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CLASS NOTES
Henry S. Coleman The sad news to report is the death this summer of our former class president and good friend, Marvin Sinkoff, a remarkable fellow. He survived two leg amputations in recent years but still traveled the world and kept in close touch with his colleagues. It was impressive to note all the wonderful things his fellow doctors wrote about him in The New York Times obits. Peter Miller was flattered that a classmate wanted to hear about him. During recent years, he has enjoyed auditing at least two College courses each semester on philosophy, government or economics. These classes “are always more sophisticated and intellectually demanding than our undergraduate courses,” he commented. Peter writes for the Citizens Union and sent me two drafts he had prepared for that organization: “Questions for all candidates seeking CU endorsement for election to New York State public office” and “Proposal for aid to families of victims of terrorism in Israel and Palestine.” Bernie Sunshine has become a board member at the Harlem School of the Arts and is contacting classmates for a midtown luncheon. A call from Howard Clifford, who now lives in
Wasted Stream, Utah, brought back more memories of Marv
Sinkoff. Howard recalled how Marv presided at our great
class luncheons at Luchows. He also recalled what a fine pianist
Marv was. Howard is organizing a group of poll-watchers for the
local primary for Justice of the Peace. He was delighted that Peter
Miller checked in and is going to ask him to prepare a
proper background questionnaire for the candidates. Howard wonders
what’s new with Paul Marks and Burt
Sapin, the great speakers at our 50th reunion.
George W. Cooper These Class Notes, or lack of same, are to be published in the
November 2002 issue, but had to be submitted by early September.
Who can tell what events of significance to classmates may occur
and be worthy of inclusion in these notes in the next two months?
Not, surely, this correspondent who, eons ago, cracked his crystal
ball. Meanwhile, for lack of communiqués, there is nothing
to relate. Is life among our classmates so uneventful, so quiescent,
so lacking in interest beyond immediate family bounds that someone,
anyone, has anything to report? Your correspondent may well be overwhelmed
by a virtual flood in the next months, requiring his joyous apologies.
It would be a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Theodore Melnechuk At the end of July, I received an e-mail from the two staff members of the Alumni Office who will be working with our reunion committee on our 55th reunion, to be held next year. Next year! It seemed like only yesterday that the e-mail’s authors wrote that I, as class correspondent, had been nominated by Class President Sears Edwards to serve on the committee, and that if I were interested in participating, they, Sharen Ovalles and Brandon Doyle, would welcome my help and any suggestions for reunion events and fund-raising efforts. In my reply, I thanked them and Sears, but explained that it would be impossible for me to attend committee meetings, and perhaps even the reunion, though I hoped to, and that as a poet and retired neuroscientific scholar, my nature did not run to fund raising. However, I did have a few ideas for the eventual committee to consider. The first seems to have been anticipated and agreed with: that the reunion not be held at Arden House, which has no sacred memories, but on the campus, laden with nostalgia. The second was that the reunion should be organized at least in part around the various extracurricular activities that many of us were involved in. For example, as art and poetry editor of Jester and Columbia Review and as one of the revivers of the Philolexian Society, I was involved with the activities of a literary crowd, as other students were instead or also involved with WKCR, the Varsity Show, athletics and so on. (In the game room, we humanists played gin rummy and poker, but pre-law students played bridge; I don’t know what the jocks and pre-businessmen played.) At each such reunion program event, one or more classmates could talk about the old days of an extracurricular activity and a current student or faculty adviser could talk about its present. A third idea was that there be another event in which classmates could tell interesting stories about our professors. For example, I have a couple of good anecdotes about Mark Van Doren and several other professors (Mangravite, Steeves, Weaver). If you are interested in joining the planning committee or have suggestions, please get in touch with Sharen Ovalles, assistant director for reunions, at (212) 870-2742, fax (212) 870-2747 or so290@columbia.edu; or with Brandon Doyle, assistant director, Columbia College Fund, (212) 870-2508 or bd2016@columbia.edu. Speaking of Class of 1948 reunions, a miniature one occurred just before I finished writing these notes at an MCC luncheon meeting. In this case, MCC is not 1,200 in Roman numerals but the last initials of Ted Melnechuk, Durham Caldwell and Charles Dewey Cole. Two weeks earlier, Charlie told me that he would like to meet for lunch in Amherst, Mass., on the day he would be driving from his home in Ithaca, N.Y., to his hometown of Leominster, Mass. Previously, we had corresponded but had never met. I agreed to meet, and Charlie agreed to invite Durham. So, on a day in early September, I drove two miles from my Amherst home, Durham drove 25 miles from his Springfield home and Charlie drove 261 miles from his Ithaca home to downtown Amherst, and we met at an excellent Chinese restaurant, where we spent an hour-and-a-half eating and conversing. Charlie regaled Durham and me with anecdotes of his experiences in World War II, of his subsequent student days on the College athletics promotional staff (at the 1947 Army defeat, he was up in the press box, high above and behind Eisenhower; where were you that day?), of his years as an attorney counseling newspaper executives in their disputes with unions — a career that brought him to almost every major city in our country — and of his post-retirement farming, running and bridge-playing, which were described in the March 2002 edition of these notes. Durham gave us copies of his 62-page ghost-story booklet, published in 1997, and showed us copies of the book published in 2000 that he edited for the Springfield suburb of Ludlow on the military experiences of men from that town, Remembering World War Two, described in the March 2002 Class Notes. Having turned 18 a half-year after the war ended, I bought a copy of the book out of respect for the war’s veterans. To get in touch with Durham about his ghost-story booklet or war book, e-mail him at durhamcaldwell@att.net. Write to Charley at 130 Autumn Ridge Ln, Ithaca, NY 14850. In news about classmates (alphabetically by their surnames): I received this e-mail: “Jason Conn died at his home in Bradenton, Fla., on June 19 after an eight-week illness. He was also a resident of Lake Toxaway, N.C. Jason was retired from Lever Brothers in New York, where he worked for more than 36 years. He leaves his wife, the former Tallulah Warm; sons, Stephen and Adam; and daughter, Catherine Youngdahl. Jason was born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., and attended James Madison High School. A military funeral service was held at Bay Pines National Cemetery in St. Petersburg, Fla., and a memorial service was held in Lake Toxaway.” Jason’s mailing address was 19 Lakeside Dr., Lake Toxaway, NC 28747. You may recall that in the last Class Notes, I deliberately made an error (using the term “most uniquest”) just to evoke another corrective letter from Herbert Goldman (who now goes by Herb Gold). Well, Herb did write again, but, politely ignoring that coinage, asked whether I had yet heard from Thaddeus Golas. Not yet. I’m not sure that Tad even receives CCT, or reads it if he does. Herb alluded to my once having called Tad (whose ancestry is Polish, in which language the word for “mister” is “Pan”) “Pan Golas,” to tease him for being an optimist like Dr. Pangloss in Candide. Herb ended his letter with “you can call me Pan Gold any time.” Herb is back in his home office at 1051-A Broadway, San Francisco, CA 94133, after having gone to Guadeloupe as part of a travel-writing assignment, and is working on his next novel. May you find many nuggets, Dr. Pan Gold! Fred Messner took on the job abandoned by Herb of correcting my grammar, “Forget ‘most uniquest.’ I have a[nother] grammatical bone to pick with you on a phrase in the Herb Goldman section: [in] ‘I don’t recall him having...’, [‘him’] should be ‘his’!” Thanks, Fred, both for that lesson and for introducing it by saying that you otherwise enjoyed the last Class Notes. Fred and his wife, Vye, live at 30 Ravine Dr., Woodcliff Lake, NJ 07677. Jean Turgeon reports from Montreal that his daughter, her husband and their two children have moved from Alabama to Vermont, so his trips to visit them in Selma are over, unless they move back south. At Concordia University, where Jean taught mathematics before retiring, he goes to the math help centre a few times a week to answer graduate students’ questions. Jean gave an example of the kind of unspoken assumptions to which cultural bias leads in the wording of tests. To a student from India who was taking a course in finite mathematics, Jean was trying to explain one of the standard probability questions: “When dealt five cards, what is the probability of getting exactly three spades?” After a while, it became clear that the student didn’t know what “spades” meant in that context. This was doubly moving to me as the organizer of a now nine-year-old monthly poker game. Jean lives at 452 Mt. Stephen Ave., Westmount, Quebec H3Y 2X6. (Jean, I just noticed that the last three characters of your address appear to pose a multiplication problem to which the answer is 12, in what is very finite mathematics indeed, namely arithmetic.) Thomas Vinceguerra ’85, former managing editor of CCT and now deputy editor of The Week, helped to revive the Philolexian Society in October 1985 and still helps to maintain and lead it. For a story about its bicentennial dinner in April, which gives information on how to reach Tom, please see the July 2002 CCT. In the Columbia archives, Tom discovered the Philolexian Society’s original membership scroll. From it, he could tell that, between Philos’ original founding in 1802 and its 1985 revival, it was revived twice. The first revival was in 1944 and involved Walter Wager ’44, who nowadays is that year’s class correspondent. The second was in October 1947, and among the signatures from that time were those of Vincent Carrozza ’49, Jason Epstein ’49, and Theodor [sic] Melnechuk. After thanking Tom, I explained that the odd spelling of my first name had come about when, earlier in ’47, I had calculated that if I dropped two phonetically redundant letters from the way my longish name was spelled on my birth certificate (“Theodore Melnechuck”), I would save two weeks of time signing it over the next 50 years, and so immediately dropped the terminal e from my first name and the second c from my surname. I have maintained the second curtailment, but some years after the first, I restored my given name after a young woman pointed out that without it, the name could be perceived as “The Odor!” Seventeen years later, I was denied a passport because of the one-letter difference between birth certificate and passport application. My parents had to submit notarized affidavits that I was still the same person before I was granted a passport. I’m glad I finally was, because it was on the ensuing trip that at a London meeting in 1964 I was able to tease Professor Jacques Barzun ’27 about his influential, many-edition biography of a great French composer by reciting a line of light verse from a poem I’d written for the occasion, published in CCT soon after, that read, “He was Hectoring before he thought of Berlioz.” In a recent Sunday New York Times, scholar Richard Taruskin discusses Igor Stravinsky’s 1957 dismissal of Berlioz, addressed “to all the literary-minded people (i.e., Barzun et al.) responsible for his revival,” because that Romantic revival threatened the hegemony of Stravinsky’s Neo-Classical line. I hope Taruskin’s article pleases our professor with its news that next year, from February to May, New York will be the scene of another Berlioz revival, comprising performances of his major works at six major celebrations of the bicentennial of his birth. By comparing the years of the two bicentennials mentioned in these notes, you can correctly deduce that Berlioz was a year younger than Philolexian. Happy Thanksgiving and other holidays through New Year’s Day!
Joseph B. Russell After 40 years of government service in five different agencies, Arthur Nolan retired two years ago from the Federal Aviation Administration, where he was a procurement specialist. He had also taught defense procurement for eight years in the ’60s through his own teaching business. Art’s time is split between Rockville, Md., and Cocoa Beach, Fla., with occasional attendance at College alumni events in Washington, D.C. He proudly reports having a wife, a stepson and three step-grandchildren. During August, our class president Joe Levie, with his wife, Hallie, happily journeyed to visit their daughter, Jessica, and son-in-law, Charles (at whose February 2002 wedding your correspondent had the honor of officiating), in Chicago. They went on to San Francisco to visit their son, Matthew, with an interim stop to visit kinfolk in Southern California. It is my sad duty to report the death of Arthur Pearson, of Westport, Conn., on December 20, 2001 after a two-month struggle with lung cancer (this despite his not having smoked during the past 50-plus years). Art had been a management consultant. He is survived by his life partner, Shelley Finn (of Westport); sons Scott (Cold Spring, N.Y.) and Ian (Parker, Colo.); daughters Elizabeth (Santa Rosa, Calif.) and Leslie Pierpont (Lamy, N.M.); six grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Art was involved with the Eleanor and Lou Gehrig MDA/ALS Center at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, as his 38-year-old son, Ian, suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease. [Editor’s note: Please see obituary on page 29.] Louis Schmid notes that last year, “We [he and his wife, one assumes] toured the headwaters of the Amazon in Peru,” as well as Lima, where despite that city’s total annual rainfall being less than one inch, it was cloudy almost every day. Charles Wright, of Havertown, Pa., one of our many returning WWII vets, reports the sad news of his wife’s death in October 2001. He had the good fortune to marry Anne Marie Krefft, the ever-cheerful dietitian whom some of us may recall as a happy young lady who fed us in John Jay’s dining hall and served bottomless cups of coffee in the Lion’s Den, in Columbia’s St. Paul’s Chapel in 1950, and they shared a wonderful life. After college, Chuck remained at Columbia and earned an M.A. in sociology in 1950 and his Ph.D. in 1954 while teaching CC-A, CC-B and sociology at the College. After that, Chuck and Anne Marie moved to UCLA for a dozen years, from which Chuck spent a term as Organization of American States professor in Chile, then served a few years at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C., as program director in sociology and social psychology. In 1969, Chuck joined the faculty at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communications, from which he retired a few years ago as professor emeritus of communications and sociology. “Wherever we went, Anne Marie and I carried happy memories of our early years on Morningside Heights. It was a wonderful time to be young, and Columbia provided an exciting and supportive environment. We were blessed,” he concludes. I have never heard it said better. I hope his words resonate for all of you as they do for your correspondent. Thanks, Chuck! And to all of you, please, keep in touch! However unimportant your
news may seem to you, your classmates are always interested in what
you have been doing, writing, saying or thinking, so pass it along
for this column.
Mario Palmieri Ray Annino has posted a new selection of his watercolors on his Web site. View Ray’s seascapes, landscapes and fishing and skiing scenes at http://pages.prodigy.net/raya1. Bob Gibson, retired and living in Arlington, Va., and ex-roommate at Columbia Gene Plotnik held a Class of 1950 mini-reunion at Gene’s home in Hartsdale, N.Y., in August. Gordon Hamilton, who lives in New Hampshire, had what he called a “wonderful surprise” when, on a visit to relatives in Burlington, Vt., he met some of his relatives’ new neighbors. The newcomers turned out to be — it’s a small world — Ruth and Bud Kassel, whom Gordon hadn’t seen for many years. A picnic ensued, with a great deal of discussion of the Class of 1950. The Hamiltons and the Kassels look forward to seeing more of each other. Howard Hanson joined a team of three from Illinois who went to Bulgaria to teach English. Howard stayed in the capital, Sofia, which he described as a big, bustling, “incredibly” inexpensive city. Howard had a great time, even though he had to communicate through translators. On the home front, Howard celebrated the arrival of his second grandchild, Luke Samuel Cox. After 55 years, Art Thomas has received credit for his effort as bow oarsman in Columbia’s shell at the Poughkeepsie Regatta in 1947. The newspapers at that time mistakenly named someone else in that position, but Art succeeded in getting Intercollegiate Athletics to produce documentation officially acknowledging that he was the man at that oar. Good show, Art — then and now. Sadly, we report three deaths: Desmond Callan M.D.,
Hillsdale, N.Y., on July 22, 2002; William D. Hart,
Westminster, S.C., on July 26, 2002; and David G. Iliff,
Indianapolis, on March 30, 2001.
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