just bought a house in Scarsdale, where they live with their two kids, Jack (31–2) and Jessica (15 months). Not one to disappoint, Desi del Valle continues to enjoy her dual career in film/video distribution and acting in the Bay Area. She directs the distribution program for FRAMELINE, a nonprofit media arts organization specializing in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender media. Besides a 40-hour per week day job, she manages to maintain a “modest but fulfilling” acting career, racking up a number of independent film credits, and more recently, a few stage credits, with a few Columbia alumni in attendance. For the sake of shout-outs, Desi has been in touch with Isaac Castañedas, Alexander Peña, Kate Movius (see past columns), Rebecca Moss ’90 and Dan Futterman. I’d like to thank Desi for reconnecting me with Isaac. He and his wife are living in the Dominican Republic. We will provide a fuller update on Isaac in an upcoming issue. One aspect of this “job” that still continues to amaze me is that story of a classmate who seems larger than life. Every other column or so, we run across that classmate, and this time the story belongs to Margarita Suarez. Post-graduation with a B.A. in computer science, Margarita began working full-time for the academic computing department, after working part-time for three years as a computer lab consultant. During her 11-year tenure, she designed and maintained the e-mail and Web systems for the University — 50,000 students, faculty and staff. While working, she earned her M.S. in computer science from SEAS in 1994, and then got her second B.A., this time in women’s and gender studies, in 2000. Aside from tuition exemption, Marg notes, the best perk of working at Columbia was the “copious” vacation time and flexible schedule. She was able to do a lot of traveling back and forth to Manila and the mountain province of the Philippines. Other travels included trips to northern and central Vietnam, a visit to the temple of Angkor in Cambodia and trekking in Thailand near the Burmese border. In 1996, she won a trip to Prague by entering a contest open to people who could prove they had been in college for more than eight years! She saw a lot of north-central Europe on that trip, including Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Munich and London. A trip in 1997 would prove to spark a future philanthropic interest. She traveled to Central America, saw parts of Guatemala and Honduras and ended up visiting a friend, a British development worker, in the small northern town of Condega, Nicaragua. There, she volunteered for several days on a building project of the local women’s construction collective. A year after her first trip to Nicaragua, Hurricane Mitch, which tore through Central America, brought her back. While the friends she made survived, they were without clean drinking water, electricity and telephone for 12 days. She rejoined the collective to assist in rebuilding the homes of 30 women affected by the hurricane. These experiences encouraged her to start the Condega Homemakers Project (www.homemakers.org), which raises money and recruits volunteers. In June 2000, Marg left her job at Columbia to devote more time to her volunteer efforts. She took a job at Nontraditional Employment for Women, where she worked on support issues for local tradeswomen, attended a national tradeswomen’s conference and helped with a new coalition of tradeswomen’s advocates and organizations. Future objectives will be to continue reaching out to building trades employers and labor unions, increase support for tradeswomen and investigate ways to help more women get into high-tech occupations. Other activities have included contract work teaching computer hardware at Rosie’s Girls, a girls’ trade exploration camp in Essex, Vt. Additionally, Marg’s work with local tradeswomen has led to her planning guest lectures by FDNY and NYPD women as well as organizing a tradewomen’s building brigade for the survivors of September 11 who may need skilled volunteer tradespeople to make modifications to their homes. On a final note, in her free time (!), Marg does freelance layout for the publication First of the Month: A Newspaper for the Radical Imagination, maintains a number of Web pages and e-mail systems, plays softball with the Prospect Park Women’s Softball League in the summer and spends time with her alternative/chosen family in the West Village, ages 34, 38 and 90. In April, Jay Timmer married Louise Howe, an Englishwoman he met while doing his Ph.D. at Berkeley. The wedding took place just outside London, and the couple honeymooned in Tuscany. Jay is doing research at Sloan-Kettering on the development of the nervous system. Louise works across the street at Cornell Medical School doing cancer research. Given their “wonderful academic salaries,” as Jay notes, they live in Astoria, Queens. Jay is in touch with Steve Mack and Jordan Foster, an M.D. living in Brooklyn with his wife, also an M.D., and their two children. Steve Mack was surprised at seeing his name in boldface in our September column. Apparently, his “outing” by the notorious Jason Carter contained a few inaccuracies, so Steve set the record straight. Steve’s been living happily in the Bay Area since 1989. It is easy for a New Yorker to feel at home, he says, because there are more Yankees fans than A’s and Giants fans put together. In 1996, he earned a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from Berkeley — like Jay — and since then he’s been working jointly at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute and Roche Molecular Systems studying the population genetics and evolution of the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) gene system. “This, while it might seem a bit dry,” says Steve, has afforded him the opportunity to travel — like Margarita — all over the world and mangle the languages of several countries, including Mexico, Japan, Spain, France (where they insisted he speak English), England and Canada. Steve claims that while it doesn’t seem likely, it is possible to mangle Canadian English. He’s been teaching a biochemistry and molecular biology class at the UC Berkeley Extension since 1997, and for the past two years he’s administered the anthropology/human genetic diversity component of the International Histocompatibility Working Group, an ongoing international collaboration that studies immunogenetics of HLA and the various relationships between transplant technology, HLA and disease. On other fronts, during the last 12 years, Steve has run two marathons; served as the chair of the board of directors of Californians for Justice, a statewide grassroots organization fighting for the rights of California’s low income families, communities of color, and gay and lesbian communities; and has become involved in local political campaigns to defeat various conservative initiatives including the passage of the anti-affirmative action proposition and anti-immigrant, anti-union and English-only legislation. Some of the propositions passed and some didn’t, but Steve and his compatriots were able to put together a statewide organization that represents the marginalized communities of California — “not an easy feat,” Steve notes. On the romantic front, Steve is engaged to the “lovely and talented” Mary Fisher, who is not a Columbia graduate. Steve notes that no one is perfect! On the “last-but-not-least” front, Stephanie (Falcone) Bernik, a breast surgeon, was featured on Lifetime’s television program, Women Docs. Episode 10, which originally aired on October 20, 2001, featured five doctors from Saint Vincent’s Catholic Medical Centers. You can easily locate an “Up Close and Personal” biography on Stephanie along with a video clip of the episode by going to www.lifetimetv.com and clicking on “Women Docs,” where you’ll see her compassion in action. Until next time...
Rachel Cowan In my previous Class Notes, you undoubtedly noticed the lack of mention of September 11. The reason for this is that I submitted my column on September 10. Although I was given the chance to update it later that week, I felt that the time was not right. Now, however, two months have passed since that sad day, and I have learned so far that we are lucky not to have lost any classmates. While some of us surely lost people we knew, I am sure that we all mourn for all of the victims and their families. I was comforted by the e-mails that I received from classmates in the weeks that followed, with uplifting news they wanted to share with our class. Sherri (Pancer) Wolf and her husband, Doug ’88, are excited to announce the birth of their third child, Jason Andrew Wolf, in March 2001. That makes him Class of 2023, where he will follow his older sisters Stephanie (5) and Ally (2). They are throwing in the towel against Rob Daniel ’88, whose wife recently brought in beautiful Jenna — number five. Caroline (Parsons) Moore writes: “After graduating and doing the obligatory Eurail pass year, I got my master’s in public health at Columbia and since then have been working, with a couple of breaks, for the Community Research Group. This is a Columbia-based group of scholars and doctors researching inner-city public health issues. Ironically, I do this work from a small, bucolic village in Vermont, where I live with my artist husband, Michael, and our two sons, Thomas (3) and Will (1).” Paul Shaneyfelt says all is well in Ohio. He has a law practice with offices in Dayton and Cincinnati and primarily does commercial litigation. He and his wife, Jill, have two sons, Henry (3) and Sam (1). Who knew, but Greg Palega lives practically down the street from me in Wilmington, N.C. After finishing his residency in Internal Medicine at Duke, he moved to Wilmington and entered private practice. He is happily married to Mary Lynn (Trifaro) Palega ’89 and has two beautiful daughters. He says life is great down there; he spends most of his free time at the beach and recently learned how to surf. Watch out for those sharks, Greg! Attorney Katerina Antos Hulme was married in NYC on May 27, 2001, at the Greek Orthodox Archdiocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity to Daniel S. Hulme, who also is a lawyer. Kathryn Schneider ’88 not only attended their wedding, but played the organ at the ceremony. The Hulmes live on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. My buddy Mike Cashton’s big news is that he finally decided to get out of law firm life and do something fun and interesting. (No offense to the rest of the attorneys out there, but is Mike the first among our class to do this?) He now works as a member of the in-house counsel team at Hasbro (yes, the toy company) in Rhode Island. His son, Tyler, turned 1 in October. I bet Tyler got some gooooood presents. In conclusion, in the Kitchen Saga Update, Isaac-Daniel Astrachan had to do only minimal revisions for Judy Shampanier’s kitchen. At press time, the hunt for the winning contractor’s bid was on.
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