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CLASS NOTES
Columbia College Today
Columbia College Today is sad to report that J. Kelly Johnson '24 died on May 13. An obituary appears in a future issue. CCT thanks John Balet '25 for letting us know about Johnson's passing. John, who recently turned 96, has no news of himself to report, other than that he "continues living." Five members of the Class of 1931, and two spouses, returned to Morningside Heights for their 70th reunion. Pictured (from left to right) are Rose and Paul Chu, Ralph E. Marson, August Gold with his wife, Lillian, and Fred Farwell. Columbia professor Eli Ginzberg also attended reunion, but missed the photo. One highlight of the weekend was the class luncheon on Saturday, June 2, with members of the Class of 1936, in Lerner Hall. George Sansom Professor of History Carol Gluck addressed both classes at the lunch, which Dean Austin Quigley also attended. Although the luncheon was the class's main reunion event, the alumni also participated in other reunion activities over the long weekend, with Rose and Paul Chu outdoing most reunion-goers — of any age! The couple, who had traveled all the way from Honolulu, took in a Broadway show on Thursday night (and attended the reception at Sardi's afterwards), enjoyed Friday night's "Taste of New York" event in the Hammerstein Ballroom on West 34th Street, were spotted leaving the Starlight Reception at about 1:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, and still made it to Sunday morning breakfast! Fred Farwell was also a great trooper, attending events from Friday's night's dinner, where he was spotted talking with Dean Quigley, to the Sunday breakfast. Arthur Seligman '33 sent along the sad news that classmate Martin Roeder '33, who graduated from the Law School in 1935 and practiced tax law in New York for over a half-century, passed away on August 3, 2000. An obituary appears in this issue. As for Arthur, he attended Cornell Medical School, practiced medicine in New York City for many years, and is now retired and living in the Sutton Place section of Manhattan. CCT sends its congratulations on his 89th birthday, which Arthur celebrated on June 17.
Paul V. Nyden
Twelve hardy and enthusiastic members of our class turned out on campus on June 2 on the exact anniversary of our graduation in 1936, a time somewhat bleak and uncertain, to celebrate our 65th reunion. Class members who were present were Solomon Fisher, Irwin Grossman, Andrew Khinoy, Herbert Meyer, James Morgenthal, Seymour Nadler, Sebastian Porrello, Edwin Rickert, Arnold Saltzman, Carl Schorske, Seymour Sindeband and Bill Sitterley. Five wives also were present. The first order of business was the election of Arnold Saltzman as President of the Class of 1936 by acclamation. He replaces Herb MacIntosh, who died January 1, 2000. Ed Rickert and Arnold Saltzman were awarded Dean's Pins in recognition of their service in planning the reunion. It was interesting to note that 10 men and five wives had attended our 60th reunion in 1996, showing an increase of two members this year. The class members were present for Dean Austin Quigley's address and then a class luncheon held in one of the private dining rooms in Lerner Hall attended also by the Class of 1931. Professor Carol Cluck of the History Department addressed the two classes, discussing changing perspectives on history over the years. Your correspondent is grateful to Ed Rickert for passing on the substance of the news in this report. I'm sorry to not have been present.
Murray T. Bloom Anton Doblmaier, who probably had the highest grade average in our class, retired in 1985 from Bellcore, the smart nephew in the Bell Telephone family. In later years, he did a lot of computer hardware and softwear design. He and his wife, Vivian, have three children and four grandchildren. His eldest, Jane, got a law degree at Columbia. "A year ago," Anton writes, "I was diagnosed with lymphoma. Chemotherapy has brought it under control but now it seems to rear its ugly head again." Harry Friedman was business manager of Jester in our senior year. (Things I never knew till now: Jester was the only John Jay 4th floor publication that made money.) He now does a lot of indoor and outdoor gardening at his home in Brewster, N.Y., where he has a greenhouse. "Our three children and four grandchildren are spread over the country. Our oldest, Carol Moore, is serving in the New Hampshire state legislature. Our son, Rick, took over the family business, specialty advertising, and is now retired in California." George Hoyns, ex-realtor, and his wife, Gloria, are retired in "sunny Cape May, New Jersey — after traveling, it seems forever." Simeon Hutner, Middlebury, Vt., is still active in his firm, which has just become part of H.G. Wellington & Co., 40 Hemlock Drive, Kings Point, NY 11024. Together, they handle "personal asset management for high net worth individuals." Winston Hart, ex-Chase Manhattan Bank, is long retired, to Fort Myers, Fla. Is there a gene for jazz appreciation? Wally Schaap, an old enthusiast, has a son, Phil, who has become a historic part of the Columbia jazz scene. For 30 years he's been preaching, daily, the gospel of jazz on Columbia's own radio station, WKCR. A long article in the City section of The New York Times (Sunday, May 29) described the jangling notes of Phil's "complex" relationship with Columbia, saying, "He is friends with many influential deans, professors and alumni and has distinguished himself as a Columbia man. Yet all the while he has worked on the fringes of the institution with no office, teaching only as an adjunct. Even at WKCR his status is unofficial... Mr. Schaap admits that he does little to ingratiate himself to academia. He avoids music department discussions and refuses to pursue any graduate degree... He seems unlikely to get official recognition that would come with an academic promotion." As Professor Robert E. Pollack '61, who used to be the College's dean, put it: "Columbia owes Phil Schaap a lot and I'd like to see them recognize his intellectual excellence and productivity, but you don't suddenly become a professor by living for 30 years in a student radio station." Stay tuned.
Dr. A. Leonard Luhby
Ralph Staiger John Leuchs responded to the comments about CCA1 and echoed my comments about the course. He recalled the first name of the instructor, Graham Lovejoy, and thought that he had gone on to Cambridge University in the U.K. for further study. He recalled also that Mr. Lovejoy would frequently end the class with, "Well, there it is. Make of it what you will." He also remembered the clicking of Eric Carlson's Braille device, and added Bob Lockwood to the meager list of remembered class members. John had been in the South Pacific, and he had an inspiring correspondence with Professor Casey (Caseyology) during the war. "I'm always happy to reminisce about those wonderful days when we had the privilege of associating with senior faculty members (such as John Dunning) because of the University's policy of having its top professors teach College courses," he writes. John McCormack recalls his fraternity brother Jay Ehret Mahoney's visit with him in Dallas soon before Jay died. Jack passed on a clipping from the New York Sun dated June 8, 1943 that included a photo of Jay as he received a Silver Star from Rear Admiral Herbert F. Leary for saving men from a torpedoed merchant ship. Jay was a gun-crew officer aboard his ship. Unfortunately, an editorial error in the caption identified Jay as Jeremiah E. Mahoney, his father, who had just made an unsuccessful run for mayor of New York. We had no difficulty in recognizing him as Jay. Jack's doings are now mostly routine. He and his wife did get to the national bridge tournament in Kansas City in March and weren't too unhappy when they finished second out of 110 pairs in a seniors game. It's games like that that keep them at the bridge table. Economists are much in the news thanks to our volatile stock market. I am reminded of a planning meeting for our 50th reunion when Al Sommers, who had just retired from The Conference Board as chief economist, and Bob Lewis, who had just retired as vice president and business economist of Citibank, were discussing a thorny issue related to the reunion. Bob was a bit reluctant to stretch the truth. "Oh," said Somers, "you're an economist. Go ahead and tell them anything. They'll believe you."
Seth Neugroschl After a year of informal discussions since our 60th reunion, our '40 legacy planning committee is now in process of formation. Think of it as a follow to that reunion, and a unique opportunity for each of us, in his own way, to ‘put it all together' personally, and for our class to step back in time, visualize ourselves and new-found friends as we were in that depression year of '36, and as we were on our graduation day, when Dean Hawkes apologized for the world his generation was leaving ours. That same day the British were evacuating their troops from Dunkirk, 18 months before Pearl Harbor. Then there were our War experiences, and our class's casualties, the heaviest of any College class. It's a chance to recall the extraordinary sweep of our personal experience — not to speak of human history! — over the intervening years to the new global Internet-enabled civilization we're building today. It's also a chance to think about our personal, class and generation's legacy — the theme of the reunion and of our current program-to-be: the kind of world we hope (or fear) we and our children are building for our grandchildren, and whether they are doomed to repeat — or worse — the bloody 20th century in the 21st. In a recent, mainly positive critique of the film 13 Days on the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Robert McNamara, then secretary of defense, stated that it didn't fully portray how close we came to utter disaster, with 80 million American lives at stake. Bob Ames, who spent much of his career in the defense industry, just sent me some documentation of the basis for that assertion, including a meeting McNamara had in Cuba a few years ago with Fidel Castro as part of a major historical review. Bob and I have been touching on the theme ever since he commented to me, years ago, about reading newspapers during the summer of 1940: how unprepared he felt, despite his Columbia education, for the unfolding disasters in Europe. John Ripandelli has been active and helpful on class-related matters, as readers of these notes know. He recently sent me a Great Courses set of tapes, "Must History Repeat the Great Conflicts of this Century?" by Joseph Nye, Dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Nye's closing: 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. Hector Dowd continues his active law practice in estates, trust and tax law. As our class president at the time, his very attractive Fifth Avenue office, with a great view of the Plaza Hotel and Central Park, was the site of class planning meetings leading to our memorable 60th reunion. Hector is enthusiastically joining our class legacy planning committee, and has very kindly offered his office for meetings. Hector and Isabel are active vacation travelers — most recently to Mexico, earlier to London and southern France. They have a son, Hector, and a daughter, Isabel Christi, and five grandchildren. Phil Thurston sent me a much appreciated thank you letter "for your ongoing work for the class of '40 Notes. As a ‘subway student' who daily came out of the ground at 116th Street, I was then less in touch with the class than I am now with your notes." Twelve years ago Phil received emeritus status as Richard B. Chapman Professor of Business Administration from Harvard Business School. He recalled enjoying his experience chairing the business panel at our 50th reunion. Law, medicine and communications were the other panels. Nearly two dozen classmates served on them; each panel explored 50 years of change in its field, and the impact of those changes on the rest of us. In making my telephone calling list in preparation for these notes, catching up with Don Kursch was high among my priorities. His wife Eleanor, Barnard '40, answered, and I was shocked to learn that Don had died on April 17. The oldest member of our class at 88, he was the first member of his family to go to college, tremendously appreciative of his Columbia education, and always committed to and active in our class. We will miss him. At our 50th reunion in 1990, he arranged for his son, Donald B., to fly back for a weekend from his post as U.S. Ambassador (acting) to Hungary, to give us a memorable, ringside view of the fall of the Berlin wall. Don's granddaughter, Catherine '95, spoke at our 55th in 1995, when we celebrated both the College's becoming co-ed, and the larger dimensions of the global move toward equality for women. Robert Alexander and his wife, Joan, a Barnard grad, live in Piscataway, N.J. He continues with his teaching and writing as professor of economics, emeritus (since '89), at Rutgers. Bob's interest in the comparative development of economic systems has led him to a historical focus for his two current courses: the Evolution of Marxist-Leninist systems, and the History of the English Speaking West Indies. With 38 books to his credit, he is best known for his many studies of Latin American politics and development, and his work on aspects of Marxism. His most recent book, Maoism in the Developed World, is just being published; another with the same focus, but on developing countries, was published a couple of years ago. Paul Marcus is a research staff member emeritus at IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center, where he continues his research. Paul joined IBM in the late '50s, and later spent two years as an IBM Fellow at the company's Zurich Research Lab. He describes his work as using first principles theory (including quantum mechanics) and computers for his research in condensed matter physics, exploring, for example, the behavior of the first few atomic layers of a metallic crystal. (In 1982 the IBM Zurich Lab created a new type of microscope, the scanning tunneling microscope, enabling the imaging of individual atoms. This proved to be a breakthrough technology, leading the way to the current very broad research hopes — not to speak of concerns — about the future of nanotechnologies.) Paul is married, lives in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., and describes his outside interests as following politics and gardening. Walter Beyer has been retired for 14 years, after 23 years at Philip Morris, including serving as director of sales administration. "It was a great company to work for," he says, adding that he "carries no brief for smoking!" Walter splits his year between homes in Tarrytown, N.Y. and Florida. Following a serious accident over a decade ago, he's pretty much house-bound. He has a son, at ATT, and an internist M.D. daughter. Walter was pleased to hear that Paul Marcus had asked about him in my earlier phone call to him. He recalled that both Paul and Alvin Turken, a Beverly Hills, Calif. orthopedic surgeon, were Stuyvesant High School classmates.
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