Update 4-17-07

Hi,

Sorry.  I'm still in shock.  I know a lot of you are having terrible weather, and that's enough reason to be concerned.  But my thoughts are somewhere else.  Virginia Tech was one of my schools, I've spent a good part of my life as a college teacher, and I've focused the last two years on helping students get into college.  I think of campuses as safe, green, isolated places, and that's exactly what Blacksburg, Virginia is.  Far on the other side of the state from Washington.  Over the mountains, away from the Interstate, and an hour from anything that even resembles a city.  It's hard to picture what happened.  And, as one of my Tech friends just wrote, "I think in some ways, it takes longer for those like us who have a connection to the place but aren't physically there to deal with our feelings about this."

Back to the Northeast:  It seems Vermont got the worst of the present storm, with unfortunately more to come.  I hope you're warm, Jean.  As I hope that anyone right on the coast is dry.

In other news:  The scholarship accounts are growing.  We have half the money -- $250 -- that we need for Booker's award and almost a third -- $158 -- of what we need for Vince's.  So please keep those checks coming.  Again, make them out to:  Rich Eisbrouch, and send them to me at:  23030 Dolorosa Street, Woodland Hills, California  91367.  In the bottom left corner of the check, please indicate which award you're supporting, or if you want your contribution split between the awards.  Thanks.

From Zelda White Nichols:  For Marc Jonas -- New Yorkers have expanded those wonderful black and white cookies elsewhere.  I've had them in San Diego and just found them in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
    For Eric Hilton -- Well, bless your heart, Eric, you're not the only one to suffer the Lohman's nightmare. My mother and sister were some of those who lived in Lohman's and often dragged me along to look for bargains.  I was horrified at the mass of human flesh fighting over clothes with labels cut out.  Even worse, was they had no shame when it came to trying on various items.  I have hated bargain basement types of stores ever since.
    Watch for George Clooney's new movie called, Leatherheads.  For the next few weeks, it is being filmed in Spencer and Salisbury, North Carolina, which are both right across the river from us.  Salisbury is one of those historic Civil War towns loaded with personality.  Spencer is home to the North Carolina Transportation Museum.  It's really interesting to read how they are restoring an already restored train depot to resemble Duluth, Minnesota, in the 1920s.  My favorite restaurant Pinocchio's, which normally is only open for dinner, is open this week from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM to feed the movie crews.  What fun to see a movie in the making.

From Stu Borman:  I've always had a very distinct memory of a dinner at Cookie's with Jay Tuerk, Robert Fiveson, and probably some others at which we did not have enough money among us to pay for what we had ordered.  By some miracle, the check was incorrectly low, giving us a reprieve.  Imagine my amazement and horror when Jay Tuerk pointed out the error to the waitress.  I think Cookie's management took our names down, and we promised to reimburse them.  Do you remember this, Jay?
    Down the row from Cookie's at the Green Acres Shopping Center was the barber shop.  Maybe it was called the Hollywood Barber Shop.  I always loved the smell of the witch hazel they put on you after they finished with your haircut.  One of the barbers had numbers inked on his forearm from the Holocaust.  Now I cut my own hair and have done so for years.  The last time someone else cut my hair was probably about fifteen years ago.  If you saw me, this would no doubt be immediately obvious.

From Judy Hartstone:  On the subject of food memories -- Len's had the best pickles, just sitting in
a bowl on the table.  For a pickle lover, it was heaven.  And, of course, the smell of charcoal is pleasingly primal, and the burgers could be cooked rare -- yay!  I also remember going to Cooky's after basketball games with Les Glasser, when we were "dating" (how quaint!) and a crowd of kids, drinking yummy milkshakes and ice cream sodas in the downstairs part of the restaurant, the better to keep us in our own noisy world.  (Have I misremembered that there was a downstairs?)

[Rich -- How do you spell the name of this restaurant anyway?  Cooky's?  Cookey's?  Cookie's?  We seem to have collective memory failure on that, and the Internet offers only Cooky's Steak Pub, which I suspect is a descendent.]

From Amy Lieberman:  Since I live about five minutes from you, Rich, I think I might have been invited to share those macaroons.

From Barnet Kellman:  All these Wall’s Bakery memories are fabulous.  We really did all share much the same experience.  There was one particular lady who worked there who would always give me free samples.  Legend in our family has it that I promised to buy her a mink coat when I grew up.  But I never saw anything in writing, so...

From Steve Cahn:  I wanted to add something about Jahn's Ice Cream Parlor.  When we were growing up, there were a few of them, the closest being in Rockville Centre, I believe.  Although all the others have closed, the original in Queens still exists.  I used to take my sons'  Boy Scout troop there after special events in the early 90s.  And, no, we never finished the Kitchen Sink.  There is a link for those who wish to reminisce, and it can easily be found through Google, since we're avoiding spam-folder-attracting links in this newsletter.

From Peggy Cooper Schwartz, to Eric Hilton:  The actor who played Private Doberman on "The Phil Silvers Show" did appear as a celebrity guest at ''The Bids For Kids Auction."  It was held on a Saturday morning in the parking lot of the Green Acres Shopping Center.  I was there with my cousin, Phyllis Ignatow.  I  remember Phyllis saying that Private Doberman was drooling.  The good news was that Phyllis won a tennis racket that morning.

From Claire Brush Reinhardt:  Can all of you '62ers believe that this June will mark forty-five years since we departed from those wonderful hallowed halls of South High School?  Incredible.  And we all still look so young.  Just to keep you all up to date, this year the Alumni Association will be awarding our very first scholarship to a worthy graduating senior.  Our Scholarship Committee met last week to go over the applicants, and we gave our choice to administration, who will make the final decision.  A further note, to those of you who live in warmer places, all of us in the Northeast are recovering from the torrential rains this past weekend and are looking forward to the spring.

From Emily Kleinman Schreiber:  I'm sending this to everyone who receives the class of '65 newsletter because I want you all to know that I think it is great.  Have a great day, and, if you're on the island, stay dry!

[Rich -- I paid Emily to say that, and I'm only running it to get my money's worth -- because you know how I feel about compliments.]

More from Emily, in her capacity as Alumni Association president.  From the winter bulletin:
I hope you are all well and enjoying whatever it is that you are doing.  Here on the island, we've had cherry blossoms in January, and some of the bulbs have also been fooled by those mild days.  February brought us back to the reality of winter, with snow and ice storms plus temperatures hovering around the zero mark on my outdoor thermometer.  Now that March is here, with Daylight Saving Time springing our clocks ahead before its usual month, I know the beauty of springtime will soon be here.
    It’s a year since South's Fifty Year celebration and the reactivation of our Alumni Association.  So much has happened within that time period.  As president, I'm truly proud to be part of such a dedicated group of people.  We have been making a difference.  We have given $200 towards the Courtyard Beautification Project.  Terence Wagner, a student at South, is so excited about the new pond, bridge, and benches, which -- along with new plantings coming in the warm weather -- have transformed the area.  We also donated money to the fundraiser which was successful in helping a recent graduate who is in need of costly medical treatments.  When the editor and advisor of The Southern Bell asked us to help support the updating of the school paper, we placed a half-page ad.  At the January meeting, Patrick Yngstrom ‘67, the Deputy Director of Veterans Services in Nassau County, spoke to us about the Veterans Summer StandDown, and the Association board voted to donate $500, thereby becoming co-sponsors of the event.  The next day, I sent out a mailing to more than six hundred South alumni and, by of the end of February, our initial pledge of $500 was almost tripled.  Since you are the ones who made that happen, thanks to all who gave so generously.
     A quick reminder about membership:  Considering that forty-nine classes have graduated from South in the past fifty-one years, there are at least 10,000 alumni scattered across the country -- even around the world.  With under six-hundred members, we have merely chipped off a tiny piece of the alumni iceberg.  I hope many more of you will join.  In addition to the first Alumni Association we are giving this year, several alumni have inquired about establishing a scholarship in the memory of a loved one.  Please contact me for the form you should use for that.  Meanwhile, I want to wish you all well.

The next Alumni Association meeting is on April 26th, 2007.

Finally, forwarded by Ryki Zuckerman, but written by editor Verlyn Klinkenborg in Buffalo:  If you read Kurt Vonnegut when you were young -- read all there was of him, book after book, as fast as you could, the way so many of us did -- you probably set him aside long ago.  That’s the way it goes with writers we love when we’re young.  It’s almost as though their books absorbed some part of our DNA while we were reading them, and rereading them means revisiting a version of ourselves we may no longer remember or trust.
    Not that Vonnegut is mainly for the young.  I’m sure there are plenty of people who think he is entirely unsuitable for readers under the age of disillusionment.  But the time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be.  He is the indispensable footnote to everything everyone is trying to teach you, the footnote that pulls the rug out from under the established truths being so firmly avowed in the body of the text.
    He is not only entertaining; he is electrocuting. You read him with enormous pleasure because he makes your hair stand on end.  He says not only what no one is saying, but also what -- as a mild young person -- you know it is forbidden to say.  No one nourishes the skepticism of the young like Vonnegut.  In his world, decency is likelier to be rooted in skepticism than it is in the ardor of faith.
    So you get older, and it’s been twenty or thirty years since you last read Player Piano or Cat’s Cradle or Slaughterhouse-Five.  Vonnegut is not, now, somehow serious enough.  You’ve entered that time of life when every hard truth has to be qualified by the sense of what you stand to lose.  “It’s not that simple,” you find yourself saying a lot, and the train of thought that unfolds in your mind as you speak those words reeks of desperation.
    And yet, somehow, the world seems more and more to have been written by Vonnegut, and your life is now the footnote.  Perhaps it is time to go back and revisit that earlier self, the one who seemed, for a while, so interwoven in the pages of those old paperbacks.