No. 12
February 1, 2006

Welcome to the twelfth issue of the Columbia College Class of 1963 eNewsletter.

I have enjoyed collecting the class news and passing it on to you. I hope that you have found these Class of 1963 eNewsletters interesting (or at least amusing). Unfortunately, news remains sparse. I do hope that you will send us a sign that you are still out there -- news, views, or even a good joke. The Second Thursday, Class of 1963 lunches continue to be a lively place for discussions and reminiscences, but it would be a lot more fun if more of you would attend. Our first lunch of the year brought back Gil Einstein, Bob Heller and me. Bob has attended many of these lunches, Gil had first come down from Massachusetts to attend last February -- we had 9 classmates at lunch that month. I hope to have as many next Thursday.

You should plan on joining us. If it's your first visit, I'll buy you a drink!. The next few dates are February 9, March 9, April 20, and May 11.

At the request of many of you, I've added a link to an archives page, which in turn, will link you to the past issues of the Class of 1963 eNewsletter.

I hope that you are finding this eNewsletter interesting, I have had a great time hearing from all of you. Judging from the number of people who have been asking me to put them in touch with old friends mentioned here, I think that many of you share my desire to reconnect with old friends. I have heard from close to a hundred of the you since I started as your class correspondent a year ago. The class luncheon in New York has been attended by over 30 of you, and many of you have become regulars. I hope many more of you will attend. Keep those notes coming, and share with us your memories and your recent news.

Missing Classmates

Geoffrey Akst wrote to ask me to change the "Lost Classmates" section to "Missing Classmates." As he said, ". . . considering our age group." I'm glad he said "age group" because I'm feeling young and healthy, thank you very much!

So, here again is the list of missing classmates that you have sent me:

Christian (Chris) Rieger
Bill Sprague
Robert Vargas

I've removed Scott M. Blue because I received the following from Stephen Langfelder, "Your request for information on missing classmates prompted me to write. I have your "job" with the South Side High School (Rockville Centre, NY) class of 1959, and in the years since our 40th reunion in 1999 have located and compiled a directory of all 323 names on my class list. In the course of my searches, I learned about Alumni Finder.com, a search engine now owned by Lexis-Nexis, and it was extremely helpful in finding a lot of the South Siders who had disappeared into neverland. The cost was fairly reasonable, 25 cents per successful search (raised to 50 cents effective 1/1/06), with no charge for searches yielding no data. So after reading your note I tried searching for Scott Blue.

Alumni Finder.com successfully reported that a Scott M. Blue, born 2/15/1941, formerly residing in Chico, CA and with a last known address in San Francisco, had died in 2001 at the age of 60. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that he's our Columbia classmate. The date of birth puts him in our age group, and our 1963 yearbook showed his address then as San Francisco.

Feel free to share this with whoever asked you about him.

I did not try looking for the other three names, since they are a lot more common, and a search by name would probably generate information that would have to be winnowed down further. But if Columbia will give you their dates of birth, that would narrow things down considerably, and I'd be glad to run them through the search engine and report back to you. Consider the cost a donation to the class!!"

Stephen, thank you for this information. Sad to hear about Scott, I will ask Columbia College to confirm this. If any of you have any further information or memories you'd like to share about Scott, please let me know.

I know that there must be many more who have lost contact with Columbia. If you know how to contact any of these classmates, please let me know. And send me the names of any other missing friends, and we will try to find them. And if you send me a note, and you do not see it reflected in the next month's eNewsletter, please re-send it. I have had several messages that you have sent either disappear enroute, or get mis-filed on my end. And thanks again to Stephen Langfelder, I will try Alumni Finder.com.

Next Lunch - Thursday, February 9

Columbia University Club of New York

Every Second Thursday of the Month, 12:30 p.m. to 2:00 p.m.

Columbia College Club - 15 West 43rd Street, NYC

Please join your classmates for an informal lunch at the Columbia Club every second Thursday of the month. It is our hope that these gatherings will renew old friendships and foster improved relationship with our class and the College. This month, Thursday, February 9, 2006.

December Lunch Attended By Four Die-hard 63ers

The twelfth Second Thursday Class of 1963 lunch was held on January 12 . Gil Einstein, who came in from Massachusetts, returned for his second lunch and was joined by fellow Second Thursday Club members, Bob Heller, and Paul Neshamkin.

Here's the gang.

(From left to right) Bob Heller, Paul Neshamkin, and Gil Einstein.

I hope you can all join us (please encourage your friends to come with you) at the next lunch on Thursday, February 9. Let me know if you will attend so that we can reserve a big enough table; RSVP to Paul Neshamkin (pauln@helpauthors.com).

Lunch Archives

If you like to see our previous lunches, click on the dates below:

December 9, 2004

January 13, 2005

February 10, 2005

March 10. 2005

For information and inquiries call Paul Neshamkin at 201-714-4881 or email at pauln@helpauthors.com.

Latest News from the Class of 63

Here are the unedited (and unexpurgated) notes and news that you have sent in the last month (we still would love to see more):

Geoffrey Akst writes, "I stayed in New York and in mathematics, finishing graduate work at NYU and then Columbia's TC while teaching math at CUNY's Borough of Manhattan Community College. Serving in various academic and administrative capacities there, I retired a few months ago to my home in Murray Hill, but am continuing to work on new editions of my various college math textbooks. Always a francophile, I'm writing now from a snowy Paris. Vive retirement! Best of luck and good health to all our classmates -- forever young in our minds. (Btw, I seem to have kept up only with those who also stayed in the City -- a pity.) " Geoffrey, sounds like a wonderful place to write. We are all certainly "young in our minds," but the last time I was happily writing (my unfinished novel) in Paris, in the snow, was in 1965. Seems like yesterday.

Stephen Langfelder also writes, "Catching up on the 40+ years since I was "Red" Langfelder, the Lions' football manager: I obtained an MBA in accounting from Columbia's Graduate School of Business and spent 13 years with Arthur Young & Company, then one of the "Big 8" accounting firms. That was followed by a series of tax jobs in corporate America, and I retired in 2001.

I've been married since 1964 to Ruth Jaffe, who hails from Passaic, NJ. We live in Wayne, NJ, and have two married daughters and six grandchildren. Our younger daughter lives in Israel with her husband, a computer chip designer whom she met when they were both at Penn State, and their four daughters. We try to visit them at least annually.

We do a fair amount of traveling, much of it through timeshare ownership, and hope to keep it up for many healthy years. On the calendar for May 2006 is a three-week visit to Spain. The New Jersey winters are something we'd like to get away from, but with two days a week dedicated to sandwich generation responsibilities, that's not likely. I "senior-sit" for my 92-year-old mother on her aide's day off, and the two of us watch our two grandchildren in Short Hills, NJ when their mother, our older daughter and the genetic counselor at St. Vincent's Hospital in NYC, works from home. Both her children have bright red hair, a reminder that I once did also, but no more."

Stephen, I hope that you can make it in to one of our lunches. Perhaps we can Tom O'Connor to join you from

Bob Kraft has been awarded the NCAA's highest honor, the Theodore Roosevelt Award, which is presented annually to a former collegiate athlete for whom competitive athletics in college and attention to physical well-being after graduation have been important factors in a distinguished career of national significance and achievement. Bob finds himself among a distinguished list of former "Teddy" winners including former presidents Eisenhower, Ford, Bush, and Reagan. Congratulations, Bob!

Speaking of Bob, Andy Lewin send me the following note, "Since the correspondence has decreased to you recently, I thought I would relate a story about one of our more illustrious classmates. This fits obviously the "old reminiscence" category.

It occurred in the spring of 1963. I was on the rugby team and as a club we were always looking for new players (experience not required). I approached Bob Kraft to try and recruit him. He said "I really can't risk getting hurt this semester. I promised my folks I would really concentrate on my studies." Two days later I saw him swathed from head to toe in white gauze bandages. He had walked through one of the glass panels of Ferris Booth Hall sustaining multiple lacerations.

The moral of the story is : walking on campus can be dangerous to your health ... Certainly more so then rugby!"

David Norris writes, "I was sad to read in the September issue of David Cohen's death. I was his roommate in Livingston Hall in our Junior and Senior years. David was a wild and gentle soul. He loved classical music as much as he loved Japanese culture, and he was very overt about demonstrating both. From a trip he had once taken to Japan he brought back a rice cooker and I often could find my way back to our room just by following my nose. And just as often my ears, since music would be blasting away. And it wasn't just the loudness he liked; he would often come racing over to the desk in my room (we had one of those 2-room suites for two) and stop my reading to point out some sweet musical passage that he found particularly beautiful. David was loud and intense and at the same time sensitive and vulnerable. I wasn't surprised when he chose Psychology as his major. That was the deeper part of David speaking. I lost touch with him a few years after graduation. I know only that he had a professorship at the University of Texas at Austin, where he lived with his wife Leslie and a son, and that he had published several books on Dream Research (his area of expertise). How appropriate that he would make a science of dreams. He also published a book about depression entitled "Out of the Blue". I came upon this book once while browsing in a bookshop in San Francisco and, of course, bought it immediately. If I were to say that I miss him, that would probably only be half true, since I don't really know enough of who he became. When I think of him now, I miss his mischievous smile as he turned up the volume on his reel-to-reel tape player. But even more than that, I miss that awkward and exquisite time as we tried so hard to figure out who we were and what we were supposed to do with our lives. He was a wild and gentle spirit and I'm glad I got to spend some of those years with him.

When you send your notes in, please indicate if you would like to share your email address(or web site) with your classmates, I've been inundated with requests to pass this information on. Always great to hear from you all.

Share your news and views with your classmates. Contact your Class Correspondent, and let him know what you would like posted here or in Columbia College Today (CCT).