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CLASS NOTES
Columbia
College Today Adelaide M. O'Connell, in reporting the deaths of her husband, Francis O'Connell '36, and their friend, Edward L. Hawthorne '34, also mentioned Ralph Bugli '34, another member of their close-knit group. Ralph lost his first wife, Winnie, but is remarried and lives in Katonah, N.Y. Our thanks to Arnold A. Saltzman '36, who solicited information from his classmates. Some responses follow, and more will appear in future issues. Bill Weisell '36 writes: "We have left Indianapolis for the university town, Bloomington, Ind., and spend summers at our place in Traverse City, Mich. Mary still claims Maine as derivation, but spent her childhood in Texas. We are called there regularly for diminishing family. It is [my] return from there last week that adds a spark to this response. We spent a fine day with Jacques Barzun '27 and his wife in San Antonio. Read Barzun's recent book if you haven't." From Meyer Halperin '36: "I am indeed still 'out there.' I retired from my practice of cardiology and professorship at the Boston University School of Medicine about 15 years ago. Since then, I have been spending about six months of the year in Florida and the rest in Massachusetts and in Maine. While in Florida, I spend most of my time taking liberal arts courses at Florida International University, which has a campus nearby. The exposure to college-age students and to faculty members has, thus far, warded off senility. In Maine, I have a summer house on a lake, where my four children (two of whom are College alumni) and their families spend time with us. For the most part, life has treated me very well." We heard from Graham S. McConnell '36: "After flunking out of Columbia Law School in '36-'37, I got a job painting a house and collected enough for bus fare to Pullman, Wash. (WSC, now WSU), where I lived with my 80-year old grandmother and got straight As (first semester), which was good enough to get me admitted to the University of Oregon Medical School in Portland. I don't know if my ability to translate the Latin portions of Lewis & Clark diaries had anything to do with that; game management majors were required to read those delightful passages. "I was allowed to take ROTC in medical school and was even commissioned first lieutenant, Medical Corps, upon graduation in 1942. Also, working until I was 80 years old did some awfully nice things to my Social Security check!" Graham's daughter, Sara, writes: "This man, born Valentine's Day, 1915, still has a marvelous, inquisitive mind and a great wit and sense of humor. We're trying to tap some of it and yet preserve its uniqueness. He plays duplicate bridge a few sessions every week, swims (and soaks in the hot pool) at the Y and reads The Wall Street Journal daily. His second wife (our stepmother, 17 years his junior) is a retired nurse with her own quirky wit and sense of humor, and is a wonderful caregiver! She's an angel." James Morgenthal '36 writes: "For the past year, I have been training to serve as a consultant to nonprofit organizations for the Executive Service Corps, a national organization with many former business executives helping all kinds of nonprofits. I serve a regional greenspace group and a charter school. It's a wonderful way to spend your time and can be very helpful." Solomon Fisher '36 reports: "I keep busy reading to catch up with all the books I missed while in school and working full-time, but also keep informed via newspapers and magazines. I've written several full-length and short plays, none of which have received commercial production, though all have been read at a local theater club. One play, about Tamar (Genesis 38, which I've dramatized with sufficiently shocking action to explain why God slew her husband on her wedding night, and his brother, the obligated substitute impregnator, is being converted to an opera by a fellow member of the Performing Arts Society. I've also written music for Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' Marlowe's 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love' and other songs." Emanual L. Brancato '36 writes: "If life can be divided into segments, I would classify the entrance into Columbia College as the beginning of an epoch of real excitement in the exploration of human events as we students were led, and frequently pushed, to learn and analyze the origins and the evolution of civilization. Although, during my student days, I frequently resented the enormous amount of reading required to keep up with the scheduled assignments, today I find myself unabashedly grateful to our university. While most of my professional activity has been in electrical engineering research, the understanding of the ebb and flow of human events (history) has made my life more palatable and most interesting." Fred H. Drane '36 looks back on his first wife Mary's accomplishments at Leisure World, where she was secretary of the board. She passed away in 1997 due to a serious heart condition. Fred then fell in love with Beatrice, a trained caregiver hired by Mary during her illness, and the two were married in 1999. They moved to Venice, Calif., in 2000. Fred also mentioned his challenging duties at Sperry Gyroscope, which included converting an A&P warehouse into a mass production line for an air-to-sea radar. Fred worked other jobs as industrial engineer and chief accountant after World War II and earned his M.B.A. at NYU. Irwin Grossman '36 rates "survival" at the top of his recent accomplishments. He also is glad he got out of Lucent with "minimal damage."
Murray T. Bloom John Bockelmann lives in the Seabrook Village retirement community in Tinton Falls, N.J. Years ago, he retired as vice president of quality at Schaeffer Breweries. His oldest son is a computer science professor at Yale, and another is a professor of anatomy and microbiology at a junior college. John has five grandchildren. John Leslie retired as an executive in the accounting department at IBM. He has two daughters, a son and one grandchild. He keeps busy as a Parks & Recreation committeeman in Peekskill, N.Y. Bram Cavin, long retired from BusinessWeek, lives in White Plains, N.Y. He's at work on a nonfiction book about some events in the American past. He has three children, one of whom graduated from Columbia not long ago. LeRoy Champion retired eight years ago from Chase Manhattan Bank, where he was an accountant. He maintains a small tax practice and travels a lot. He has two daughters and eight grandchildren.
Dr. A. Leonard Luhby
Columbia College Today
Seth Neugroschl As I started to write these notes, a few days before September 11, I tried calling Charlie Webster - our globe-trotting class president - in California and lucked out. He had just returned from two fascinating trips: one to Alaska, fishing at Bristol Bay and watching bears do the same, and an earlier trip to Vietnam with a Stanford University alum group. Besides observing the dynamic, bicycle-based life in Saigon, the group met with the U.S. ambassadors to Laos and Cambodia, as well as Vietnam. Their consensus on the situation in their respective countries appeared to be this: with education limited to five years and investment just beginning, "We're halfway between hopeful and hopeless." Charlie and I were struck by how apropos a description this was for today's global realities, the context for our 2000 reunion theme and Class Legacy Project. The recently concluded Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, with all its limitations, provides a ray of hope. The joint Jordan-Israel Dead Sea water project perhaps leads the way. I call to your attention Dean Joseph Nye's (Harvard Kennedy School of Government) critically important challenge to all of us, following his review of the causes of World Wars I and II. He asks, "Must history repeat the great conflicts of the 20th century? It is a mistake to use historical metaphors as a cause for complacency or despair. History does not repeat itself ... our future is always in our own hands." My deep thanks to John Ripandelli, Legacy Committee member, who alerted me to Dean Nye's thinking, and has been in correspondence with him about our Legacy Project. My call to Harry Moore, in response to his mailed-in Class Notes card, turned out to be a great exploration of much common ground, both at Columbia and elsewhere, and ended with my invitation to Harry - enthusiastically accepted- to participate in our Class Legacy project. A business card identified Col. Harrison W. Moore as a chairman at the World Future Society (Westchester, Fairfield, Rockland Chapter). Harry's note: "On August 7, I will be conducting a 'mini reunion' of my 1941-42 World War II U.S. Army Signal Corps 900-plus radar officers, Electronic Training Group, who served in England with me and the British Army and RAF. We hope to have most of the 20 or so who live in the Metropolitan New York area join us at the Harvard Club for lunch." The day following our call, I was astonished to find a half-page story on Harry's reunion in the Science section of The New York Times under the headline, "Veterans of Secret Unit Celebrate Their War Hero, Radar." It described the key role that radar played in helping win WWII, the larger than A-bomb resources devoted to developing radar, the specific roles that some of the Harvard Club attendees, including Harry, played in this process, and for some of them, the continuity with their postwar careers. For Harry, it led to combining his interests in broadcasting and the arts into ownership of a classical music station in Norfolk, Va., community outreach via the Tidewater Arts Council, community affairs and economic development with the Norfolk Chamber of Commerce and then to the New York regional office of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Harry lives in Bronxville, N.Y., with his second wife. He has a son and two grandchildren. I called George Silvis, Columbian staffer, in the course of a to-be-completed appreciation of Bob Ames, yearbook editor-in-chief, whose death I reported in September's CCT. George earned his M.D. from Boston University's School of Medicine in 1943 and joined the Army in March 1945. He was assigned to a hospital ship to bring back wounded, first from the Pacific, then from Europe. In 1947, he returned to Brooklyn to open a 19-year private practice in internal medicine, then joined Continental Insurance for the next 19 years, becoming a v.p. and corporate medical director. George always has been deeply involved with his family. He described cradling each of his eight infant grandsons in his arms, singing them to sleep. Even now (they range from 8-18), he writes "stuff" on wide-ranging subjects, which he hand-delivers to them. He gets feedback, but thinks that it will have the most meaning to them years from now. George ended a post-retirement, part-time nine years with his company in 1994 to be full-time with Helen, his wife of 47 years, in her terminal illness; they had two sons and a daughter. George recently moved from his lifelong Brooklyn neighborhood to a condo in Massapequa Park, N.Y., to be near his eldest son and his son's family.
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