Update 6-26-12
Hi,
The thing about grandchildren is they're mainly terrific, but they tend to change other people's plans. In Florida, one of my friends couldn't go snorkeling with us because she suddenly had to babysit for her granddaughter. In New York, of the maybe ten people who'd planned to go out for dinner, half had to back out because of their grandchildren. That left Robin Feit Baker, Dennis Shapiro, Paul DeMartino, and me eating in a very nice Italian restaurant called the Blue Moon in Rockville Centre.
First, let me say something about downtown Rockville Centre: it's a lot more interesting than what's left of downtown Valley Stream. Rockville Centre has at least two long blocks where almost every store is a different kind of restaurant. In contrast, when I walked the length of downtown Valley Stream looking for a comfortable place to take my mom, I found a handful of bars, several low-end restaurants, two good spots to buy ice cream, and a couple of places to take out pizza.
The Blue Moon, besides having memorable food, has been around for a while. Its walls are decorated by murals where the people are almost life-sized and the subjects come from photos taken in the restaurant in the 1930s and 40s. Judging from the murals, the restaurant may have been narrower then, occupying only one of its two present stores, but I'll bet the food was as good.
While we were eating, I noticed that Robin always seems to look the same. That is, she appears to be somewhere under thirty-five and smiles in the same delighted way she did in our yearbook. Dennis, Paul, and I look well older than Robin, and we all look better fed than in our high school photos. Paul and I seemed to be especially serious in those, but I think Dennis, at least, was grinning. Still, he looks so hungry in his head shot that I wonder if he'd only been eating our delicious school lunches.
The four of us talked about the usual things. We've been catching up this way about once a year since 2002. Dennis has now retired and is trying to figure out how best to spend his new free time. Paul, like me, is half-retired, but he and his wife travel far more and far more widely than I do. Robin seems as busy as always and was happy I'd remembered a promise I'd made to her last year.
Last summer, the small New York gathering was at Robin's house, and for the first time I saw her son's vinyl collection. It seemed focused on sixties music, and I mentioned that I had a half-dozen almost new Phil Ochs albums he might like. The records were almost new because I used to tape my albums when I bought them, and when the tapes wore out, I recorded the music again. Robin and I had to explain who Phil Ochs was, but once her son understood, he was interested. Fortunately, my memory worked well enough a year later for me to remember to bring the albums to dinner.
In addition to that dinner, I managed to see Ken and Laura Waxman Ulric for breakfast and Linda Cohen Greenseid and her husband Michael while I was on an errand for my mom. Coincidentally, Ken and Michael are cousins. I also saw Arlene Lynn Ainbinder, who lives not far from my mom, and was able to talk with Jay Berliner for about a half-hour one night on the phone. Jay also travels a lot, worldwide, and often for business. But I didn't get into New York City to try to have lunch with Alan Finder. I didn't get to see Barbara Peres Napolitano or Linda Tobin Kettering though I passed by Linda's house more than a few times. And I didn't get to call Booker Gibson to see if he and his wife Frances had time for me to stop in for a quick visit.
I did stop at South briefly though Liz King Giordano had already told me she probably wouldn't be there. I could have dropped in the previous Friday, but that was the last day of school, and I was sure it would be chaos. The school looks pretty good, about the same as it has the last few times I've been there, and maintenance crews were already beginning to repair the year's wear.
I'd started to walk to South though not by way of the still partially dismantled bridge, but I got caught in one of several thunderstorms that occurred during my stay in Valley Stream. I got soaked through in less than a minute, and standing under a sheltering tree didn't seem wise. We don't have that kind of violent lightning, thunder, and rain in Los Angeles, so it's always fun for me to see. Though I did wonder how my mother would manage if she lost her electricity. Fortunately, I didn't have to experience that till almost a week later, in Washington.
Still, when it was drier, I walked a bit around the old neighborhood. I seem to remember that it used to take me ten minutes to get to South on a clear day, and if the bridge were still intact, I bet that would still be true. It did take me seven minutes to walk from my mom's house to the former site of Molly and Leo's, passing Nancy Garfield's old house at the three-minute mark. And it took me just under fifteen minutes to reach the back entrance to Green Acres / Mill Brook. That feels right because it's just about a mile from my mom's house, and that's how fast I walk. Putting all that together, it would probably take me fifteen minutes to walk to South by way of Mill Road, so the loss of the bridge still doesn't seem huge. Of course, very few students seem to walk to South anyway.
One last note: I had several occasions to be at Hoeffner's Gulf station at the rear entrance to Green Acres / Mill Brook, and it has a series of old farm photos mounted on the office wall. When I asked where the family farm was, I was told, "Right here." Actually, there were two farms: the first extended from the present gas station to about the creek. "That was my father's," Tony Hoeffner told me. The second went from the creek to about where Temple Hillel is on Rosedale Road. "That was my granddad's." In some way, it's good to know that after over two hundred years in this country, the Hoeffner family is still working part of its land.
Rich
Sunday, June 17, 2018
Update 6-19-12
Hi,
I knew I was going to miss three of these updates, but I figured I could fill them in with notes about my trip, about the small New York gathering, and about the small Washington, DC, gathering. That turned out to be easy, hard, and then easy again.
The center of my trip was my annual week-long stay with my mom. She's eighty-four, still lives at home, and has four children who each try to call her at least once a week. When we all lose track and call on the same day, it kind of overwhelms her. The four of us also live at varying distances from her, so we all try to visit occasionally.
Originally, I'd planned to fly to New York and then spend three weeks driving slowly down the coast. This is part of my ongoing sixty-fifth birthday celebration. But the friends I wanted to see in Key West were going to be away when I hoped to visit them in mid-July, so I juggled my plans, started by flying to Florida, made a couple of stops there, and then flew from Orlando to New York. After the week with my mother, I drove to DC, making a few other stops along the way. That cut out everyone I'd wanted to see between DC and Florida, and the fact that I shortened my trip by a week cut out other people I'd hoped to see in Florida, Washington, and New York.
Still, I mostly travel to see people, not places, so I was surprised at how much sightseeing I ended up doing. For example, I never expected to be six miles into the Atlantic, snorkeling, or walking the battlefield at Antietam and inspecting the remains of the armory site at Harper's Ferry. I had expected to see parts of Disney World because the daughter and son-in-law of the friends I was visiting near there work for that company. But I hadn't seen Disney World since a month after it opened in 1971, so I knew it would be interestingly changed.
Let me start with the Atlantic: I'd never done any serious snorkeling, just the kid stuff you do in a pool or at the beach. That's because I can't see very well without my glasses, and you can't easily wear glasses under a face mask. But the friends I was visiting are also nearsighted, so they had face masks with magnifying lenses. These turned out to be terrific, and for the first time, I could see underwater. In the Key West coral, there are lots of interesting fish.
I also discovered the ocean is very salty. Maybe it doesn't seem that way in the breaking waves at the beach, especially those protected by sandbars. But it sure seemed salty when it was washing into my mouth. Plus, I was reminded how little upper body strength I have. When my friends asked, "Can you swim?" I immediately said, "Sure," and thought, "Do they think I'm an idiot?" But in the ocean, with even a four-knot current coming against me, I really can't do more than stay in place. My friends had planned to take me nine miles offshore, where the snorkeling was even better, but the current there was even stronger. So they told me to drift, watch the fish, and then come to the surface. Somehow, they'd find me.
My friends were also aware that I had no real boating experience. I warned them that I'd nearly capsized Chuck Gleichmann's speedboat when we were in high school. I hadn't learned to drive yet so didn't realize you didn't have to crank the steering wheel just to turn mildly left. My friends gave me some quick instruction but said that if anything happened to them not to try to take the boat in myself. "The coral is really close to the surface, sometimes just a couple of inches down. If we're in trouble, and you're alone in the boat, just grab the radio and shout 'Mayday! Mayday!' " My friends further explained that there were two types of sailors in Key West: those who'd gone aground and wrecked their expensive propellers, and those who lied about it.
Antietam and Harper's Ferry were very different kinds of experiences. For one thing, I wasn't in danger of killing myself. For another, I was reminded how poorly I know my American history. I knew Antietam was the site of a major Civil War battle, and the people in the South call it Sharpsville. And I knew Harper's Ferry had something to do with John Brown. But that was about it. I didn't know the chronology. I didn't know the importance of the events. I didn't understand the repercussions, and I didn't know that they involved Stonewall Jackson, Clara Barton, and J.E.B. Stuart. Now, I know a little more about that, at least for a while.
The battlefield was sobering. It was green, broad, and beautiful and probably had been the day of the battle, too, as the National Park Service has kept the land mainly unchanged. But that didn't stop over 23,000 men from dying. Harper's Ferry is also well preserved, in a cleaned-up Colonial Williamsburg way. But walking the steep main street, you can kind of time travel and remove the overlays of gentility in your imagination, replacing them with more realistic nineteenth century grime.
At the other extreme, Disney World, of course, has no dirt. It's fantasy, and though pirates still exist and are mean and dangerous, the animatronic ones in the Magic Kingdom ain't. Somehow I remembered that, in 1971, I parked in a lot named Grumpy. Now, in Epcot, the lots are named after inspiring words like Discover and Create. I miss the dwarves.
Rich
Hi,
I knew I was going to miss three of these updates, but I figured I could fill them in with notes about my trip, about the small New York gathering, and about the small Washington, DC, gathering. That turned out to be easy, hard, and then easy again.
The center of my trip was my annual week-long stay with my mom. She's eighty-four, still lives at home, and has four children who each try to call her at least once a week. When we all lose track and call on the same day, it kind of overwhelms her. The four of us also live at varying distances from her, so we all try to visit occasionally.
Originally, I'd planned to fly to New York and then spend three weeks driving slowly down the coast. This is part of my ongoing sixty-fifth birthday celebration. But the friends I wanted to see in Key West were going to be away when I hoped to visit them in mid-July, so I juggled my plans, started by flying to Florida, made a couple of stops there, and then flew from Orlando to New York. After the week with my mother, I drove to DC, making a few other stops along the way. That cut out everyone I'd wanted to see between DC and Florida, and the fact that I shortened my trip by a week cut out other people I'd hoped to see in Florida, Washington, and New York.
Still, I mostly travel to see people, not places, so I was surprised at how much sightseeing I ended up doing. For example, I never expected to be six miles into the Atlantic, snorkeling, or walking the battlefield at Antietam and inspecting the remains of the armory site at Harper's Ferry. I had expected to see parts of Disney World because the daughter and son-in-law of the friends I was visiting near there work for that company. But I hadn't seen Disney World since a month after it opened in 1971, so I knew it would be interestingly changed.
Let me start with the Atlantic: I'd never done any serious snorkeling, just the kid stuff you do in a pool or at the beach. That's because I can't see very well without my glasses, and you can't easily wear glasses under a face mask. But the friends I was visiting are also nearsighted, so they had face masks with magnifying lenses. These turned out to be terrific, and for the first time, I could see underwater. In the Key West coral, there are lots of interesting fish.
I also discovered the ocean is very salty. Maybe it doesn't seem that way in the breaking waves at the beach, especially those protected by sandbars. But it sure seemed salty when it was washing into my mouth. Plus, I was reminded how little upper body strength I have. When my friends asked, "Can you swim?" I immediately said, "Sure," and thought, "Do they think I'm an idiot?" But in the ocean, with even a four-knot current coming against me, I really can't do more than stay in place. My friends had planned to take me nine miles offshore, where the snorkeling was even better, but the current there was even stronger. So they told me to drift, watch the fish, and then come to the surface. Somehow, they'd find me.
My friends were also aware that I had no real boating experience. I warned them that I'd nearly capsized Chuck Gleichmann's speedboat when we were in high school. I hadn't learned to drive yet so didn't realize you didn't have to crank the steering wheel just to turn mildly left. My friends gave me some quick instruction but said that if anything happened to them not to try to take the boat in myself. "The coral is really close to the surface, sometimes just a couple of inches down. If we're in trouble, and you're alone in the boat, just grab the radio and shout 'Mayday! Mayday!' " My friends further explained that there were two types of sailors in Key West: those who'd gone aground and wrecked their expensive propellers, and those who lied about it.
Antietam and Harper's Ferry were very different kinds of experiences. For one thing, I wasn't in danger of killing myself. For another, I was reminded how poorly I know my American history. I knew Antietam was the site of a major Civil War battle, and the people in the South call it Sharpsville. And I knew Harper's Ferry had something to do with John Brown. But that was about it. I didn't know the chronology. I didn't know the importance of the events. I didn't understand the repercussions, and I didn't know that they involved Stonewall Jackson, Clara Barton, and J.E.B. Stuart. Now, I know a little more about that, at least for a while.
The battlefield was sobering. It was green, broad, and beautiful and probably had been the day of the battle, too, as the National Park Service has kept the land mainly unchanged. But that didn't stop over 23,000 men from dying. Harper's Ferry is also well preserved, in a cleaned-up Colonial Williamsburg way. But walking the steep main street, you can kind of time travel and remove the overlays of gentility in your imagination, replacing them with more realistic nineteenth century grime.
At the other extreme, Disney World, of course, has no dirt. It's fantasy, and though pirates still exist and are mean and dangerous, the animatronic ones in the Magic Kingdom ain't. Somehow I remembered that, in 1971, I parked in a lot named Grumpy. Now, in Epcot, the lots are named after inspiring words like Discover and Create. I miss the dwarves.
Rich
Update 6-12-12
Hi,
First, I'm going away again, so the next update will be around July 4th.
Next, some reports from South's recent awards assembly. First, from Booker Gibson: Hello to you wonderful people. Last night, I went to the annual awards ceremony at South. I've gone each year, and since the place is now air-conditioned, it's nice. My wife, Frances, drives me. As some of you remember, she used to teach music at Forest Road School, so she also feels a connection to South.
Emily Kleinman Schreiber was there and took pictures of Irv Saffrin and me. I believe Irv was given an award. He looks great, and he's somewhere in his 90s.
Nevertheless, I always have to thank all of you people who have kept Vince and my scholarships coming. Valley Stream and South have changed somewhat since you've left, but I always see "the cream of the crop."
From Emily: Please mention that two Alumni Association Scholarships were also presented. One was in memory of Hiram Rosov and the other in honor of Irv Saffrin.
Irv Saffrin was with me on the stage in South Hall, and his daughter was there in the audience. She was so excited. It's amazing how outstandingly achieving the students are -- at least, the ones who are receiving the scholarships.
And from Linda Tobin Kettering, who again presented the Booker Gibson and Vince Tampio scholarships: The award ceremony went well last night as evidenced by the attached photos and information about the recipients. Kudos to everyone for keeping up the scholarships. It's always my pleasure to present them.
The information:
The Booker Gibson Scholarship: In the past six years, this student has demonstrated a true love and dedication for music. In Concert Band, he is an outstanding performer who can always be counted on to set a positive example for his classmates and take on extra responsibilities. He is president of the Tri-M Music Honor Society and has also performed with the select Wind Ensemble, Jazz Ensemble, and Pit Orchestra. He was selected to perform with the District Concert Band and Orchestra for three consecutive years, and he even accompanied the District Chorus. In his free periods, he could frequently be found volunteering his time to tutor junior high students in the band room. As a student, he is simply the finest we have. He is always prompt, reliable, ready to work, helpful, and eager to make our groups succeed. He is respectful, professional, helpful to his peers, and ready to take on new challenges. He is a leader in band, and through his various activities, he brings honor and recognition to our school. It is my honor to present the Booker Gibson Scholarship to Michael Gallagher.
The Vince Tampio Theater Scholarship goes to a student who has excelled in music theater. In theater, the spotlight shines on the talented actors and singers as they bring the stage to life. While the actors are no doubt an essential element of any musical, a production simply could not be without those individuals who work tirelessly behind the curtains. This year, this award goes to a student who has put forth great effort to improve his own abilities as a musician and guitarist for the purpose of performing with the Pit Orchestra. He is a member of the national math, language, and science honor societies, and, as president of the Falcon Report -- our school-side televised news report each Friday -- he does an amazing job of overseeing production from start to finish. He is an outstanding young man whose potential is limitless. It is my pleasure to present the Vince Tampio scholarship to Eric Kleinertz.
[Rich -- There's a photo of Linda with Eric Kleinertz and one of Booker Gibson with Michael Gallagher. Since even deactivated links can turn these newsletters into spam, I'll forward the photos to Emily Kleinman Schreiber. Maybe she can include them in an Alumni Bulletin. I'll also bet Emily took photos of her own.]
Next, three follow-ups to last week's newsletter. First, from Lynn Nudelman Villagran: Hi, all. I have been working for the past five years as a medical social worker in a Memory Clinic at Kaiser San Jose Medical Center, on an interdisciplinary team including two geriatricians, a geriatric psychiatrist, a neuropsychologist and a clinical nurse specialist, so I am pretty up to date on the latest research on Alzheimer's and other dementias. My understanding is that while it can't hurt you, there is not currently evidenced based research to show that the brain training programs mentioned by Judy Hartstone will help prevent dementia, so I'm not sure they are worth the cost. It is true that "what's good for your heart is good for your brain" -- a campaign slogan of the Alzheimer's Association, alz . org -- and the most important thing to know is that daily exercise is what is most recommended to help prevent dementia. This is based on clinical trials of people already showing cognitive impairment. The American Heart Association recommends 30 minutes a day, and brisk walking is fine. Also, the Mediterranean diet is recommended- omega 3 fish oils, etc. And socialization with others, cognitive stimulation by learning something new, word search puzzles, games like suduko are all good.
[Judy also wanted people to know that the $4.99 a month she mentioned was an offer which involved paying in advance for a year, like a magazine subscription.]
Something else that's useful to memory is trying to correctly remember the past. Here's a correction and two questions from Steve Zuckerman:
Thinking back, I made a mistake about my good buddy Mike Floyd. I believe his event on the track team was pole vaulting. If I get the opportunity next time he and I speak by phone, which we do every so often, I will check with him on that point, though I'm sure when he reads the track team article in the last newsletter, he will correct me. He was a sprinter, possibly running the 220, and he may have also done the high jump. As I wrote last week, he loved running and was really good
Also, a while back there was a brief discussion about the various fraternities we had at South. The one I belonged to -- along with Jimmy Lorey ,Mike Floyd, and Dan Tannen -- was Lambda Beta Zeta. Our colors were blue and blue. Besides Kappa Delta Nu and Omega Gamma Delta, wasn't there another fraternity whose colors were red and green? It had to be either Alpha Nu Theta or Alpha Theta Nu. I never forgot their jackets, which were dark green and red. I just can't recall their correct.
And another quick flash to the past -- does anyone remember the kids in school talking about a weird green cloud or long object hanging over all of Valley Stream one night. It was visible anywhere in the sky and stayed for hours on end? This happened on a week night, and I remember that because I was on my way to the shopping center with Cliff Iverson, Bob Bowen, Ed Taylor, and the rest of our little gang. We were something like the East Side Kids minus Leo Gorsey, Billy Hallop, and Bobby Jorden. Cliff Iverson was supposed to settle a wager on a key pool game with a kid from Rosedale. This was in the basement pool room in the Bowling Alley. And when we left there, fairly late at night, the weird green cloud or thing was still up there bright and hanging in the night sky. It drove us nuts, looking at it. It also made the cover of Newsday but not the evening news.
Which brings us to a note from Ed Albrecht: I remember the meet where Danny Stellabotte dropped the baton and went back to pick it up. I was on the team, and we couldn't believe what he'd done.
I held 3 track records at South for years: the 440 4-man relay, the 100 yard low hurdles, and the high jump. I tried the pole vault, too, but couldn't clear 10 feet with a pole that didn't bend. I used to practice the high jump with my own set-up that I'd take to South and set up in the charcoal pit on weekends. I was only 5'-3" and could jump 5-'8". In one meet against Malverne, their jumper was sick, and they told a fellow who was 6 foot plus and had never jumped before to go against me. He literally fell over 5'-10", and I packed it in. That was my last time jumping.
My records stood for many years I was told. Again, Danny Stellabotte was a rocket. He had the weirdest form but was like lightening. So was Richie Viscecchia. In fact, overall, we did have some pretty good teams.
Just reminiscing.
Finally, a reminder that if you want to get together with a small group of former South folks probably in Rockville Centre the evening of Friday June 22nd, please contact Dennis Shapiro at: dshapiro @ optonline . net
And if you want to get together with a different group of former South folks the afternoon of Sunday, July 1st in Bethesda, Maryland, please contact Stu Borman at: sborman @ gmail . com
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
Rich
Hi,
First, I'm going away again, so the next update will be around July 4th.
Next, some reports from South's recent awards assembly. First, from Booker Gibson: Hello to you wonderful people. Last night, I went to the annual awards ceremony at South. I've gone each year, and since the place is now air-conditioned, it's nice. My wife, Frances, drives me. As some of you remember, she used to teach music at Forest Road School, so she also feels a connection to South.
Emily Kleinman Schreiber was there and took pictures of Irv Saffrin and me. I believe Irv was given an award. He looks great, and he's somewhere in his 90s.
Nevertheless, I always have to thank all of you people who have kept Vince and my scholarships coming. Valley Stream and South have changed somewhat since you've left, but I always see "the cream of the crop."
From Emily: Please mention that two Alumni Association Scholarships were also presented. One was in memory of Hiram Rosov and the other in honor of Irv Saffrin.
Irv Saffrin was with me on the stage in South Hall, and his daughter was there in the audience. She was so excited. It's amazing how outstandingly achieving the students are -- at least, the ones who are receiving the scholarships.
And from Linda Tobin Kettering, who again presented the Booker Gibson and Vince Tampio scholarships: The award ceremony went well last night as evidenced by the attached photos and information about the recipients. Kudos to everyone for keeping up the scholarships. It's always my pleasure to present them.
The information:
The Booker Gibson Scholarship: In the past six years, this student has demonstrated a true love and dedication for music. In Concert Band, he is an outstanding performer who can always be counted on to set a positive example for his classmates and take on extra responsibilities. He is president of the Tri-M Music Honor Society and has also performed with the select Wind Ensemble, Jazz Ensemble, and Pit Orchestra. He was selected to perform with the District Concert Band and Orchestra for three consecutive years, and he even accompanied the District Chorus. In his free periods, he could frequently be found volunteering his time to tutor junior high students in the band room. As a student, he is simply the finest we have. He is always prompt, reliable, ready to work, helpful, and eager to make our groups succeed. He is respectful, professional, helpful to his peers, and ready to take on new challenges. He is a leader in band, and through his various activities, he brings honor and recognition to our school. It is my honor to present the Booker Gibson Scholarship to Michael Gallagher.
The Vince Tampio Theater Scholarship goes to a student who has excelled in music theater. In theater, the spotlight shines on the talented actors and singers as they bring the stage to life. While the actors are no doubt an essential element of any musical, a production simply could not be without those individuals who work tirelessly behind the curtains. This year, this award goes to a student who has put forth great effort to improve his own abilities as a musician and guitarist for the purpose of performing with the Pit Orchestra. He is a member of the national math, language, and science honor societies, and, as president of the Falcon Report -- our school-side televised news report each Friday -- he does an amazing job of overseeing production from start to finish. He is an outstanding young man whose potential is limitless. It is my pleasure to present the Vince Tampio scholarship to Eric Kleinertz.
[Rich -- There's a photo of Linda with Eric Kleinertz and one of Booker Gibson with Michael Gallagher. Since even deactivated links can turn these newsletters into spam, I'll forward the photos to Emily Kleinman Schreiber. Maybe she can include them in an Alumni Bulletin. I'll also bet Emily took photos of her own.]
Next, three follow-ups to last week's newsletter. First, from Lynn Nudelman Villagran: Hi, all. I have been working for the past five years as a medical social worker in a Memory Clinic at Kaiser San Jose Medical Center, on an interdisciplinary team including two geriatricians, a geriatric psychiatrist, a neuropsychologist and a clinical nurse specialist, so I am pretty up to date on the latest research on Alzheimer's and other dementias. My understanding is that while it can't hurt you, there is not currently evidenced based research to show that the brain training programs mentioned by Judy Hartstone will help prevent dementia, so I'm not sure they are worth the cost. It is true that "what's good for your heart is good for your brain" -- a campaign slogan of the Alzheimer's Association, alz . org -- and the most important thing to know is that daily exercise is what is most recommended to help prevent dementia. This is based on clinical trials of people already showing cognitive impairment. The American Heart Association recommends 30 minutes a day, and brisk walking is fine. Also, the Mediterranean diet is recommended- omega 3 fish oils, etc. And socialization with others, cognitive stimulation by learning something new, word search puzzles, games like suduko are all good.
[Judy also wanted people to know that the $4.99 a month she mentioned was an offer which involved paying in advance for a year, like a magazine subscription.]
Something else that's useful to memory is trying to correctly remember the past. Here's a correction and two questions from Steve Zuckerman:
Thinking back, I made a mistake about my good buddy Mike Floyd. I believe his event on the track team was pole vaulting. If I get the opportunity next time he and I speak by phone, which we do every so often, I will check with him on that point, though I'm sure when he reads the track team article in the last newsletter, he will correct me. He was a sprinter, possibly running the 220, and he may have also done the high jump. As I wrote last week, he loved running and was really good
Also, a while back there was a brief discussion about the various fraternities we had at South. The one I belonged to -- along with Jimmy Lorey ,Mike Floyd, and Dan Tannen -- was Lambda Beta Zeta. Our colors were blue and blue. Besides Kappa Delta Nu and Omega Gamma Delta, wasn't there another fraternity whose colors were red and green? It had to be either Alpha Nu Theta or Alpha Theta Nu. I never forgot their jackets, which were dark green and red. I just can't recall their correct.
And another quick flash to the past -- does anyone remember the kids in school talking about a weird green cloud or long object hanging over all of Valley Stream one night. It was visible anywhere in the sky and stayed for hours on end? This happened on a week night, and I remember that because I was on my way to the shopping center with Cliff Iverson, Bob Bowen, Ed Taylor, and the rest of our little gang. We were something like the East Side Kids minus Leo Gorsey, Billy Hallop, and Bobby Jorden. Cliff Iverson was supposed to settle a wager on a key pool game with a kid from Rosedale. This was in the basement pool room in the Bowling Alley. And when we left there, fairly late at night, the weird green cloud or thing was still up there bright and hanging in the night sky. It drove us nuts, looking at it. It also made the cover of Newsday but not the evening news.
Which brings us to a note from Ed Albrecht: I remember the meet where Danny Stellabotte dropped the baton and went back to pick it up. I was on the team, and we couldn't believe what he'd done.
I held 3 track records at South for years: the 440 4-man relay, the 100 yard low hurdles, and the high jump. I tried the pole vault, too, but couldn't clear 10 feet with a pole that didn't bend. I used to practice the high jump with my own set-up that I'd take to South and set up in the charcoal pit on weekends. I was only 5'-3" and could jump 5-'8". In one meet against Malverne, their jumper was sick, and they told a fellow who was 6 foot plus and had never jumped before to go against me. He literally fell over 5'-10", and I packed it in. That was my last time jumping.
My records stood for many years I was told. Again, Danny Stellabotte was a rocket. He had the weirdest form but was like lightening. So was Richie Viscecchia. In fact, overall, we did have some pretty good teams.
Just reminiscing.
Finally, a reminder that if you want to get together with a small group of former South folks probably in Rockville Centre the evening of Friday June 22nd, please contact Dennis Shapiro at: dshapiro @ optonline . net
And if you want to get together with a different group of former South folks the afternoon of Sunday, July 1st in Bethesda, Maryland, please contact Stu Borman at: sborman @ gmail . com
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
Rich
Update 6-5-12
Hi,
First, the cover story in Time this week -- the June 11th issue -- is by Joe Klein, and it's about his parents, Miriam and Malcom. Some of us may remember the Kleins, since they lived on the corner of Eastwood and Jasmine Lanes while we were going up. Joe went to Forest and to South for a couple of years, and he's kind of well-known. And I didn't say this was a cheerful story.
On more ordinary matters, a follow-up about last week's Medicare article, this from Judy Hartstone: Just wanted to mention that people should check with their insurance broker or directly with Social Security office regarding Medicare supplemental insurance because there are several variables to be considered. I didn't read the article someone posted on last week's newsletter all that carefully because I have an appointment with my broker this week to go over the options. Here's a brief explanation of the "open enrollment" period I found online:
"The best time to purchase a Medicare Supplement insurance policy (also called a Medigap policy) is during your Medigap open enrollment period. This 6-month period begins on the first day of the month in which you are both age 65 or older and enrolled in Medicare Part B. Once you enroll in Part B, your Medicare Supplement open enrollment period begins and cannot be changed. During this period, an insurance company cannot use medical underwriting. This means they can't refuse to sell you any Medigap policy that they offer, make you wait for coverage to start, or charge you more for a Medigap policy because of past or present health problems."
[Rich -- Judy and I had lunch last Friday. We try to get together quarterly. This time I brought one of my dogs, and Judy brought hers. They behaved very well. Judy also told me about a web site she's been using, which is good for the mind.]
From Judy: At lunch, I was telling you about lumosity . com. Although the neuroscience world continues to study the effectiveness of "brain training," I'm enjoying the challenge of the various games and activities on lumosity, which purport to help increase neuron growth. Lord knows, I need all the help I can get with this aging brain! I'm not a sales rep for lumosity, but I do encourage people to check it out -- I think they offer a free trial of nine or more of the thirty-five available games. After that, it's $4.99 a month.
On a pair of entirely different subjects, from Art Halprin: Yep, someone hacked my e-mail account again, but, unfortunately as far as I know, no one in our class sent me the $2000.
This was an extreme hack. My entire e-mail contact list was wiped out, and I had to go back through sent e-mails for five years to reconstruct it. Microsoft would have been kind enough to reconstruct the list for me for only $259. The e-mail account had been diverted to an address which was in Arabic, and I needed assistance from my son to get it back.
My wife, Lee, and I are heading to Northern California in two weeks for my son's wedding. When we return, we will visit Jerry Bittman's daughter Katie and his granddaughter. Katie works at the same facility as my wife -- the Boulder Community Hospital.
[Rich -- On behalf of all of us, I offered Art our sympathy for his e-mail account and congratulations on his son's wedding.]
Next, from Steve Zuckerman in Puerto Rico: I was interested in what you wrote a few weeks ago about working with coach Ralph Foster. Were you on the track team when he coached us? I was on the team for two years. It might have been three -- I forget how long after all this time. I went out for track with my good buddy Mike Floyd, who inspired me to be a sprinter like him. Mike, I think, was a really good runner, and he also was a high jumper, which was his event of choice. I could run, but my speed was nothing like some of the other guys. So I found my passion in throwing the shot put -- just heaving a twelve-pound lead ball into the air, or the lighter one we used for indoor track practice on rainy days. Josh Talkoff was on the shot put squad with me, and when he saw my dismal performance during a track meet, he became my personal trainer and coach and tried to turn me into a quality shot putter, at least one who wouldn't let the team down.
Remember the hard work coach Ralph Foster put us through, especially on Saturday morning practices? We starting off with running cross-country and then did a battery of push-ups and sit-ups. I loved to see everyone on the team having to run, even the best sprinters and jumpers. One of the fastest runners I ever saw was Dan Stellabotte, unless I imagined it. I know for sure he turned back in a relay race once to pick up a dropped baton in his lane, and he still had the speed to pass the baton to the next runner successfully in time. That was something I never witnessed again. Ken Nolan and Tom Connelly, great sprinters both, were also on the team. We had an exceptional team due largely to the fact that we had those guys.
[Rich -- As I wrote Steve: Yep, I was Ralph Foster's manager for the soccer and track teams in 8th and 9th grades, and I remember you and all the guys you were talking about. I had a lot of fun working with the teams, even as minor support. Track was busier because I had to collect all the scores at the meets. With soccer, it was mainly a matter of keeping attendance and replacing cleats.]
And Steve wrote back: I tried out for soccer, but Mr. Argenzio saw right away that -- as he said to me -- I had some decent speed, but lacked coordination and agility, especially passing the ball in play. He was the one who suggested that I try my skills at Track and Field. Undaunted, and determined to make my mark in varsity high school sports, I tried again, this time to get on the wrestling squad. Only I didn't have enough power in my arms to pin anyone, even with some weight lifting after school. And the idea of using my neck to get out of being pinned to the mat and to risk permanent spine injury ended any serious wrestling career.
[Rich -- As I've probably mentioned before, the only thing I ever did well enough in sports was being dumb enough to repeatedly tackle Ricky Glickman when we were playing football in front of Forest Road School. Never hurt my neck, but I broke several pairs of glasses.]
A reminder that the South Awards assembly is Wednesday night -- that's tomorrow, June 6th -- at 7:00 in South Hall.
Finally, Zelda White Nichols sent some questions from the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina , Kansas. The original document is on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, and the exam was reprinted by the Salina Journal. The test has made the Internet rounds frequently, and probably many of us have seen it, so here's just one easy question:
A wagon box is 2 feet deep, 10 feet long, and 3 feet wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
[Yeah, well, none of those folks would know how to use a cell phone, either.]
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
Rich
Hi,
First, the cover story in Time this week -- the June 11th issue -- is by Joe Klein, and it's about his parents, Miriam and Malcom. Some of us may remember the Kleins, since they lived on the corner of Eastwood and Jasmine Lanes while we were going up. Joe went to Forest and to South for a couple of years, and he's kind of well-known. And I didn't say this was a cheerful story.
On more ordinary matters, a follow-up about last week's Medicare article, this from Judy Hartstone: Just wanted to mention that people should check with their insurance broker or directly with Social Security office regarding Medicare supplemental insurance because there are several variables to be considered. I didn't read the article someone posted on last week's newsletter all that carefully because I have an appointment with my broker this week to go over the options. Here's a brief explanation of the "open enrollment" period I found online:
"The best time to purchase a Medicare Supplement insurance policy (also called a Medigap policy) is during your Medigap open enrollment period. This 6-month period begins on the first day of the month in which you are both age 65 or older and enrolled in Medicare Part B. Once you enroll in Part B, your Medicare Supplement open enrollment period begins and cannot be changed. During this period, an insurance company cannot use medical underwriting. This means they can't refuse to sell you any Medigap policy that they offer, make you wait for coverage to start, or charge you more for a Medigap policy because of past or present health problems."
[Rich -- Judy and I had lunch last Friday. We try to get together quarterly. This time I brought one of my dogs, and Judy brought hers. They behaved very well. Judy also told me about a web site she's been using, which is good for the mind.]
From Judy: At lunch, I was telling you about lumosity . com. Although the neuroscience world continues to study the effectiveness of "brain training," I'm enjoying the challenge of the various games and activities on lumosity, which purport to help increase neuron growth. Lord knows, I need all the help I can get with this aging brain! I'm not a sales rep for lumosity, but I do encourage people to check it out -- I think they offer a free trial of nine or more of the thirty-five available games. After that, it's $4.99 a month.
On a pair of entirely different subjects, from Art Halprin: Yep, someone hacked my e-mail account again, but, unfortunately as far as I know, no one in our class sent me the $2000.
This was an extreme hack. My entire e-mail contact list was wiped out, and I had to go back through sent e-mails for five years to reconstruct it. Microsoft would have been kind enough to reconstruct the list for me for only $259. The e-mail account had been diverted to an address which was in Arabic, and I needed assistance from my son to get it back.
My wife, Lee, and I are heading to Northern California in two weeks for my son's wedding. When we return, we will visit Jerry Bittman's daughter Katie and his granddaughter. Katie works at the same facility as my wife -- the Boulder Community Hospital.
[Rich -- On behalf of all of us, I offered Art our sympathy for his e-mail account and congratulations on his son's wedding.]
Next, from Steve Zuckerman in Puerto Rico: I was interested in what you wrote a few weeks ago about working with coach Ralph Foster. Were you on the track team when he coached us? I was on the team for two years. It might have been three -- I forget how long after all this time. I went out for track with my good buddy Mike Floyd, who inspired me to be a sprinter like him. Mike, I think, was a really good runner, and he also was a high jumper, which was his event of choice. I could run, but my speed was nothing like some of the other guys. So I found my passion in throwing the shot put -- just heaving a twelve-pound lead ball into the air, or the lighter one we used for indoor track practice on rainy days. Josh Talkoff was on the shot put squad with me, and when he saw my dismal performance during a track meet, he became my personal trainer and coach and tried to turn me into a quality shot putter, at least one who wouldn't let the team down.
Remember the hard work coach Ralph Foster put us through, especially on Saturday morning practices? We starting off with running cross-country and then did a battery of push-ups and sit-ups. I loved to see everyone on the team having to run, even the best sprinters and jumpers. One of the fastest runners I ever saw was Dan Stellabotte, unless I imagined it. I know for sure he turned back in a relay race once to pick up a dropped baton in his lane, and he still had the speed to pass the baton to the next runner successfully in time. That was something I never witnessed again. Ken Nolan and Tom Connelly, great sprinters both, were also on the team. We had an exceptional team due largely to the fact that we had those guys.
[Rich -- As I wrote Steve: Yep, I was Ralph Foster's manager for the soccer and track teams in 8th and 9th grades, and I remember you and all the guys you were talking about. I had a lot of fun working with the teams, even as minor support. Track was busier because I had to collect all the scores at the meets. With soccer, it was mainly a matter of keeping attendance and replacing cleats.]
And Steve wrote back: I tried out for soccer, but Mr. Argenzio saw right away that -- as he said to me -- I had some decent speed, but lacked coordination and agility, especially passing the ball in play. He was the one who suggested that I try my skills at Track and Field. Undaunted, and determined to make my mark in varsity high school sports, I tried again, this time to get on the wrestling squad. Only I didn't have enough power in my arms to pin anyone, even with some weight lifting after school. And the idea of using my neck to get out of being pinned to the mat and to risk permanent spine injury ended any serious wrestling career.
[Rich -- As I've probably mentioned before, the only thing I ever did well enough in sports was being dumb enough to repeatedly tackle Ricky Glickman when we were playing football in front of Forest Road School. Never hurt my neck, but I broke several pairs of glasses.]
A reminder that the South Awards assembly is Wednesday night -- that's tomorrow, June 6th -- at 7:00 in South Hall.
Finally, Zelda White Nichols sent some questions from the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina , Kansas. The original document is on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, and the exam was reprinted by the Salina Journal. The test has made the Internet rounds frequently, and probably many of us have seen it, so here's just one easy question:
A wagon box is 2 feet deep, 10 feet long, and 3 feet wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
[Yeah, well, none of those folks would know how to use a cell phone, either.]
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
Rich
Update 5-29-12
Hi,
It's Memorial Day, of course. At least, it's somewhere between the day we currently celebrate and the day we used to celebrate. According to AOL News, Memorial Day grew out of Decoration Day, which began after the Civil War as a way to encourage healing between people in the North and South. Eventually, it worked.
Next, the Subject Line from a clearly spam-generated e-mail sent from one of Art Halprin's former accounts: It's Urgent Please Am Sad .. Reply Soon !?
Third, if you're a friend of Jerry Bittman, you can see a picture of him on Facebook with his new granddaughter. Very cute. The kid is, too.
Fourth, some social notes. There are two small gatherings being planned, both focused around people in the former class of '65. One party is probably in Rockville Centre, and the other's in Bethesda, Maryland.
On Friday, June 22nd, a group of us is gathering at a restaurant, bar, or pizza place probably in Rockville Centre, probably starting around 7 PM. Anyone from any class is welcome, and if you're interested in joining us, please contact Dennis Shapiro, our coordinator. His e-mail address is: dshapiro @ optonline . net (Take out those spaces, of course.) It's pay-as-we-go, stay-as-long-as-we-want. Dennis just needs to know how much space we may initially occupy.
And on Sunday, July 1st, another group of us is gathering at Stu Borman's house in Bethesda, Maryland. To make things easier, I'd again suggested a restaurant, bar, or pizza place, but Stu generously felt his house and backyard would be more comfortable. Stu's grilling. We get to supply the side dishes. We're looking at an early afternoon start, and if you want to join us, please contact Stu. His e-mail address is: sborman @ gmail . com (Again, please remove those spaces.)
Why do I keep asking you to remove the spaces? That brings me to my next social note. On Sunday, I sent you all an e-mail which went directly to many people's spam folders. Why? Simply because it had an attachment. That's even worse than an embedded Internet address. Also, I didn't send the note from this address because it wasn't class business, and I realized afterwards that a lot of people don't know my last name, so they wouldn't know to fish an e-mail from an alien address out of their spam folders.
The attachment was part of my ongoing birthday celebration. Instead of having one big party, I sent you all a present. The Subject Line reads: Collected Internet Jokes, and the address is: reisbrouch @ gmail . com (without the spaces.) My last name is Eisbrouch, pronounced ice-brook, like "frozen river." The attachment is harmless, unless you have a low threshold for vintage Internet jokes.
Next, another interesting Arthur Miller-South connection, this time from Barbara Dorin Hayden: Just thought I'd share this as a side note -- as I've mentioned before, my husband, James Hayden, starred on Broadway in Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge and also in David Mamet's American Buffalo. That was the production with Al Pacino. I met both Miller and Mamet a bunch of times, and Pacino was a friend back then.
The View production previewed at New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre the winter Natalie Wood died. Her sister Lana was dating Alan Feinstein, who was in the cast and was with us when the news arrived. Then three weeks later, my husband's best friend, who lived with us, passed away. Earlier the same night, Dustin Hoffman and John Voight were in the audience. Jim told no one about Michael's death until afterward. Good thing A View from the Bridge isn't a comedy.
Finally, a couple of medical stories. And if any military commemoration reminds me of the lesson about respect Jimmy Lorey taught me, any medical story reminds me of the warning Andy Dolich once sent: "You're not going to turn this into a Medicare bulletin now?" Still, Barbara Blitfield Pech sent the first useful article, which I'll excerpt, and the second excerpt is part of a story in the May 28th issue of New York magazine.
From Barbara, an article in Jewish World Review by Kimberly Lankford: In most cases, you cannot switch plans midyear. To choose a Medicare Advantage plan for next year, you must wait until open-enrollment season, which runs from October 15 to December 7. There's a special enrollment period -- January 1 to February 14 -- that lets you switch out of a Medicare Advantage plan into traditional Medicare (and sign up for a stand-alone Part D prescription-drug policy), but you can't use that window to move from one Medicare Advantage plan to another.
A new option, however, allows those who have access to a five-star Medicare Advantage plan to switch plans once during the year outside of open enrollment.
The link to the rest of the short article: jewishworldreview . com / 0512 / medicare_midyear.php3
From New York, an article by Michael Wolff: In 1990, there were slightly more than 3 million Americans over the age of 85. Now there are almost 6 million. By 2050 there will be 19 million -- approaching 5 percent of the population. There are various ways to look at this. If you are responsible for governmental budgets, it’s a knotty policy issue. If you are in marketing, it suggests new opportunities (and not just Depends). If you are my age, it seems amazingly optimistic. Age is one of the great modern adventures, a technological marvel -- we’re given several more youthful-ish decades if we take care of ourselves. Almost nobody, at least openly, sees this for its ultimate, dismaying, unintended consequence: By promoting longevity and technologically inhibiting death, we have created a new biological status held by an ever-growing part of the nation, a no-exit state that persists longer and longer, one that is nearly as remote from life as death, but which, unlike death, requires vast service, indentured servitude really, and resources.
The link to the rest of the long article: nymag . com / news / features/parent-health-care-2012-5/
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
Rich
Hi,
It's Memorial Day, of course. At least, it's somewhere between the day we currently celebrate and the day we used to celebrate. According to AOL News, Memorial Day grew out of Decoration Day, which began after the Civil War as a way to encourage healing between people in the North and South. Eventually, it worked.
Next, the Subject Line from a clearly spam-generated e-mail sent from one of Art Halprin's former accounts: It's Urgent Please Am Sad .. Reply Soon !?
Third, if you're a friend of Jerry Bittman, you can see a picture of him on Facebook with his new granddaughter. Very cute. The kid is, too.
Fourth, some social notes. There are two small gatherings being planned, both focused around people in the former class of '65. One party is probably in Rockville Centre, and the other's in Bethesda, Maryland.
On Friday, June 22nd, a group of us is gathering at a restaurant, bar, or pizza place probably in Rockville Centre, probably starting around 7 PM. Anyone from any class is welcome, and if you're interested in joining us, please contact Dennis Shapiro, our coordinator. His e-mail address is: dshapiro @ optonline . net (Take out those spaces, of course.) It's pay-as-we-go, stay-as-long-as-we-want. Dennis just needs to know how much space we may initially occupy.
And on Sunday, July 1st, another group of us is gathering at Stu Borman's house in Bethesda, Maryland. To make things easier, I'd again suggested a restaurant, bar, or pizza place, but Stu generously felt his house and backyard would be more comfortable. Stu's grilling. We get to supply the side dishes. We're looking at an early afternoon start, and if you want to join us, please contact Stu. His e-mail address is: sborman @ gmail . com (Again, please remove those spaces.)
Why do I keep asking you to remove the spaces? That brings me to my next social note. On Sunday, I sent you all an e-mail which went directly to many people's spam folders. Why? Simply because it had an attachment. That's even worse than an embedded Internet address. Also, I didn't send the note from this address because it wasn't class business, and I realized afterwards that a lot of people don't know my last name, so they wouldn't know to fish an e-mail from an alien address out of their spam folders.
The attachment was part of my ongoing birthday celebration. Instead of having one big party, I sent you all a present. The Subject Line reads: Collected Internet Jokes, and the address is: reisbrouch @ gmail . com (without the spaces.) My last name is Eisbrouch, pronounced ice-brook, like "frozen river." The attachment is harmless, unless you have a low threshold for vintage Internet jokes.
Next, another interesting Arthur Miller-South connection, this time from Barbara Dorin Hayden: Just thought I'd share this as a side note -- as I've mentioned before, my husband, James Hayden, starred on Broadway in Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge and also in David Mamet's American Buffalo. That was the production with Al Pacino. I met both Miller and Mamet a bunch of times, and Pacino was a friend back then.
The View production previewed at New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre the winter Natalie Wood died. Her sister Lana was dating Alan Feinstein, who was in the cast and was with us when the news arrived. Then three weeks later, my husband's best friend, who lived with us, passed away. Earlier the same night, Dustin Hoffman and John Voight were in the audience. Jim told no one about Michael's death until afterward. Good thing A View from the Bridge isn't a comedy.
Finally, a couple of medical stories. And if any military commemoration reminds me of the lesson about respect Jimmy Lorey taught me, any medical story reminds me of the warning Andy Dolich once sent: "You're not going to turn this into a Medicare bulletin now?" Still, Barbara Blitfield Pech sent the first useful article, which I'll excerpt, and the second excerpt is part of a story in the May 28th issue of New York magazine.
From Barbara, an article in Jewish World Review by Kimberly Lankford: In most cases, you cannot switch plans midyear. To choose a Medicare Advantage plan for next year, you must wait until open-enrollment season, which runs from October 15 to December 7. There's a special enrollment period -- January 1 to February 14 -- that lets you switch out of a Medicare Advantage plan into traditional Medicare (and sign up for a stand-alone Part D prescription-drug policy), but you can't use that window to move from one Medicare Advantage plan to another.
A new option, however, allows those who have access to a five-star Medicare Advantage plan to switch plans once during the year outside of open enrollment.
The link to the rest of the short article: jewishworldreview . com / 0512 / medicare_midyear.php3
From New York, an article by Michael Wolff: In 1990, there were slightly more than 3 million Americans over the age of 85. Now there are almost 6 million. By 2050 there will be 19 million -- approaching 5 percent of the population. There are various ways to look at this. If you are responsible for governmental budgets, it’s a knotty policy issue. If you are in marketing, it suggests new opportunities (and not just Depends). If you are my age, it seems amazingly optimistic. Age is one of the great modern adventures, a technological marvel -- we’re given several more youthful-ish decades if we take care of ourselves. Almost nobody, at least openly, sees this for its ultimate, dismaying, unintended consequence: By promoting longevity and technologically inhibiting death, we have created a new biological status held by an ever-growing part of the nation, a no-exit state that persists longer and longer, one that is nearly as remote from life as death, but which, unlike death, requires vast service, indentured servitude really, and resources.
The link to the rest of the long article: nymag . com / news / features/parent-health-care-2012-5/
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
Rich
Update 5-22-12
Hi,
First, the scholarship checks arrived at South. Liz King Giordano wrote: The checks arrived in the mail today, Friday, May 18th. I contacted Linda Kettering to confirm that she’ll be presenting the awards, and I will also contact Booker Gibson to see if he is attending the program. The Awards Assembly is Wednesday, June 6th, in South Hall at 7 PM, and graduation is Friday, June 22nd. I'll try to send you the programs soon after that and remind the students to write their thank-you notes. Again, thanks to everyone for supporting these scholarships.
Second, half of a correction from last week: I think South's English teacher's name was Paul Hartman. I had it as "Phil" in half the newsletters last week, and then I corrected it. Phil Hartman was the late actor and comic.
Third, from Zelda White Nichols: A continuation of a travelogue started by Larry Rugan is a visit to Low Country South Carolina. We have spent numerous vacations in California’s wine countries -- Central Coast, Napa and Sonoma -- and the Pacific Northwest. We lived within a half hour of the Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine coasts and love that area, too. It wasn’t until we purchased two beach rental properties in Garden City Beach, South Carolina, however, that we started falling in love with the Myrtle Beach south to Charleston coastal areas.
To provide brochures of interesting places to stay for my renters, I visit as many places as possible each time we go to our beach houses for maintenance purposes. I have learned of so many truly great animal sanctuaries of all kinds that provide life-long shelter for abused and abandoned animals, sea turtles, and raptors -- birds of prey. The variety makes my head spins. This is truly a nature lover's paradise, especially with all the wildlife viewing areas along the coast. If you are an American Revolution and Civil War history buff, this is the place to be as well. This isn’t a solicitation for our beach rental properties -- we are completely booked for the summer -- but just want to share an experience that includes the above as well as great dining and hotels. If you're interested in further information, you can email me privately at: Zelda . nichols @ high-rock-lake . com (please remove spaces)
Fourth and fifth, a pair of related stories from Robert Fiveson and Barbara Blitfield Pech: First, from Robert:
Arthur Miller and Death Of a Salesman have been a presence throughout my life. My father was a salesman, and I once told him he was Willy Loman. He asked, "Who the hell is that?" to which I responded "Exactly Dad."
Also, my grandmother told me that my grandfather, Arthur Fiveson, had two sisters, one of whom married a man named Miller, and they had a son also named Arthur who became a playwright.
I may be misrembering the precise lineage, because it was an oral history, my grandmother told of how Arthur Miller was a third cousin on the Fiveson side. My brother Mike traced to the name Fieveson from Kounas in Lithiuania (en . m . wikipedia . org/wiki / Kaunas_massacre_of_October_29,_1941) (please remove spaces) before the first E was dropped at Ellis Island. He found proof of this in the archives.
Finally, from Barbara: From The New York Times, May 18, 2012, by Samuel Freeman: A Yiddish play with the title “Toyt fun a Salesman”opened at the Parkway Theater in Brooklyn early in 1951. As most of the audience recognized from the name alone, the show was a translation of Arthur Miller’s drama Death of a Salesman. It seemed a mere footnote to the premiere production, which had completed its triumphal run on Broadway several months earlier, having won the Pulitzer Prize.
Even so, a theater critic in Commentary magazine, George Ross, declared of the Brooklyn version, “What one feels most strikingly is that this Yiddish play is really the original, and the Broadway production was merely Arthur Miller’s translation into English.”
History, it must be said, has not exactly ratified Mr. Ross’s judgment. In an enduring way, however, he framed a penetrating question about Miller’s masterpiece, which has echoed from the 1949 debut to the celebrated revival now on Broadway: Is Willy Loman Jewish?
Did Miller create him devoid of ethnic or religious markings to better serve as an American Everyman broken on the wheel of capitalism? Or did he subtly intend for part of Willy’s tragedy to be his estrangement from the Jewish and Judaic heritage that might have provided some ballast as his working life, and with it his very identity, falls to ruin?
These are the sort of questions that defy provable answers. Miller himself changed his view of Willy over the decades, evolving from a fierce defense of his indeterminate identity to a perception of him as an untethered Jew. Literary critics, especially Jewish ones, have long argued the point among themselves. Leslie Fiedler dismissed Willy as the “crypto-Jewish” product of Miller’s “pseudo-universalizing,” while Julius Novick maintained that the Loman family’s “separation from the roots ... is what makes them so vulnerable to the false values that undo them.”
Miller grew up in a thoroughly Jewish milieu, recalling in his autobiography, Timebends, how he sat on his great-grandfather’s lap in synagogue and later had a bar mitzvah ceremony. His adult belief system, though, took the form of left-wing politics, and critiques of capitalism and the McCarthy era’s Red Scare ultimately informed many of his finest plays -- All My Sons, A View From the Bridge, The Crucible,
Salesman -- had indisputably Jewish origins. Miller based Willy Loman on his uncle Manny Newman, a salesman brought low by the Depression. He tried out earlier versions of the character in stories he wrote in his teens and 20s about salesmen with apparently Jewish surnames — Schoenzeit and Schleifer.
So the intriguing question remains why Willy, as finally written, offers so little evidence of heritage. Miller, in a 1969 interview, insisted that the character’s “religious or cultural background ... seems to me irrelevant.” The contemporary playwright Tony Kushner, who is editing Miller’s collected plays for the Library of America, suggested that for Jewish writers in the mid-20th century, “there wasn’t a sense of shame about being Jewish, but of reaching for something universal, and there was some sense that the immigrant experience and the ethnic specificity would limit it.”
Miller did write overtly Jewish characters, starting in his 1945 novel about anti-Semitism, Focus, and continuing through two plays about the Holocaust, Incident at Vichy (1964) and Broken Glass (1994). So the decision to leave Willy’s identity indistinct represented a thought-through choice, not a chronic ambivalence about Jewish content. Mr. Novick, for his part, called Salesman the sequel to Fiddler on the Roof -- the tragic culmination of the immigrant’s American dream. Harold Bloom, a scholar of both biblical and modern literature, posited that the play’s heartbreaking, embittered reunion of Willy and his alienated son Biff is an inversion of the Bible’s reuniting of Jacob and Joseph, which he called “the paradigm of Jewish family love.”
The playwright David Mamet, himself the grandson of a traveling salesman, said that the play’s tension “between hope, confusion, aspiration and circumstance” was itself “the voice of the second-generation American-Jewish writers.” Some critics have singled out Linda Loman’s famous speech about Willy -- “Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person” -- as having a distinctively Yiddish cadence.
Over time, Miller came around to acknowledging some Jewish specificity to the Lomans. In an essay published for the play’s 50th anniversary, in 1999, he described them as “Jews light-years away from religion or a community that might have fostered Jewish identity.” Thus sundered, they are left “on the sidewalk side of the glass looking in at the clean well-lighted place.” In the very absence of their Jewish identity, one might say, is its very presence.
The current production — widely lauded and nominated for seven Tony Awards — has been most notable for its fidelity to Miller’s original intent. It uses the set design and musical score from the original production, and it indelibly portrays Willy’s drift between present and past, between reality and memory and fantasy. Miller’s original title for the play, after all, was The Inside of His Head.
The producer Scott Rudin was interested enough, though, in the matter of the Loman family’s roots to assemble a research folder of critical and biographical essays grappling with the Jew-Everyman debate. “It’s so much a play about someone who wants to belong to the largest thing he can belong to — a fantasy of America,” Mr. Rudin said in a recent interview. “And he’s become deracinated from his background in the process.”
Mike Nichols, the director of the current revival, came to the United States as a Jewish refugee child from Nazi Germany. What he has seen in Willy is not the intensity of the immigrant generation of Jews, with its fervor for education, but the worship of materialism by the second generation, those disparaged in Yiddish as being “alrightniks.”
“Willy has no forebears,” Mr. Nichols said in an interview this month. “He’s not from any country. He has no holidays of any religion. So you have to assume Miller’s making a point. We who are struggling to sell enough have to drop everything — religion, nationality, family. There is nothing except, as Willy puts it, being known and being well-liked.”
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
Please take out the spaces.
Rich
Hi,
First, the scholarship checks arrived at South. Liz King Giordano wrote: The checks arrived in the mail today, Friday, May 18th. I contacted Linda Kettering to confirm that she’ll be presenting the awards, and I will also contact Booker Gibson to see if he is attending the program. The Awards Assembly is Wednesday, June 6th, in South Hall at 7 PM, and graduation is Friday, June 22nd. I'll try to send you the programs soon after that and remind the students to write their thank-you notes. Again, thanks to everyone for supporting these scholarships.
Second, half of a correction from last week: I think South's English teacher's name was Paul Hartman. I had it as "Phil" in half the newsletters last week, and then I corrected it. Phil Hartman was the late actor and comic.
Third, from Zelda White Nichols: A continuation of a travelogue started by Larry Rugan is a visit to Low Country South Carolina. We have spent numerous vacations in California’s wine countries -- Central Coast, Napa and Sonoma -- and the Pacific Northwest. We lived within a half hour of the Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine coasts and love that area, too. It wasn’t until we purchased two beach rental properties in Garden City Beach, South Carolina, however, that we started falling in love with the Myrtle Beach south to Charleston coastal areas.
To provide brochures of interesting places to stay for my renters, I visit as many places as possible each time we go to our beach houses for maintenance purposes. I have learned of so many truly great animal sanctuaries of all kinds that provide life-long shelter for abused and abandoned animals, sea turtles, and raptors -- birds of prey. The variety makes my head spins. This is truly a nature lover's paradise, especially with all the wildlife viewing areas along the coast. If you are an American Revolution and Civil War history buff, this is the place to be as well. This isn’t a solicitation for our beach rental properties -- we are completely booked for the summer -- but just want to share an experience that includes the above as well as great dining and hotels. If you're interested in further information, you can email me privately at: Zelda . nichols @ high-rock-lake . com (please remove spaces)
Fourth and fifth, a pair of related stories from Robert Fiveson and Barbara Blitfield Pech: First, from Robert:
Arthur Miller and Death Of a Salesman have been a presence throughout my life. My father was a salesman, and I once told him he was Willy Loman. He asked, "Who the hell is that?" to which I responded "Exactly Dad."
Also, my grandmother told me that my grandfather, Arthur Fiveson, had two sisters, one of whom married a man named Miller, and they had a son also named Arthur who became a playwright.
I may be misrembering the precise lineage, because it was an oral history, my grandmother told of how Arthur Miller was a third cousin on the Fiveson side. My brother Mike traced to the name Fieveson from Kounas in Lithiuania (en . m . wikipedia . org/wiki / Kaunas_massacre_of_October_29,_1941) (please remove spaces) before the first E was dropped at Ellis Island. He found proof of this in the archives.
Finally, from Barbara: From The New York Times, May 18, 2012, by Samuel Freeman: A Yiddish play with the title “Toyt fun a Salesman”opened at the Parkway Theater in Brooklyn early in 1951. As most of the audience recognized from the name alone, the show was a translation of Arthur Miller’s drama Death of a Salesman. It seemed a mere footnote to the premiere production, which had completed its triumphal run on Broadway several months earlier, having won the Pulitzer Prize.
Even so, a theater critic in Commentary magazine, George Ross, declared of the Brooklyn version, “What one feels most strikingly is that this Yiddish play is really the original, and the Broadway production was merely Arthur Miller’s translation into English.”
History, it must be said, has not exactly ratified Mr. Ross’s judgment. In an enduring way, however, he framed a penetrating question about Miller’s masterpiece, which has echoed from the 1949 debut to the celebrated revival now on Broadway: Is Willy Loman Jewish?
Did Miller create him devoid of ethnic or religious markings to better serve as an American Everyman broken on the wheel of capitalism? Or did he subtly intend for part of Willy’s tragedy to be his estrangement from the Jewish and Judaic heritage that might have provided some ballast as his working life, and with it his very identity, falls to ruin?
These are the sort of questions that defy provable answers. Miller himself changed his view of Willy over the decades, evolving from a fierce defense of his indeterminate identity to a perception of him as an untethered Jew. Literary critics, especially Jewish ones, have long argued the point among themselves. Leslie Fiedler dismissed Willy as the “crypto-Jewish” product of Miller’s “pseudo-universalizing,” while Julius Novick maintained that the Loman family’s “separation from the roots ... is what makes them so vulnerable to the false values that undo them.”
Miller grew up in a thoroughly Jewish milieu, recalling in his autobiography, Timebends, how he sat on his great-grandfather’s lap in synagogue and later had a bar mitzvah ceremony. His adult belief system, though, took the form of left-wing politics, and critiques of capitalism and the McCarthy era’s Red Scare ultimately informed many of his finest plays -- All My Sons, A View From the Bridge, The Crucible,
Salesman -- had indisputably Jewish origins. Miller based Willy Loman on his uncle Manny Newman, a salesman brought low by the Depression. He tried out earlier versions of the character in stories he wrote in his teens and 20s about salesmen with apparently Jewish surnames — Schoenzeit and Schleifer.
So the intriguing question remains why Willy, as finally written, offers so little evidence of heritage. Miller, in a 1969 interview, insisted that the character’s “religious or cultural background ... seems to me irrelevant.” The contemporary playwright Tony Kushner, who is editing Miller’s collected plays for the Library of America, suggested that for Jewish writers in the mid-20th century, “there wasn’t a sense of shame about being Jewish, but of reaching for something universal, and there was some sense that the immigrant experience and the ethnic specificity would limit it.”
Miller did write overtly Jewish characters, starting in his 1945 novel about anti-Semitism, Focus, and continuing through two plays about the Holocaust, Incident at Vichy (1964) and Broken Glass (1994). So the decision to leave Willy’s identity indistinct represented a thought-through choice, not a chronic ambivalence about Jewish content. Mr. Novick, for his part, called Salesman the sequel to Fiddler on the Roof -- the tragic culmination of the immigrant’s American dream. Harold Bloom, a scholar of both biblical and modern literature, posited that the play’s heartbreaking, embittered reunion of Willy and his alienated son Biff is an inversion of the Bible’s reuniting of Jacob and Joseph, which he called “the paradigm of Jewish family love.”
The playwright David Mamet, himself the grandson of a traveling salesman, said that the play’s tension “between hope, confusion, aspiration and circumstance” was itself “the voice of the second-generation American-Jewish writers.” Some critics have singled out Linda Loman’s famous speech about Willy -- “Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person” -- as having a distinctively Yiddish cadence.
Over time, Miller came around to acknowledging some Jewish specificity to the Lomans. In an essay published for the play’s 50th anniversary, in 1999, he described them as “Jews light-years away from religion or a community that might have fostered Jewish identity.” Thus sundered, they are left “on the sidewalk side of the glass looking in at the clean well-lighted place.” In the very absence of their Jewish identity, one might say, is its very presence.
The current production — widely lauded and nominated for seven Tony Awards — has been most notable for its fidelity to Miller’s original intent. It uses the set design and musical score from the original production, and it indelibly portrays Willy’s drift between present and past, between reality and memory and fantasy. Miller’s original title for the play, after all, was The Inside of His Head.
The producer Scott Rudin was interested enough, though, in the matter of the Loman family’s roots to assemble a research folder of critical and biographical essays grappling with the Jew-Everyman debate. “It’s so much a play about someone who wants to belong to the largest thing he can belong to — a fantasy of America,” Mr. Rudin said in a recent interview. “And he’s become deracinated from his background in the process.”
Mike Nichols, the director of the current revival, came to the United States as a Jewish refugee child from Nazi Germany. What he has seen in Willy is not the intensity of the immigrant generation of Jews, with its fervor for education, but the worship of materialism by the second generation, those disparaged in Yiddish as being “alrightniks.”
“Willy has no forebears,” Mr. Nichols said in an interview this month. “He’s not from any country. He has no holidays of any religion. So you have to assume Miller’s making a point. We who are struggling to sell enough have to drop everything — religion, nationality, family. There is nothing except, as Willy puts it, being known and being well-liked.”
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
Please take out the spaces.
Rich
Update 5-15-12
Hi,
Let's start with some news from South, from Liz King Giordano: The committee has chosen the following recipients for the Gibson and Tampio scholarships this year:
The Vince Tampio Memorial Scholarship – Eric Kleinertz
The Booker Gibson Scholarship Award – Michael Gallagher
Also, do you think Linda Kettering would like to present the awards again this year? The ceremony is June 6th, and if you’d like, I can reach out to her for you. Please let me know.
[Rich -- As I've already written Liz, and as I think I've already mentioned here, Linda Tobin Kettering has again nicely agreed to present the awards, which I'm sure we all appreciate. Also, I sent the checks today.]
Less happy news, a reflection from Eric Hilton: I was quite upset to receive the last reunion update and find that Ralph Renna had passed away. After my wife Gilda and I were married and returned from Spokane, Washington, I was asked to play guitar in a band that played wine and cheese houses. The singer in the band was Ralph Renna, my friend Doug’s brother.
Ralph and his wife Barbara started as just casual acquaintances of ours and became very close friends until Ralph left for California. I lost touch with both him and Doug until a few years ago when Doug contacted me. Still, I had no idea Ralph was sick, and after opening this newsletter, I am truly saddened to hear that he is gone.
Last year, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, though too small a growth to get a Gleason rating, and last month, I had a cyst removed from my mouth. Fortunately, no cancer there. So now, at the age of 65, I truly appreciate all our South High friends and all the people who have come into my life, and I try not to take anything for granted. As I've said before, I love getting the newsletters and hearing about old friends.
Really happy news, from Jerry Bittman: YIPPEE! Late last night, I became a grandfather for the first time. On Monday, May 7th, my daughter Katie and her husband Aaron had a daughter named Andrea Catherine. I'm thrilled to say that both mom and daughter are doing great. Now I need to teach Andrea to say, "Mets -- Yes! Yankees Suck!"
Also, last Thursday, my cousin Sandy Hackett brought his show to town. It's called The Rat Pack, it's played in Las Vegas for about six years, and is now on a two-year tour. Sandy did a great job producing and writing the show, and audience members went up to him afterwards and told him that he stole the show.
The music and jokes were great. Sandy is in negotiations to maybe bring it to Broadway, and he's writing a new play based on his father's life. It's titled My Buddy.
Sandy and I had an opportunity to spend time together the morning of the show and after the show. I mentioned that My Buddy had to include the poem that Buddy wrote when his daughter Ivy got married. I guarantee that any man who has a daughter will cry when hearing the poem.
A compliment and a canine correction from Joanne Shapiro Polner: Thank you, Paul DeMartino, for all the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans information.
Also, "Shepherd" -- with the second H and a second E instead of an A -- is the correct spelling of the dog breed that included Bullet. That's also the correct spelling for the occupation of a person who tends herds, most often, specifically, sheep.
[Rich -- I'm always happy to try to learn to spell. As Paul Hartman pointed out when I was in 11th grade, I couldn't spell then, and he didn't expect I'd ever learn.]
Andy Dolich mentions: The non-existent addition to our former house at 13 Forest Road has been named a non-extent historical monument. Thanks for making this happen.
Robert Fiveson writes: I get a phrase from this site every week and find it fascinating. It just occurred to me that other people might want to subscribe. It's free. apaw @ phrasefinder . co . uk (Remove the spaces please.)
Travel tips from Larry Rugen: For anyone thinking of a Florida vacation, here are some highlights and suggestions.
My wife and I just got back from 10-day southern Florida self-tour. What a wonderful state. Who knew? We started in Spring Hill because we had to close on a house and then went off to Cocoa Beach, where we stayed at the Hampton Inn. Nice room, great beach, and we saw the Kennedy Space Center.
Next was Key Largo with a lunch stop in Boca Raton. In Key Largo, we stayed in the Holiday Inn. Get a room poolside because it has semi-private outdoor seating by your room, and between the pools and the rooms are many palm trees and other tropical plants. This was the best hotel stay to date, and the Key Largo highlight can be seen at: pennekamppark . com There's great snorkeling here or a tour on a glass bottom boat out on the Coral Reef. Also, when at the park, take a kayak for an hour through the mangroves. There's much to see, and the bay and backwaters were peaceful and full of exotic birds.
Next day, we took the two-hour drive to Key West. Spectacular views with many places to pull off the road to take pictures or just to enjoy the water colors. Also, there are fine beaches along the drive, including Sombrero Beach, which has nice sand even a few palm trees to offer a bit of shade. Great eats in Key Largo. The Fish House was one restaurant, and we should have written down the name of the other. It will come to me in a few days, I hope.
Next stop was the west coast and Treasure Island. We stayed at the Marriott Residence Inn and had a large bedroom, a living room, a large kitchen, and two balconies. Get a room on the upper floors -- we were on 7 of 9 -- because the sunsets are spectacular. Out of John’s Pass -- known for its shopping and marina -- we took the Dolphin Tour and were not disappointed. We spotted 20 plus dolphins, a few with babies.
We stayed the last night in Spring Hill, and on the way from Treasure Island -- St. Pete's -- we stopped for a few hours in Tampa at the Florida Aquarium. It has a few really nice displays including the shark tanks. The best meal was at the Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City – Tampa. It's Cuban and dates from 1905. It has 17 dining rooms in a block-long building. The food was great. Many, many choices for lunch, and the restaurant is famous for its homemade sangria. Oh, yes, bring a camera. The art is out of this world, with tile murals all over the building. At 1 PM on a Wednesday, the place was packed.
Overall, a great vacation and easily recommended. We never thought Florida had all this and more. Also, one last thing: on the way from Key Largo to Treasure Island, we stopped in the Everglades at Sawgrass Park. There's a 2-hour tram tour, which is well worth the stop.
If anyone wants more detail, please feel free to write me at: Larry1800 @ aol . com (Again, take out the spaces.)
[Rich -- Finally, it was pointed out that a phrase I used in referring to Ralph Foster last week might more politely have been written as "really irritated." Unfortunately, I've spent most of my life around stagehands and carpenters, and I often speak like one. But I'll try to behave.]
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
Please take out the spaces.
Rich
Hi,
Let's start with some news from South, from Liz King Giordano: The committee has chosen the following recipients for the Gibson and Tampio scholarships this year:
The Vince Tampio Memorial Scholarship – Eric Kleinertz
The Booker Gibson Scholarship Award – Michael Gallagher
Also, do you think Linda Kettering would like to present the awards again this year? The ceremony is June 6th, and if you’d like, I can reach out to her for you. Please let me know.
[Rich -- As I've already written Liz, and as I think I've already mentioned here, Linda Tobin Kettering has again nicely agreed to present the awards, which I'm sure we all appreciate. Also, I sent the checks today.]
Less happy news, a reflection from Eric Hilton: I was quite upset to receive the last reunion update and find that Ralph Renna had passed away. After my wife Gilda and I were married and returned from Spokane, Washington, I was asked to play guitar in a band that played wine and cheese houses. The singer in the band was Ralph Renna, my friend Doug’s brother.
Ralph and his wife Barbara started as just casual acquaintances of ours and became very close friends until Ralph left for California. I lost touch with both him and Doug until a few years ago when Doug contacted me. Still, I had no idea Ralph was sick, and after opening this newsletter, I am truly saddened to hear that he is gone.
Last year, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, though too small a growth to get a Gleason rating, and last month, I had a cyst removed from my mouth. Fortunately, no cancer there. So now, at the age of 65, I truly appreciate all our South High friends and all the people who have come into my life, and I try not to take anything for granted. As I've said before, I love getting the newsletters and hearing about old friends.
Really happy news, from Jerry Bittman: YIPPEE! Late last night, I became a grandfather for the first time. On Monday, May 7th, my daughter Katie and her husband Aaron had a daughter named Andrea Catherine. I'm thrilled to say that both mom and daughter are doing great. Now I need to teach Andrea to say, "Mets -- Yes! Yankees Suck!"
Also, last Thursday, my cousin Sandy Hackett brought his show to town. It's called The Rat Pack, it's played in Las Vegas for about six years, and is now on a two-year tour. Sandy did a great job producing and writing the show, and audience members went up to him afterwards and told him that he stole the show.
The music and jokes were great. Sandy is in negotiations to maybe bring it to Broadway, and he's writing a new play based on his father's life. It's titled My Buddy.
Sandy and I had an opportunity to spend time together the morning of the show and after the show. I mentioned that My Buddy had to include the poem that Buddy wrote when his daughter Ivy got married. I guarantee that any man who has a daughter will cry when hearing the poem.
A compliment and a canine correction from Joanne Shapiro Polner: Thank you, Paul DeMartino, for all the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans information.
Also, "Shepherd" -- with the second H and a second E instead of an A -- is the correct spelling of the dog breed that included Bullet. That's also the correct spelling for the occupation of a person who tends herds, most often, specifically, sheep.
[Rich -- I'm always happy to try to learn to spell. As Paul Hartman pointed out when I was in 11th grade, I couldn't spell then, and he didn't expect I'd ever learn.]
Andy Dolich mentions: The non-existent addition to our former house at 13 Forest Road has been named a non-extent historical monument. Thanks for making this happen.
Robert Fiveson writes: I get a phrase from this site every week and find it fascinating. It just occurred to me that other people might want to subscribe. It's free. apaw @ phrasefinder . co . uk (Remove the spaces please.)
Travel tips from Larry Rugen: For anyone thinking of a Florida vacation, here are some highlights and suggestions.
My wife and I just got back from 10-day southern Florida self-tour. What a wonderful state. Who knew? We started in Spring Hill because we had to close on a house and then went off to Cocoa Beach, where we stayed at the Hampton Inn. Nice room, great beach, and we saw the Kennedy Space Center.
Next was Key Largo with a lunch stop in Boca Raton. In Key Largo, we stayed in the Holiday Inn. Get a room poolside because it has semi-private outdoor seating by your room, and between the pools and the rooms are many palm trees and other tropical plants. This was the best hotel stay to date, and the Key Largo highlight can be seen at: pennekamppark . com There's great snorkeling here or a tour on a glass bottom boat out on the Coral Reef. Also, when at the park, take a kayak for an hour through the mangroves. There's much to see, and the bay and backwaters were peaceful and full of exotic birds.
Next day, we took the two-hour drive to Key West. Spectacular views with many places to pull off the road to take pictures or just to enjoy the water colors. Also, there are fine beaches along the drive, including Sombrero Beach, which has nice sand even a few palm trees to offer a bit of shade. Great eats in Key Largo. The Fish House was one restaurant, and we should have written down the name of the other. It will come to me in a few days, I hope.
Next stop was the west coast and Treasure Island. We stayed at the Marriott Residence Inn and had a large bedroom, a living room, a large kitchen, and two balconies. Get a room on the upper floors -- we were on 7 of 9 -- because the sunsets are spectacular. Out of John’s Pass -- known for its shopping and marina -- we took the Dolphin Tour and were not disappointed. We spotted 20 plus dolphins, a few with babies.
We stayed the last night in Spring Hill, and on the way from Treasure Island -- St. Pete's -- we stopped for a few hours in Tampa at the Florida Aquarium. It has a few really nice displays including the shark tanks. The best meal was at the Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City – Tampa. It's Cuban and dates from 1905. It has 17 dining rooms in a block-long building. The food was great. Many, many choices for lunch, and the restaurant is famous for its homemade sangria. Oh, yes, bring a camera. The art is out of this world, with tile murals all over the building. At 1 PM on a Wednesday, the place was packed.
Overall, a great vacation and easily recommended. We never thought Florida had all this and more. Also, one last thing: on the way from Key Largo to Treasure Island, we stopped in the Everglades at Sawgrass Park. There's a 2-hour tram tour, which is well worth the stop.
If anyone wants more detail, please feel free to write me at: Larry1800 @ aol . com (Again, take out the spaces.)
[Rich -- Finally, it was pointed out that a phrase I used in referring to Ralph Foster last week might more politely have been written as "really irritated." Unfortunately, I've spent most of my life around stagehands and carpenters, and I often speak like one. But I'll try to behave.]
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
Please take out the spaces.
Rich
Update 5-8-12
Hi,
Some updates on some old news and then a piece of nostalgia.
First, about Ralph Renna:
From Claire Brush Reinhardt: I checked my 1960 yearbook, and Ralph Renna was indeed in that class.
From Danny Stellabotte: After learning today of the passing of Ralph Renna, I have some information to share. I do remember the name very well. My sister Barbara dated Ralph for some time. My sister and Ralph were in the same graduating class, the class of 1960.
From Bernie O'Brien: Ralph was in the class of '60. He was a hardworking and very respectful young man who didn't have a lot of athletic ability but really put forth the effort.
[Rich -- If that's what generous Bernie thought of hardworking Ralph Renna, I can only imagine what he thought of me: Hated sports. Couldn't climb a rope. Wouldn't even try to catch a medicine ball if it was handed to him. But, somehow, I had three junior high letters for managing two of Ralph Foster's teams. Would've had four, but Ralph finally pissed me off.]
Next, about that room that was supposedly over the garage of Andy Dolich's childhood house:
From Jerry Bittman: I was in the Dolich house a zillion times, and I don't recall an upstairs extension. But, then again, at my age, I can't recall many things. Is this the same South High School I went to in Evansville, Indiana?
From Stu Marshall: Really???
Rich, writing to Jerry, Stu, Andy and Barbara Blitfield Pech: All right then. I just looked at a satellite picture of Andy's old house, and you're all obviously right -- there's no room above the garage. Wow. I wonder whose house I'm thinking about? Maybe 3 Forest Road, but from the satellite picture of that house, it has a whole different kind of extension. I wonder if they remodeled it. Nah, that's not even worth thinking about. Back to 2012.
From Barbara: Whew -- one memory validation down. Now, onto the other 40,000 things that I only think are right. Let's start with that I believe it might have been the Kiviats' house at 5 Forest that had the cross-the-roof extension. Then again...
[Rich -- Yep, it did and still does. The Kiviats added a full second floor.]
From Andy: What the satellite photos of my old house didn't capture was the underground LSD lab, the wine cellar, and the basketball court. Looks can be deceiving.
From Barbara: And they're all cleverly disguised as a fallout shelter.
From Jerry: Or maybe the Dolichs did build an extension, and the new owners tore it down. This concept will permit Rich to keep his sanity.
[Rich: Sanity? I can't even find my reading glasses.]
Finally, the nostalgia, forwarded by Paul DeMartino: The Roy Rogers Museum in Branson, Missouri, has closed its doors forever. It was previously in Victorville, California, near Roy and Dale's ranch, but it moved after Roy and Dale died.
The contents of the museum were sold at a public auction because Roy had told his son that if the museum ever started operating at a loss to close it and sell the contents. When it recently did, his son complied.
Here's a partial listing of some of the items that were sold:
Roy's 1964 Pontiac Bonneville sold for $254,500. It had been estimated to sell for between $100,000 and $150,000.
Trigger's saddle and bridle sold for $386,500. The estimate, again, had been between $100,000 and $150,000.
One of Roy's many shirts sold for $16,250, and one of his many cowboy hats sold for $17,500.
One set of Roy's boot spurs sold for $10,625. Reportedly, he never used a set of spurs on Trigger
Pat Brady's Jeep, Nellybelle, sold for $116,500. And don't go confusing Pat Brady with Pat Buttram. Buttram was Gene Autry's sidekick.
Dale's horse, Buttermilk -- stuffed -- sold below the estimate of $30,000 to $40,000 and only brought in $25,000.
In contrast, Dale's parade saddle, estimated to sell between $20,000 and $30,000, sold for $104,500.
Bullet, Roy and Dale's German Shepard -- also stuffed -- sold for $35,000, well above the $10,000 to $15,000 estimate. Bullet was Roy and Dale's real pet.
And Trigger -- famously stuffed -- sold for $266,500. A side note: in the 1938 movie The Adventures of Robin Hood, which starred Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, de Havilland rode Trigger. He had been bred on a farm co-owned by Bing Crosby, and Roy bought Trigger on a time payment plan for $2,500. Roy and Trigger made 188 movies together, and Trigger even outdid Bob Hope by winning an Oscar in the 1953 movie Son of Paleface.
Happy Trails, of course.
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
Please take out the spaces.
Rich
Hi,
Some updates on some old news and then a piece of nostalgia.
First, about Ralph Renna:
From Claire Brush Reinhardt: I checked my 1960 yearbook, and Ralph Renna was indeed in that class.
From Danny Stellabotte: After learning today of the passing of Ralph Renna, I have some information to share. I do remember the name very well. My sister Barbara dated Ralph for some time. My sister and Ralph were in the same graduating class, the class of 1960.
From Bernie O'Brien: Ralph was in the class of '60. He was a hardworking and very respectful young man who didn't have a lot of athletic ability but really put forth the effort.
[Rich -- If that's what generous Bernie thought of hardworking Ralph Renna, I can only imagine what he thought of me: Hated sports. Couldn't climb a rope. Wouldn't even try to catch a medicine ball if it was handed to him. But, somehow, I had three junior high letters for managing two of Ralph Foster's teams. Would've had four, but Ralph finally pissed me off.]
Next, about that room that was supposedly over the garage of Andy Dolich's childhood house:
From Jerry Bittman: I was in the Dolich house a zillion times, and I don't recall an upstairs extension. But, then again, at my age, I can't recall many things. Is this the same South High School I went to in Evansville, Indiana?
From Stu Marshall: Really???
Rich, writing to Jerry, Stu, Andy and Barbara Blitfield Pech: All right then. I just looked at a satellite picture of Andy's old house, and you're all obviously right -- there's no room above the garage. Wow. I wonder whose house I'm thinking about? Maybe 3 Forest Road, but from the satellite picture of that house, it has a whole different kind of extension. I wonder if they remodeled it. Nah, that's not even worth thinking about. Back to 2012.
From Barbara: Whew -- one memory validation down. Now, onto the other 40,000 things that I only think are right. Let's start with that I believe it might have been the Kiviats' house at 5 Forest that had the cross-the-roof extension. Then again...
[Rich -- Yep, it did and still does. The Kiviats added a full second floor.]
From Andy: What the satellite photos of my old house didn't capture was the underground LSD lab, the wine cellar, and the basketball court. Looks can be deceiving.
From Barbara: And they're all cleverly disguised as a fallout shelter.
From Jerry: Or maybe the Dolichs did build an extension, and the new owners tore it down. This concept will permit Rich to keep his sanity.
[Rich: Sanity? I can't even find my reading glasses.]
Finally, the nostalgia, forwarded by Paul DeMartino: The Roy Rogers Museum in Branson, Missouri, has closed its doors forever. It was previously in Victorville, California, near Roy and Dale's ranch, but it moved after Roy and Dale died.
The contents of the museum were sold at a public auction because Roy had told his son that if the museum ever started operating at a loss to close it and sell the contents. When it recently did, his son complied.
Here's a partial listing of some of the items that were sold:
Roy's 1964 Pontiac Bonneville sold for $254,500. It had been estimated to sell for between $100,000 and $150,000.
Trigger's saddle and bridle sold for $386,500. The estimate, again, had been between $100,000 and $150,000.
One of Roy's many shirts sold for $16,250, and one of his many cowboy hats sold for $17,500.
One set of Roy's boot spurs sold for $10,625. Reportedly, he never used a set of spurs on Trigger
Pat Brady's Jeep, Nellybelle, sold for $116,500. And don't go confusing Pat Brady with Pat Buttram. Buttram was Gene Autry's sidekick.
Dale's horse, Buttermilk -- stuffed -- sold below the estimate of $30,000 to $40,000 and only brought in $25,000.
In contrast, Dale's parade saddle, estimated to sell between $20,000 and $30,000, sold for $104,500.
Bullet, Roy and Dale's German Shepard -- also stuffed -- sold for $35,000, well above the $10,000 to $15,000 estimate. Bullet was Roy and Dale's real pet.
And Trigger -- famously stuffed -- sold for $266,500. A side note: in the 1938 movie The Adventures of Robin Hood, which starred Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, de Havilland rode Trigger. He had been bred on a farm co-owned by Bing Crosby, and Roy bought Trigger on a time payment plan for $2,500. Roy and Trigger made 188 movies together, and Trigger even outdid Bob Hope by winning an Oscar in the 1953 movie Son of Paleface.
Happy Trails, of course.
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
Please take out the spaces.
Rich
Update 5-1-12
Hi,
As usual, sad news first -- from Evelyn Roedel Read, '59: It is with heartfelt sympathy for his family that I bring you the news of the passing of Ralph D. Renna, class of 1960, on April 6th, 2012. Ralph was a resident of Middletown, New York. He is survived by his two sons and his four grandchildren.
Evelyn added: At least, one of his sons believes his father was in the class of 1960. Perhaps you could check with people who read the newsletter. Thanks.
[Rich-- Obviously, I'm doing that. But first, I wrote our alumni authority Emily Kleinman Schreiber and asked: Was Ralph Renna in your class, '61, or in the class of '60?
Emily wrote back: I don't recall any Ralph in my class, but I'll take a look in my yearbook, and I'll send messages to my contacts in the class of '60 and to people in my class as well.
[Rich -- While waiting to hear back from Emily's contacts, if anyone else knew Ralph Renna and knew what class he was in, please tell us.]
Next, something Barbara Blitfield and I have been casually discussing. It started with her comparison between the flat-roofed extra room built over the garage of the house she used to live in on Jasmine Lane and a similar extension built on the house my mother still lives in on Forest Road.
Barbara described her upstairs room as being used as her dad's law office and having dark, knotty pine walls and small, odd-shaped windows.
I wrote back: No, it sounds like a slightly different set-up. The extension on my mother's house is actually two rooms, with a set of open stairs with a wrought iron railing leading from the living room where the guest clothes closet used to be. That set of stairs leads to a landing. To the right on the landing is the door to the main bedroom. Straight ahead on the landing is a normal sized-window and there's another window the same size to the left. We have open shelves, floor-to-ceiling, on both those walls for books, but the light from the windows comes around the books and shelves.
Also leading from the landing is a second set of steps, in the opposite direction from the first. They lead to a smaller bedroom, 6 by 9, with a gabled ceiling, a single normal-sized window, but no closet. That was the guest room until my sister decided she wanted it when our younger brothers needed separate bedrooms. When I went to college, my sister took the main bedroom upstairs, and I moved my stuff to the guest room. When she went to college, she got to keep the room because my parents didn't want my younger brothers -- the older was already 10 -- away from them.
I was 12 when my parents built the main bedroom upstairs for me. That was 1959, soon after the first of my brothers was born. The rooms were modeled on an extension built on Beverly and Harold Berger's house, on one of the Elderberry Lanes. The same company built both extensions, but they messed up Beverly and Harold's and had to go back and raise the ceiling above the second set of steps. If I remember correctly, the small room in their house was Harold's at-home law office.
The main bedroom in both extensions has a lot of light -- the whole front wall is windows, and there's another pair of windows on the adjoining outside wall. No knotty pine, just white walls. That room's about 9 by 12, and there's a small bathroom with just a sink and toilet, and a walk-in closet about the same size. Each is maybe 4 by 4.. The attic entry is a 3 by 4 door partway up the back wall in the closet.
Now the extension on Andy Dolich's old house has a flat roof, and I think is only one room, just over the garage. You used to get to it from a narrow stairway in the kitchen, immediately to your left when you enter from the dining room. That stairway replaced some cabinets. I don't know if the layout is still the same. That kitchen may long ago have been enlarged.
Barbara wrote back: Wow. Exterior looks were certainly deceiving. And the wrought iron railing was something I may have overlooked in my earlier description. But we only had a two-step entry and curlicue double wrought iron posts on each side
As I mentioned, the room was initially my dad's office and had just about the same timeline your sister had with her room switch. I brazenly moved all my dad's office furniture downstairs to my soon-to-be-former bedroom -- the first one off the living room -- and took the room for my own. While this was an act of sheer guts on my part, somehow my dad turned the other cheek and not only didn't kill me, he now met his law clients in a lavender room. It stayed that color until he sold the house in 1973, and my family moved to North Woodmere..
Also, my parents were good friends of Yetta and Mac Dolich, and I was in their house many times. But I don't remember an upstairs extension. Any idea when they added it?
I wrote back: I don't remember the Dolichs adding their upstairs room, so it may have been there when my family moved to Green Acres in 1953. Maybe Andy remembers.
Also, I suspect a number of younger sisters and brothers moved to somewhat more desirable rooms after their older sisters and brothers moved out. I guess some of it depended on how many kids were in the family.
[Rich -- And I still need to write about my bike riding, and it should have been this week, since we just got back from three days in Davis, California, a university town well-known for almost everyone riding bikes. They even have a bike museum. But another time.]
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
Please take out the spaces.
Rich
Hi,
As usual, sad news first -- from Evelyn Roedel Read, '59: It is with heartfelt sympathy for his family that I bring you the news of the passing of Ralph D. Renna, class of 1960, on April 6th, 2012. Ralph was a resident of Middletown, New York. He is survived by his two sons and his four grandchildren.
Evelyn added: At least, one of his sons believes his father was in the class of 1960. Perhaps you could check with people who read the newsletter. Thanks.
[Rich-- Obviously, I'm doing that. But first, I wrote our alumni authority Emily Kleinman Schreiber and asked: Was Ralph Renna in your class, '61, or in the class of '60?
Emily wrote back: I don't recall any Ralph in my class, but I'll take a look in my yearbook, and I'll send messages to my contacts in the class of '60 and to people in my class as well.
[Rich -- While waiting to hear back from Emily's contacts, if anyone else knew Ralph Renna and knew what class he was in, please tell us.]
Next, something Barbara Blitfield and I have been casually discussing. It started with her comparison between the flat-roofed extra room built over the garage of the house she used to live in on Jasmine Lane and a similar extension built on the house my mother still lives in on Forest Road.
Barbara described her upstairs room as being used as her dad's law office and having dark, knotty pine walls and small, odd-shaped windows.
I wrote back: No, it sounds like a slightly different set-up. The extension on my mother's house is actually two rooms, with a set of open stairs with a wrought iron railing leading from the living room where the guest clothes closet used to be. That set of stairs leads to a landing. To the right on the landing is the door to the main bedroom. Straight ahead on the landing is a normal sized-window and there's another window the same size to the left. We have open shelves, floor-to-ceiling, on both those walls for books, but the light from the windows comes around the books and shelves.
Also leading from the landing is a second set of steps, in the opposite direction from the first. They lead to a smaller bedroom, 6 by 9, with a gabled ceiling, a single normal-sized window, but no closet. That was the guest room until my sister decided she wanted it when our younger brothers needed separate bedrooms. When I went to college, my sister took the main bedroom upstairs, and I moved my stuff to the guest room. When she went to college, she got to keep the room because my parents didn't want my younger brothers -- the older was already 10 -- away from them.
I was 12 when my parents built the main bedroom upstairs for me. That was 1959, soon after the first of my brothers was born. The rooms were modeled on an extension built on Beverly and Harold Berger's house, on one of the Elderberry Lanes. The same company built both extensions, but they messed up Beverly and Harold's and had to go back and raise the ceiling above the second set of steps. If I remember correctly, the small room in their house was Harold's at-home law office.
The main bedroom in both extensions has a lot of light -- the whole front wall is windows, and there's another pair of windows on the adjoining outside wall. No knotty pine, just white walls. That room's about 9 by 12, and there's a small bathroom with just a sink and toilet, and a walk-in closet about the same size. Each is maybe 4 by 4.. The attic entry is a 3 by 4 door partway up the back wall in the closet.
Now the extension on Andy Dolich's old house has a flat roof, and I think is only one room, just over the garage. You used to get to it from a narrow stairway in the kitchen, immediately to your left when you enter from the dining room. That stairway replaced some cabinets. I don't know if the layout is still the same. That kitchen may long ago have been enlarged.
Barbara wrote back: Wow. Exterior looks were certainly deceiving. And the wrought iron railing was something I may have overlooked in my earlier description. But we only had a two-step entry and curlicue double wrought iron posts on each side
As I mentioned, the room was initially my dad's office and had just about the same timeline your sister had with her room switch. I brazenly moved all my dad's office furniture downstairs to my soon-to-be-former bedroom -- the first one off the living room -- and took the room for my own. While this was an act of sheer guts on my part, somehow my dad turned the other cheek and not only didn't kill me, he now met his law clients in a lavender room. It stayed that color until he sold the house in 1973, and my family moved to North Woodmere..
Also, my parents were good friends of Yetta and Mac Dolich, and I was in their house many times. But I don't remember an upstairs extension. Any idea when they added it?
I wrote back: I don't remember the Dolichs adding their upstairs room, so it may have been there when my family moved to Green Acres in 1953. Maybe Andy remembers.
Also, I suspect a number of younger sisters and brothers moved to somewhat more desirable rooms after their older sisters and brothers moved out. I guess some of it depended on how many kids were in the family.
[Rich -- And I still need to write about my bike riding, and it should have been this week, since we just got back from three days in Davis, California, a university town well-known for almost everyone riding bikes. They even have a bike museum. But another time.]
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
Please take out the spaces.
Rich
Saturday, June 16, 2018
Update 4-24-12
Hi,
Yep, sadly, Dick Clark died, at merely eighty-two. He wasn't exactly Mike Wallace, but maybe he was better for it.
Next, lots of business: a Los Angeles fundraising reminder, some e-mail address changes, and some pet warnings. Once you get through all that, some thoughts about senior discounts.
First, from Paulinda Schimmel by way of Facebook: Happily Ever Laughter, the second annual fundraiser for the Ovarian Cancer Circle -- which was inspired by Paulinda's late daughter Robin Babbini -- will be held at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles at 7:00 PM on Thursday, April 26th.
It stars the comedian and actor Sinbad and features Troy Rawlins, Bobbie Oliver, Vargus Mason, and Darren Carter. The event will be hosted by Jeanette Rizzi and includes "food, drinks, and an amazing silent auction." Paulinda notes that "Tickets are going fast." For more information, go to: theovariancancercircle . org
Next, the address changes. As with the address just above, please remove the spaces:
For Donna Chirico Mungo: dmnjm55 @ verizon . net
For Ira Mitzner (and Rachael Robinson Mitzner): mitzneri @ dicksteinshapiro . com
For Eve Londner: elondner @ revner . co . uk
Some pet warnings, forwarded by Zelda White Nichols from her friend Lori Stowe, who compiled them:
1. Planning on mulching your yard? Cocoa Shell Garden Mulch smells really good. However, it can be highly lethal if your dog or cat decides it tastes as good as it smells. The issue is Theobromine, and the bags do not carry a warning.
2. If your pets love to play with tennis balls, please do not use the Tretorn X balls. Evidently, they contain an inert substance which presumably helps them bounce. However, when the pet pops open the tennis ball while chewing, the substance makes a terrible gooey mess in its mouth and presents an aspiration hazard.
3. Dog food problems: Avoid Kirkland canned lamb and rice dog food with an expiration date of 2013. Apparently, there have been some issues and dog deaths with this food.
A quote from Will Rogers, lifted from Lori Stowe's e-mail: If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.
Next, forwarded by Barbara Blitfield Pech: As someone I know was waiting in line behind an older gentleman at Wendy's recently, she heard him ask for his senior discount. The girl at the register apologized and charged him less. When my friend asked the man what the discount was, he told her that seniors over fifty-five gets ten percent off everything on the menu, every day.
Being within this age group herself, my friend figured she might as well ask for the discount, too. As she waited for her turn, she thought about the consequences of doing so: If the cashier asked her for ID, it could be embarrassing, having to show her license. But if the cashier didn't ask for proof, she would get depressed that she really did look "old" and didn't need to prove it. Since she always like to save money -- and don't we all -- she boldly asked for the discount. Sadly, the cashier just rang up the discount, even though my friend is convinced she doesn't look a day over fifty-four.
Anyway, this incident prompted me to do some research, and I came across a list of restaurants, supermarkets, department stores, travel deals, and other types of offers which give various discounts with different age requirements. I was actually surprised to see how many there are and how some of them start at the young age of fifty. For example, Dunkin' Donuts gives free coffee to people over fifty-five. Of course, you have to buy a donut first. But if you're paying for a cup of coffee every day, you might want to start getting it for free. (Following is a list of seventy-five-or-so restaurants, clothes stores, supermarkets, hotels, motels, movie theaters, and uncategorized places like AT&T and Home Depot. The point is, if you even suspect there's a discount -- and these range from five to twenty percent -- just ask.)
[Rich -- A pair of Kiviat corrections from several weeks ago: The older brother Eric and his wife live in San Diego, not San Francisco. The middle brother Doug's wife's name is Jane, not Julie. I had it right earlier, and then I got it wrong.]
[Rich -- An unrelated, random piece of information: Years, ago, there was a Spencer Tracy / Katharine Hepburn movie called The Desk Set. It concerned a researcher, Hepburn, whose job was about to be replaced by a computer program designed by the character played by Spencer Tracy. Yesterday, The New York Times ran an article titled "Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously." In it, I discovered that a computer program can do all the work I do annually in one of my pleasant retirement jobs in under forty seconds. If you'd like to read the article, go to the Times site and search on the article name.]
Finally, belaboring a joke, on ValleyStreamTimes . com , the Holy Name of Mary students are still being honored from October 11th. That reminds me that I just saw a brilliant production of Waiting For Godot.
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
(Yep, take out the spaces.)
Rich
Hi,
Yep, sadly, Dick Clark died, at merely eighty-two. He wasn't exactly Mike Wallace, but maybe he was better for it.
Next, lots of business: a Los Angeles fundraising reminder, some e-mail address changes, and some pet warnings. Once you get through all that, some thoughts about senior discounts.
First, from Paulinda Schimmel by way of Facebook: Happily Ever Laughter, the second annual fundraiser for the Ovarian Cancer Circle -- which was inspired by Paulinda's late daughter Robin Babbini -- will be held at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles at 7:00 PM on Thursday, April 26th.
It stars the comedian and actor Sinbad and features Troy Rawlins, Bobbie Oliver, Vargus Mason, and Darren Carter. The event will be hosted by Jeanette Rizzi and includes "food, drinks, and an amazing silent auction." Paulinda notes that "Tickets are going fast." For more information, go to: theovariancancercircle . org
Next, the address changes. As with the address just above, please remove the spaces:
For Donna Chirico Mungo: dmnjm55 @ verizon . net
For Ira Mitzner (and Rachael Robinson Mitzner): mitzneri @ dicksteinshapiro . com
For Eve Londner: elondner @ revner . co . uk
Some pet warnings, forwarded by Zelda White Nichols from her friend Lori Stowe, who compiled them:
1. Planning on mulching your yard? Cocoa Shell Garden Mulch smells really good. However, it can be highly lethal if your dog or cat decides it tastes as good as it smells. The issue is Theobromine, and the bags do not carry a warning.
2. If your pets love to play with tennis balls, please do not use the Tretorn X balls. Evidently, they contain an inert substance which presumably helps them bounce. However, when the pet pops open the tennis ball while chewing, the substance makes a terrible gooey mess in its mouth and presents an aspiration hazard.
3. Dog food problems: Avoid Kirkland canned lamb and rice dog food with an expiration date of 2013. Apparently, there have been some issues and dog deaths with this food.
A quote from Will Rogers, lifted from Lori Stowe's e-mail: If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.
Next, forwarded by Barbara Blitfield Pech: As someone I know was waiting in line behind an older gentleman at Wendy's recently, she heard him ask for his senior discount. The girl at the register apologized and charged him less. When my friend asked the man what the discount was, he told her that seniors over fifty-five gets ten percent off everything on the menu, every day.
Being within this age group herself, my friend figured she might as well ask for the discount, too. As she waited for her turn, she thought about the consequences of doing so: If the cashier asked her for ID, it could be embarrassing, having to show her license. But if the cashier didn't ask for proof, she would get depressed that she really did look "old" and didn't need to prove it. Since she always like to save money -- and don't we all -- she boldly asked for the discount. Sadly, the cashier just rang up the discount, even though my friend is convinced she doesn't look a day over fifty-four.
Anyway, this incident prompted me to do some research, and I came across a list of restaurants, supermarkets, department stores, travel deals, and other types of offers which give various discounts with different age requirements. I was actually surprised to see how many there are and how some of them start at the young age of fifty. For example, Dunkin' Donuts gives free coffee to people over fifty-five. Of course, you have to buy a donut first. But if you're paying for a cup of coffee every day, you might want to start getting it for free. (Following is a list of seventy-five-or-so restaurants, clothes stores, supermarkets, hotels, motels, movie theaters, and uncategorized places like AT&T and Home Depot. The point is, if you even suspect there's a discount -- and these range from five to twenty percent -- just ask.)
[Rich -- A pair of Kiviat corrections from several weeks ago: The older brother Eric and his wife live in San Diego, not San Francisco. The middle brother Doug's wife's name is Jane, not Julie. I had it right earlier, and then I got it wrong.]
[Rich -- An unrelated, random piece of information: Years, ago, there was a Spencer Tracy / Katharine Hepburn movie called The Desk Set. It concerned a researcher, Hepburn, whose job was about to be replaced by a computer program designed by the character played by Spencer Tracy. Yesterday, The New York Times ran an article titled "Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously." In it, I discovered that a computer program can do all the work I do annually in one of my pleasant retirement jobs in under forty seconds. If you'd like to read the article, go to the Times site and search on the article name.]
Finally, belaboring a joke, on ValleyStreamTimes . com , the Holy Name of Mary students are still being honored from October 11th. That reminds me that I just saw a brilliant production of Waiting For Godot.
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
(Yep, take out the spaces.)
Rich
Update 4-17-12
Hi,
Couple of bike stories, a map mention, some thoughts about an old friend, another memory of Rose Agree, a newspaper story, and a dog tale.
First, from Zelda White Nichols: I lived on my bike, a one-speed and definitely not a Schwinn, but maybe a Raleigh of now unremembered color. Ira Levy and Allen Moss were bike pals, and I remember riding the streets of our neighborhood with them as well as with a few others. I have always remembered being chased one day in a game of bike tag and crashing my bike. Both my knees and my elbows were skinned, but I got right back on my bike and took off again.
Flash forward to 1993, where I still loved cycling but now had a 21-speed and was training for a Century Ride -- 100 miles -- with my husband. Once again, I crashed, this time rounding a curve at the bottom of a hill doing 35 miles per hour. But it ended my cycling days. Amazing, how resilient we were as kids that we just dusted ourselves off after some really bad injuries. Compare that to now being sidelined by age. One shattered leg and damage that couldn’t be repaired presently have me sitting in a bass boat on a North Carolina lake all day instead of riding a bike. My neurologist loves me because I sit in his office a lot, too, paying his mortgage.
Next, from Amy Miller: Bikes -- very, very significant to me. In January, I bought an outdoor recumbent tricycle, which is comfy and brings back all the memories of the bikes of my childhood. My dad was an accountant for a Raleigh and Rudge dealership in Brooklyn, so our garage slowly filled with a variety of three- speed bikes.
Two bike memories: There was a wonderful bike path in Green Acres, coming into a playground, which was mainly hard cement with a metal jungle gym. The path was parallel to Flower Road. If you were entering the community at the front entrance going towards Forest Road, the bike path would be on your right, but tucked away in between those dead end, older streets. Riding to the Old Section gave a great sense of freedom. I still have the Scrabble set brought to me by Jeffrey Vogel -- who lived on Crestwood Lane -- after an accident I had riding on the back of his bike. We were on our way, I think, to a Halloween Party at Nancy King's house, and my foot got caught in the spokes. Nancy's father, I think, was a piano teacher, and they lived on Brook Road.
And on Great Old Maps: as I've mentioned before there is a wonderful map of the area that became and was surrounded Peninsula Boulevard in a lovely book, The Lord's Woods, by Robert Arbib. The map includes Mill Road, Rosedale Road and all the wonderful geographical features of the woods many of which disappeared as the land was filled in and many of us moved into the beginning of what became developed suburbia.
From Ryki Zuckerman: Although she was a year ahead of me, I was good friends with Gerri Kaplan. I think she was only in her early thirties when she was, if i recall correctly -- i have a bad memory -- killed by a drunk driver in California. There is a candid photo of Gerri, or someone who looks like her, in a book about west coast craftspeople/artisans, circa the 1960s -'70s. The book includes Laura Birch, but it's probably out of print. I came across a copy of it in the '70's, and its title might be Native Funk and Flash.
As of several years ago, Gerri's mom, a retired teacher, still lived in their Green Acres home. Her mom and mine had been pretty good friends in Valley Stream, and they reconnected again a few years ago, before my mother passed away.
I also have fond memories of Rose Agree. Like Judy Hartstone, I volunteered and helped in the Forest Road School library. I remember that Mrs. Agree took some of us -- maybe Gail Gordon and two or three others -- on her own time, perhaps a Saturday, to Manhattan, to the 42nd Street Library. It was quite a thrill. By the way, I was very glad to find out that she was not the porn star who shared her name.
[Rich -- I was one of the people who contacted Gerri Kaplan's mother in the summer of 2001. When I heard Gerri had possibly died, I was kind of stunned that I'd never see her again because I'd been looking forward to that. And someone in the class, possibly Paul DeMartino, had called Gerri's mother and been put off because talking about Gerri was extremely painful for her. But we still only had a rumor that Gerri had died, and since I was an old friend of hers, I thought her mother might remember me. When I called, I got the unfortunate confirmation Gerri had died, but nothing else. It was a short, uncomfortable conversation, and Mrs. Kaplan didn't remember me at all. So I don't know how accurate the information is about Gerri dying in a car crash, killed by a drunk drive in California. And the other piece is she was coming home typically late after a music gig in a bar.]
In happier news, Alan Finder is off the Times foreign desk as an editor and back to writing for the paper. His latest piece can be read at: nytimes . com/2012/04/12/technology/personaltech/e-books-are-easier-to-borrow-just-be-prepared-to-wait . html?scp=2&sq=alan%20finder&st=cse (remove the spaces, of course)
Here's the opening:
E-Book Borrowing, Preceded by E-book Waiting
By Alan Finder, The New York Times, April 11, 2012
As a technical matter, it’s remarkably easy to borrow an e-book from your local library. But not if you want to take out the best-selling biography of Steven P. Jobs, the hero of the Internet age who helped lure tens of millions of people to personal computers, tablets and other digital devices.
The publisher of the Jobs biography, Simon & Schuster, does not sell digital books to libraries. Five of the six major publishers of trade books either refuse to make new e-books available to libraries or have pulled back significantly over the last year on how easily or how often those books can be circulated. And complaints are rampant about lengthy waiting lists for best sellers and other popular e-books from the publishers that are willing to sell to libraries.
Want to borrow “The Help,” the novel by Kathryn Stockett? On New Jersey’s state e-book consortium, 375 people were waiting for a copy recently. At the New York Public Library’s Web site, 193 members had put a hold on a digital edition of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, which begins with “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”
How about the immensely popular novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” by E. L. James? Thirty-three people were waiting for the e-book on the Seattle Public Library’s site.
“We hear a lot of frustration,” said Christopher Platt, the director of collections and circulation operations at the New York Public Library. “It’s rational. We don’t expect our readers to understand the complexities of the publishing industry.”
Finally, absolutely frivolous news: our younger dog Rocky, who's two-years-old, has fallen in love with the new, eleven-week-old dog next door. We keep telling Rocky that the new dog is underage, not neutered, that he is neutered, and that she hasn't had her shots, but it's no use. Yesterday, he lay out in the rain, in the mud, with his nose poking through the chain link fence, just trying for a chance to see her. Last night, he slept in the living room, so he could be closer to the back yard and his dog door, just in case she barked. The day before, he effected an animal alert, when she tried to crawl under the gate and got caught by her neck. I had to go our and slide her free. Today, I talked with our neighbor, to find out if he's keeping the dog and if he's named her. He's probably keeping her and her name's Misty. It's going to be a long summer.
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
Yep, take out the spaces.
Rich
Hi,
Couple of bike stories, a map mention, some thoughts about an old friend, another memory of Rose Agree, a newspaper story, and a dog tale.
First, from Zelda White Nichols: I lived on my bike, a one-speed and definitely not a Schwinn, but maybe a Raleigh of now unremembered color. Ira Levy and Allen Moss were bike pals, and I remember riding the streets of our neighborhood with them as well as with a few others. I have always remembered being chased one day in a game of bike tag and crashing my bike. Both my knees and my elbows were skinned, but I got right back on my bike and took off again.
Flash forward to 1993, where I still loved cycling but now had a 21-speed and was training for a Century Ride -- 100 miles -- with my husband. Once again, I crashed, this time rounding a curve at the bottom of a hill doing 35 miles per hour. But it ended my cycling days. Amazing, how resilient we were as kids that we just dusted ourselves off after some really bad injuries. Compare that to now being sidelined by age. One shattered leg and damage that couldn’t be repaired presently have me sitting in a bass boat on a North Carolina lake all day instead of riding a bike. My neurologist loves me because I sit in his office a lot, too, paying his mortgage.
Next, from Amy Miller: Bikes -- very, very significant to me. In January, I bought an outdoor recumbent tricycle, which is comfy and brings back all the memories of the bikes of my childhood. My dad was an accountant for a Raleigh and Rudge dealership in Brooklyn, so our garage slowly filled with a variety of three- speed bikes.
Two bike memories: There was a wonderful bike path in Green Acres, coming into a playground, which was mainly hard cement with a metal jungle gym. The path was parallel to Flower Road. If you were entering the community at the front entrance going towards Forest Road, the bike path would be on your right, but tucked away in between those dead end, older streets. Riding to the Old Section gave a great sense of freedom. I still have the Scrabble set brought to me by Jeffrey Vogel -- who lived on Crestwood Lane -- after an accident I had riding on the back of his bike. We were on our way, I think, to a Halloween Party at Nancy King's house, and my foot got caught in the spokes. Nancy's father, I think, was a piano teacher, and they lived on Brook Road.
And on Great Old Maps: as I've mentioned before there is a wonderful map of the area that became and was surrounded Peninsula Boulevard in a lovely book, The Lord's Woods, by Robert Arbib. The map includes Mill Road, Rosedale Road and all the wonderful geographical features of the woods many of which disappeared as the land was filled in and many of us moved into the beginning of what became developed suburbia.
From Ryki Zuckerman: Although she was a year ahead of me, I was good friends with Gerri Kaplan. I think she was only in her early thirties when she was, if i recall correctly -- i have a bad memory -- killed by a drunk driver in California. There is a candid photo of Gerri, or someone who looks like her, in a book about west coast craftspeople/artisans, circa the 1960s -'70s. The book includes Laura Birch, but it's probably out of print. I came across a copy of it in the '70's, and its title might be Native Funk and Flash.
As of several years ago, Gerri's mom, a retired teacher, still lived in their Green Acres home. Her mom and mine had been pretty good friends in Valley Stream, and they reconnected again a few years ago, before my mother passed away.
I also have fond memories of Rose Agree. Like Judy Hartstone, I volunteered and helped in the Forest Road School library. I remember that Mrs. Agree took some of us -- maybe Gail Gordon and two or three others -- on her own time, perhaps a Saturday, to Manhattan, to the 42nd Street Library. It was quite a thrill. By the way, I was very glad to find out that she was not the porn star who shared her name.
[Rich -- I was one of the people who contacted Gerri Kaplan's mother in the summer of 2001. When I heard Gerri had possibly died, I was kind of stunned that I'd never see her again because I'd been looking forward to that. And someone in the class, possibly Paul DeMartino, had called Gerri's mother and been put off because talking about Gerri was extremely painful for her. But we still only had a rumor that Gerri had died, and since I was an old friend of hers, I thought her mother might remember me. When I called, I got the unfortunate confirmation Gerri had died, but nothing else. It was a short, uncomfortable conversation, and Mrs. Kaplan didn't remember me at all. So I don't know how accurate the information is about Gerri dying in a car crash, killed by a drunk drive in California. And the other piece is she was coming home typically late after a music gig in a bar.]
In happier news, Alan Finder is off the Times foreign desk as an editor and back to writing for the paper. His latest piece can be read at: nytimes . com/2012/04/12/technology/personaltech/e-books-are-easier-to-borrow-just-be-prepared-to-wait . html?scp=2&sq=alan%20finder&st=cse (remove the spaces, of course)
Here's the opening:
E-Book Borrowing, Preceded by E-book Waiting
By Alan Finder, The New York Times, April 11, 2012
As a technical matter, it’s remarkably easy to borrow an e-book from your local library. But not if you want to take out the best-selling biography of Steven P. Jobs, the hero of the Internet age who helped lure tens of millions of people to personal computers, tablets and other digital devices.
The publisher of the Jobs biography, Simon & Schuster, does not sell digital books to libraries. Five of the six major publishers of trade books either refuse to make new e-books available to libraries or have pulled back significantly over the last year on how easily or how often those books can be circulated. And complaints are rampant about lengthy waiting lists for best sellers and other popular e-books from the publishers that are willing to sell to libraries.
Want to borrow “The Help,” the novel by Kathryn Stockett? On New Jersey’s state e-book consortium, 375 people were waiting for a copy recently. At the New York Public Library’s Web site, 193 members had put a hold on a digital edition of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, which begins with “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”
How about the immensely popular novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” by E. L. James? Thirty-three people were waiting for the e-book on the Seattle Public Library’s site.
“We hear a lot of frustration,” said Christopher Platt, the director of collections and circulation operations at the New York Public Library. “It’s rational. We don’t expect our readers to understand the complexities of the publishing industry.”
Finally, absolutely frivolous news: our younger dog Rocky, who's two-years-old, has fallen in love with the new, eleven-week-old dog next door. We keep telling Rocky that the new dog is underage, not neutered, that he is neutered, and that she hasn't had her shots, but it's no use. Yesterday, he lay out in the rain, in the mud, with his nose poking through the chain link fence, just trying for a chance to see her. Last night, he slept in the living room, so he could be closer to the back yard and his dog door, just in case she barked. The day before, he effected an animal alert, when she tried to crawl under the gate and got caught by her neck. I had to go our and slide her free. Today, I talked with our neighbor, to find out if he's keeping the dog and if he's named her. He's probably keeping her and her name's Misty. It's going to be a long summer.
The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com
The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com / SouthHS65
Yep, take out the spaces.
Rich
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)