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CLASS NOTES
Alan N. Miller Well, a long, exceptionally hot summer is over and by the time you read this, we will hopefully have another great fall leaf change to enjoy. Homecoming against our nemesis, Princeton, will be over, with many loyal classmates and wives or significant others having planned to get together. I’ll be going with Steve Easton and his wife, Elke, and my girlfriend, Janet. By October 5, I will have attended Steve and Elke’s wedding. Maybe we’ll consider our next luncheon (#4) at the Columbia/Princeton Club (the name order doesn’t change) as a sort of bachelor party three days before the wedding at St. Paul’s Chapel on campus. At the last luncheon, we welcomed a few new faces, namely, Danny Link, who looked his best ever, congrats to Elinor, and Fred Bruno. Phil Libson, our most loyal communicator, is still taking courses, in his case, medical history. His two most recent papers for the Chicago Literary Society were on Marco Polo and Sherlock Holmes. It gets more and more difficult to learn more than you forget. I am taking three courses at Columbia: “the French Revolution,” “the Intellectual Background to the American Constitution,” and “Nobility and Civility in Medieval and Modern Japan.” I also am taking two lecture series at the Metropolitan Museum. Should keep me busy and out of trouble. NYC is such a great place to live and in such an improved condition, and having Columbia nearby is such a plus. I heard good things about our new president, Lee Bollinger, and am planning to attend his inauguration on October 3. So here is wishing all a happy and healthy New Year for you, your children and especially grandchildren. Please keep me informed about personal and family events as well as ideas for class events, and remember the 50th. Phone (212) 712-2369, fax (212) 875-0955. Love to all.
Herman Levy Carlos Muñoz, Mark Stanton and Ed Weinstein “have been having a home-and-home series of golf games at [their] respective courses.” Ed notes, “Mark continues in law practice in central New Jersey. Carlos is enjoying retirement, which gives him more time to play bridge and golf. Earlier in the summer, Carlos competed in the American Contract Bridge League championships in D.C. and placed 10th. Hooray for Carlos! We won’t comment on our golf.” Ed attended Alvin Kass’ promotion ceremony at NYC Police Headquarters. On August 29, Alvin became the chief chaplain of the NYPD. He is the longest-serving NYPD chaplain; his first appointment was in 1966. He continues to serve as senior rabbi of East Midwood Jewish Center, one of New York City’s largest. “Police Commissioner Ray Kelly spoke with affection about Alvin, saying, among other things, that he is an ambassador of the NYPD to the city.” Ed and Roy Wolff recently had dinner in Washington
D.C., “an aftermath of our reunion. Roy is a senior counsel
to the Washington D.C., office of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood
LLP, specializing in anti-trust law. After a stint in the Air Force,
Roy went to the Law School. He found his way to D.C. as an attorney
with the Federal Trade Commission, then became one of the first
attorneys in the newly-organized Department of Transportation. What
was to have been a short interlude away from NYC led to permanent
D.C. residence. Roy’s children, Ethan and Anna, live in NYC,
which gives him an excuse to return from time to time.”
Barry Dickman Mark Weiss’ wife, Joan, sent an article from The Washington Post about Mort Halperin’s son, Mark, who is political director of the ABC-TV network and co-author of The Note, a daily feature on ABCNews.com, a Web site that handicaps the “silent primary” — the 2004 presidential campaign. According to the article, the site attracts a core audience of fanatics who swear by its analysis and gossip, and states that Mark “knows more about people in politics and more about politics than anybody else out there now.” Well, maybe not more than Mort! Stan Meyers’ son Brendan’s fencing career flourishes. He is ranked No. 1 nationally in both Youth 14 and under-17 foil and No. 2 in under-20. At 13, he was on the U.S. National team at the Junior and Cadet World Fencing Championships in Antalya, Turkey, where he won a bronze medal, making him the first U.S. medalist in cadet men’s foil. And on his 14th birthday, in April, Brendan took 12th place in the U.S. Senior National Championships in Louisville. Joe Dorinson passed along his latest literary work: a review of Inventing Jerry Lewis (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), written by Frank Krutnik in Humor: International Journal of Humor Research. Joe liked the book, but still hasn’t figured out why the French lionize the comedian. Diane and Asher Rubin’s son, Jacob, is a member of the Class of 2006. Scott Shukat is on medical leave from his position
as director of class lunches, so Art Radin is filling
in. The lunch is held on the second Wednesday of every month in
the Grill Room of the Princeton/ Columbia Club, 15 W. 43rd Street
($31 per person). You can let Art know (aradin@radinglass.com)
if you plan to attend up to the day before. We wish Scott a quick
and complete recovery and a speedy return to his hosting duties.
Bennett Miller There was never any doubt that Mike Berlin was going to have a place in the journalistic community. “I spent almost 30 years as a reporter for various newspapers, ending up covering the United Nations for The Washington Post. I was teaching journalism at Columbia as an adjunct for much of that time. In 1988, I embarked on a full-time teaching career, beginning with a Fulbright in Beijing. (Seven years later, I did a Fulbright stint in Moscow.) I have been an associate professor of journalism at Boston University since 1990, with plans for at least another three years there. I also keep busy writing in one way or another. “Nancy [’61 Barnard] and I recently celebrated our 40th anniversary. We are looking forward to a month in Seattle with our daughter, Meredith, and her family, including two grandchildren. Nancy is an artist and has regular shows at galleries in Chelsea, NYC, and on Newbury Street in Boston. We live in Cambridge during the academic year and spend many weekends and most of our summers in our house in Truro, on Cape Cod.” Steve Berzok married Marcia Sirlin, a Brooklyn sweetheart, soon after graduation. “After a false start in an M.B.A. program at UC Berkeley, I spent 31 years as an educator for the New York City Board of Education, changing from teacher to assistant principal and then to principal in elementary schools. (Difficult and good times.) During that period, Marcia and I raised two kids. We have spent most summers in sleep-away camps for children, settling in since 1980 at Camp Lokanda, in Glen Spey, N.Y. During these 41 summers (seven off for good (?) behavior) I have done everything from bunk counselor to camp director. For the past eight years, I have been the bookkeeper. “I retired in 1992 and moved to Florida. I live in Boynton Beach. My children and, thanks to my daughter, two grandchildren, Zachary and Michael, live close by. So between tennis, golf and family, I have it made! I have remained in touch with many of my fellow Columbians. Howard Gelpey ’60 spends most of the year in Boynton Beach, and we get together often. “Additionally, every five years since 1984, I have organized a reunion dinner, close to the Columbia campus, for my Sigma Alpha Mu brothers, classes of 1956–60. In June 1999, we met at V&T’s (yes, it’s still there!) on Amsterdam Avenue. Thirty-seven brothers, including Shel Saunders (Shimansky), Sam Bahn, Artie Mollin, Simeon David, Ron Lightstone, Mike Messer, Robert Ratner and Fred Lorber attended. Our next dinner, scheduled during our 45th reunion, is in planning. I hope to see many more of my classmates and fraternity brothers on that weekend in May 2004. I wish all of our classmates health and happiness.” Steve, maybe you can you get those deadbeat revelers from 1959 to send me something for this half-baked reminiscence — Lorber excepted, because he already has had his 15 seconds of fame published in an earlier issue. Mike Bromberg reports: “I should have kept in touch before now, but I always read Class Notes. Just finished my first year as chairman of Capitol Health Group, a health lobbying and strategic planning firm in Washington, D.C. We represent a wide range of health care companies and associations. “After graduating from NYU law school, I practiced law and ran a couple of successful congressional campaigns in New York. I wound up in the U.S. House of Representatives as a chief of staff, then was CEO of a hospital trade association for 26 years. In 1995, I became of counsel to the law offices of Deborah Steelman, renamed Steelman Health Strategies. Last year, we reorganized that firm, and I became chairman of Capitol Health Group. My wife, Marlys, and I live in D.C. We have five grown daughters living on both coasts from San Francisco to D.C. Best wishes to all my classmates.” Tevye is alive and well in D.C. I read in The Washington Post that Steve Trachtenberg has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The 2002 Class includes Itzhak Perlman, three Nobel Prize winners and six Pulitzer Prize winners. Good company, I think. Congrats, Steve! Congratulations, also, to Joe Calarco, winner of the 2002 National New Play Award for beethoven is … a play about, not surprisingly, Beethoven. Joe previously was designated as a “principal theorist” of tragedy in Tragedy and Tragic Theory: An Analytic Guide. He is professor of theatre at Wayne State University. This from Joe Ramos: “At a time when I should have been considering retiring, I have just been elected to be dean of faculty of economics and business administration of the University of Chile. Though I came to the University of Chile as visiting professor of economics 34 years ago, most of my professional career was in U.N. agencies in Latin America, headquartered in Santiago. I returned to the university full-time three years ago and was chosen as dean in July for the next four years.” E-mail: jramos@decon.facea.unchile.cl. Eric Jakobsson remains active in teaching and research at the University of Illinois and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He is helping to create a new computational biology curriculum while continuing research and dissemination on using bioinformatics tools in biology teaching and doing his research on ion channels and membrane structure, as well as moving into nanotechnology. His wife, Naomi, recently won a contested primary and is going for a seat in the Illinois legislature this month. Good luck, Naomi! After practicing internal medicine for 30 years in Hollywood, Fla., Lewis Fineman has retired. “Retirement has been great. I’ve been fortunate to keep active physically, to take extended motor home trips throughout the United States, and to participate in our local Institute for Learning in Retirement. My wife, Ann, and I have been married for nearly 37 years and have two children, Mark (32) and Lisa (31).” Our famous Hollywood screenwriter (he worked on The Godfather and other hits), Doran William (Bill) Cannon, is reinventing himself as a teacher of creative writing. He offers an online course on the subject “Write Like a Pro” via EducationGo.com, to 1,400 colleges around the country, plus a number of seminars and workshops to professionals in the screenwriting biz. His accomplishments also include the book Authorship: The Dynamic Principles of Writing Creatively (Hannah House Publishing Company, 1993). E-mail: dwc@writingacademy.com. Joel Rein is in his 31st year of surgical practice in Greenwich, Conn. He is the senior plastic surgeon and chief of section at Greenwich Hospital. After 30 years of all-inclusive surgery, he now focuses on cosmetic surgery and office-based reconstructions. For the past four years, he has been selected by New York as one of the “Best Doctors in the New York City Area.” Find him at joelreinmd.com. He would be pleased to hear from old friends. Joel is married to Judy Wasserman ’62 Barnard, a clinical social worker practicing in Greenwich for the past 18 years. His daughter is in Seattle and is married to a surgeon; his son is soon to defend his Ph.D. dissertation at Georgia Tech. Joel and Judy are looking forward to the birth of their first grandchild. Joel ends with, “I have enjoyed reading my classmates’ achievements in Class Notes so much, I felt it was time to say hello.” Thanks, Joel. We end on an interesting note from Bayard Ludlum, given these anxious times. “In spite of events to the contrary, during the past two decades, I have promoted the Middle East peace plan of my late mother, Victoria C. Ludlum, of a Federation of Middle Eastern States, formed with the help of the United States government and whichever Middle Eastern nations care to join. It may not be much, but I have kind letters from Presidents Clinton and Bush to show for it. Hope springs eternal …” Sometimes all we have is hope, and sometimes it is enough to catalyze
action. Let us all pray for peace in the Middle East and throughout
this sorely troubled world.
Robert A. Machleder In reading your letters and e-mail, I’ve discovered that important aspects of your lives can be as elusive as quicksilver. You reduce them to cryptograms dropped into postscripts; confine them to offhand remarks pinched between parentheses; whisper them in fleeting allusions that slip softly into silence. I suspect that I’m being tested to ferret out the clues. I fear that I fail far too often. But there have been times, though they be infrequent, when the light shifts while I’m reading, a phrase catches its shaft, a trace of a gem glistens, and after some work on my part, a vein is exposed. And so it was with the note in July from Stephen Teitelbaum, a physician-scientist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, with a special interest in bone cell biology. He has taken great interest recently in public issues of biomedical research. This and other information offered by Steve appeared in the September issue of CCT, but I was intrigued by his reference to the public issues of biomedical research and followed up with a note that those issues are of such enormous importance and urgency that it would be interesting to share his thoughts with the class. Steve responded: “I’m president of the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology, which is the largest association of experimental biologists (60,000) in the world. The federation’s main mission is public policy, so I have been in the middle of the cloning and stem cell issues.” Steve became president of FASEB in June 2001 and is a leading authority on the normal biology and pathology of bone. In the late 1970s, he developed a method of using structural changes in bone to diagnose bone disorders such as postmenopausal osteoporosis. He was responsible for showing that vitamin D therapy helps overcome defective bone formation that occurs with kidney failure. He holds the chair as the Wilma and Roswell Messing Professor of Pathology at the Washington University School of Medicine, where he received his medical degree in 1964. An author or co-author of more than 200 scientific articles, he also is an associate editor for the Journal of Cellular Biochemistry and serves on the editorial boards of many scientific journals. In 1997, the school named a scholarship to honor him as a distinguished alumnus. Steve may have omitted this out of modesty, but it’s all there in record, and in the immortal words of Casey Stengel, “You could look it up.” From the time he was president-elect of FASEB, Steve has been actively engaged in policy issues important to the advancement of medical research and has had a leading role in the effort to defend stem cell research, writing editorials and convening public meetings to address the issue. Steve now devotes about 50 percent of his time to FASEB and sees his primary goal as promoting the federal funding of biomedical and life sciences research. In addition to impressive professional credentials, Steve brings to the task passion, eloquence, and a vision of research that could lead to the most important medical breakthroughs for decades to come: the development of therapies for diseases from Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s to diabetes and cancer, for the treatment of spinal cord trauma and severe heart conditions. But the issue of therapeutic embryonic stem cell research is veiled in controversy, having become entangled and confused with the concept of reproductive human cloning. As Steve points out, FASEB and virtually the entire scientific community emphatically oppose human cloning as morally abhorrent and medically unsafe, and would outlaw the process. Regrettably, Steve adds, the scientific community has not done a good job of educating the public to distinguish reproductive cloning from the replication of cells for cell-based therapies, and has not helped its own cause by employing the unfortunate phrase “therapeutic cloning” when the process is not one of cloning at all. I submitted to Steve that the opponents of stem cell research have framed the debate as a two-pronged ideological argument: First, they have cast the issue in terms of moral absolutism/inherent objective morality versus moral relativism. Stem cells, they contend, are a human potentiality, a stage in human development, and as nascent human life have moral rights and a claim to protection. Proponents, they maintain, accord no special moral rights to embryonic stem cells, focusing instead on the utilitarian quest to produce the greatest good for the greatest number and the relief of human suffering. For the opponents, the creation of human life for the purpose of its use in research and ultimate destruction crosses a significant moral boundary, coarsens our moral sensibilities, and presents an unacceptable moral precedent. The second prong of their argument is that they are pragmatists; that the proponents are theoreticians who ignore the practical reality that no regulatory scheme can ensure against its violation; that ultimately, rogue enterprises will ignore ethical protocols and reproductive human cloning will occur, unless all research is banned. Steve spends much of his time in Washington, D.C., meeting with members of the Senate and others. Undoubtedly, he has heard the arguments ad nauseam. Yet, he responds to these contentions not with a sigh of weariness but with an advocate’s voice suffused with energy. “Scientists since the time of Copernicus have faced opposition. We’re always dealing with these sorts of issues. I don’t get into debates about morality. A blastocyst is not skin — it does consist of 150 cells — but neither is it a human life. Back in the ’70s, there was the same debate about DNA research, and look at the yield. “So the slippery slope argument doesn’t make much sense. I’m the pragmatist; they’re not the pragmatists. I’m a physician. I’ve seen lives ruined by disease, by Parkinson’s and by Alzheimer’s. Research using blastocysts has a real potential for developing cures for these diseases. Crazies are not going to be getting National Institutes of Health research grants. There has to be some sense of trust. Historically, folks who get NIH grants tend to act responsibly; they do not do things abhorrent to society.” In July 2002, the President’s Council on Bioethics, by a slender majority (10–7), recommended a four-year moratorium on somatic cell nuclear transfer for biomedical research. Legislation sponsored by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), which the president supported, would impose such a moratorium and criminalize not only the pursuit of such research in this country but the importation of therapies based on research conducted abroad. Steve believes that the Senate will not back the bill. He finds most senators favor biomedical research, cutting across party lines and traditional liberal/conservative ideologies. One of the strongest supporters of biomedical research, for whom Steve has developed great respect, is Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). But the lingering uncertainty that infects the issue has a price, and the price is being paid now. Steve decries the fact that talented young researchers are not attracted to a field that is freighted with so much baggage; that scientific progress depends on universities, and universities need NIH funding to carry on research; and that while wonderful progress is being made in the United Kingdom and China, the United States is lagging behind and may well lose its preeminent position in health research and life-saving technologies. As these contentious issues continue to unfold, Steve presses the case for federally funded, sensibly regulated biomedical research. I asked Steve three questions: “When you graduated from Columbia and entered medical school, did you envision a career leading to where you are now? Was there anything in your Columbia experience that particularly influenced you? And what didn’t I ask that I should have asked?” To the first, Steve said, “No. We can never really imagine where we’re going to end up.” To the second, “Columbia made me a reader; a liberal thinker. The Core Curriculum gave me the fundamentals; taught me how to think in a societal sense.” And to the third … laughter! There are events in our lives, sharp fragments of times long past, imprinted so perfectly on the part of us that stores memory, that time and time again when summoned, they unerringly return with the same stunning clarity and immediacy. One such event occurred in our junior year. I suspect I shared it with almost every one of you. I can yet see and feel that day in mid-April, 1959, the campus electric with excitement, College Walk so tightly packed, every pair of eyes straining in the direction of the imposing figure in signature shaggy beard and olive green fatigues, and I can yet hear the cascade of exuberant voices filled with admiration for the charismatic Fidel Castro, newly minted icon of popular revolution. Castro, invited to the United States as a guest of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, visited Columbia and received a tumultuous reception. But a voice behind me, addressing no one in particular, caused several of us to turn as one. “The New York Times loves him today,” said the speaker, a graduate student, one foot resting on the sundial, “but he’ll turn Cuba communist, a Soviet satellite, and we’ll be at war with him within two years time.” No Delphic Oracle he, ambiguities posing as prophecy, but an observer with a minority opinion delivering his forecast as straightforward as rain. Two years later, there began massive deployments of U.S. ships in the Caribbean and the Atlantic, as well as aircraft and troops. On October 22, President Kennedy spoke to the nation and reported “unmistakable evidence” based on the analysis of aerial photographs that missile sites were being prepared in Cuba to provide an offensive nuclear strike capability against the U.S. and the rest of the Western Hemisphere, and that in defense of our own security, “a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba [was] being initiated.” The Cuban missile crisis brought us face to face with Cuba and the Soviet Union in the closest we have ever been to a nuclear confrontation. These memories were evoked by Neil Markee’s reflections on his life during the past 42 years. The Cuban missile crisis and his tour of duty in the Navy figure prominently. “Immediately after graduation, I spent 18 months as the communications officer on board the USS Walworth County. During a Sixth Fleet deployment to the Mediterranean, I met with onetime roommate Tom Raup, who was assigned to the Saratoga. I think we were in Naples. “Later, I transferred to the commissioning detail of the USS Okinawa, put the ship in commission and served on board as its ‘plank owning’ radio officer. You may recall the Okinawa was the amphibious forces’ flagship during the Cuban missile crisis (with, Neil adds, a crew of some 600 and about 1,000 Marines, their gear and their helicopters). I can remember sitting on the catwalk outside the radio shack on board a darkened ship watching what may have been truck traffic in what I guess was Oriente Province the night President Kennedy made his speech. One of my radiomen asked what I thought might happen. I told him I didn’t know, but that if Castro took umbrage, we’d be one of the first to know. We’d come a long way from the euphoria I saw on the Columbia campus when Castro had visited New York City a few years earlier.” Neil left the Navy when his hitch was up. He went to work for two related nonprofit organizations associated with the business side of higher education, where he spent the next 32-plus years, the last 25 as CEO. He left to become editor of a print journal, did that for four years and then was brought in to organize and edit an online publication for a San Francisco-based dot.com. That enterprise having recently been acquired, he is launching a new online publication. Neil and his wife, Susan, live in Port Jefferson, Long Island, not far from where they attended high school. Their daughter, Jennifer, is a professional horse trainer and broker in New Jersey. A few years ago, Neil was invited to the decommissioning of the USS Okinawa, a vessel laying special claim to his affection, both having come of age together. Several weeks before the official event, he drove to San Diego to see the ship. “Rust-streaked, mothballed, scavenged and shackled to an ocean-going tug, she was a sorry sight,” Neil said. Such reunions, and the appalling condition of the anthropomorphized objects at their center, make us more acutely aware of our own vulnerability. And so, a simple plea: may time’s passage never leave us so ill-used, or neglect cause us to be so cruelly ravaged … and may we never suddenly awaken to a chilling bleak realization that we are shackled to a tug. Much of the time, Thomas Hamilton’s head is in outer space. For more than 30 years, Tom’s field has been astronomy. He taught at Wagner College from 1971–83, at the College of Staten Island from 1983–89, and since 1990 at the Staten Island campus of St. John’s University. He has lectured at the Newark Museum’s planetarium and has “alternately bored and irritated the astronomical community for decades with articles on the space program and planetariums.” With a passion for writing, Tom turned his attention to the computer field, producing two books in the 1970s that “stunned the computer industry” but were “little read.” Undeterred and still in search of an appreciative audience, Tom has been applying his writing talents to science fiction and satire. He has had four short science fiction stories published in a new e-zine devoted to alternate histories. In one, “The Woolesthorp Project,” which appeared in the April 2002 edition of Changing the Times, Sir Isaac Newton (born in Woolesthorp), continues to devote himself to scientific pursuits resulting in the development of an atomic bomb in England in 1767. Another, “If Thomas Harriot Had Not Published His Astronomical Discoveries,” will need to be read in order for you to discover its consequences. Satiric efforts situate Tom as a literary descendant of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Jonathan Swift and Henry Miller. How he ranks in that pantheon remains for history and others to assess. We offer so much of an unpublished work (as it is likely to remain) as CCT will allow, a bawdy send-up that requires only passing familiarity with the Harry Potter stories: “Having Found He Cannot Kill Harry, Lord Valdemar Converts Him to a Slightly Darker Reality. Introducing: Harry Potty, Magician of the Toilets. Constipation spells, four for a nickel; incontinence spells, dollar each; ask for our special rates on diarrhea spells. Make your enemy break wind loudly at all social occasions!” And so on…. As it is unlikely that Tom will be devoting much time to a book tour or to auctioning the screen rights to the Harry Potty piece, he has turned his satiric attentions to a series of send-ups of “A Christmas Carol,” a project that is slowly taking shape. “We lived through some interesting times together,” writes Jack Zeller. “Remember the Hungarian Revolution? [Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles over-promises to do in the bad guys; our cowardly reply, and the intense angst of it all.” Jack commends to our thoughts an evaluation of the outcome of the 1956 presidential election in our freshman year and the impact of McCarthyism. “Would Adlai Stevenson have made a difference? And who wasn’t afraid of Joe McCarthy?” With an apparent sense of relief and apprehension, Jack questions: “Having survived and arrived triumphant from one long, long crisis, what does that teach us about the new ones? Are we better thinking citizens from all of this, or are we just ever more aware that all the study in the world is hardly a help? [I]f we do know something worth passing on, how do we do this within the context of existing institutions?” The class is invited to respond. As a start, Hegel wrote in his introduction to the Philosophy of History: “What experience and history teach is this: that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.” Now, let me turn to a letter refreshingly uplifting, a letter that heralds the joy and rewards of continual study of the canons of Western and Eastern civilizations coupled with active community service, as providing a path to contentment. And a letter that touches on several issues particularly pertinent to us: Did we have a common bonding experience as members of the class? How do we relate to Alma Mater? How do we employ our time in retirement, give meaning to our life, and share it with others? Retired from Xerox for about five years after 25 years of service, Bow Lum Lee writes from Stamford, Conn.: “I have not responded in the past because I commuted to Columbia every day from my home in lower Manhattan and, therefore, didn’t get to know many of my classmates. However, my love for Alma Mater remains strong. “…I have had time [since retirement] to return to campus to take advantage of colloquia offered to Friends of the Heyman Center for the Humanities and to John Jay Associates. I have enjoyed reading and discussing 18 of Shakespeare’s plays led by Professor Jim Shapiro ’77, and reading and discussing The Decameron as part of ‘The Art of Early Short Fiction’ and another, ‘The Political, Historical, and Literary Works of Machiavelli,’ both led by Professor Jim Mirollo. Professor Ken Jackson led a six-session version of his ‘History of New York City,’ but without his noted bicycle tours. Professor Robert Belknap led us in a discussion of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov. Finally, I have enjoyed reading revised editions of the Sources of Chinese and Japanese Traditions’ selected readings on Buddhism and Japanese literature with discussions led by Professors Ted de Bary ’41 and Donald Keene ’42. My retirement years have been enriched by returning to Columbia and I invite others to join us. I will be glad to answer any questions from my classmates about these offerings. “In addition to taking colloquia at Columbia, my time has been taken up with volunteer work for the United Methodist Church on the local, district, conference and national levels. This, too, has been very rewarding and has enriched my life. God has been good to me and my family, and I have no complaints.” Look to future issues for news of and from Larry Mendelson,
Paul Nagano, Dan Shapiro, John Hamby, Thad Long, Peter Phillipes,
David Farmer, Jerry Tellefsen, Joe Giacalone, Martin Piltch, David
Gordis, John Gubbings and Paul Chevalier.
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