To my fellow Forty-Niners and anyone else who cares:
Since leaving Amherst, I followed through with plans to become a physician, graduating from State U. of N.Y., Downstate in 1951. A residency in Urology interrupted by Air Force service during the Korean War, was completed in 1957.
In 1955, Carol (nce Reiman) and I were married after a nine week courtship. (We will shortly celebrate our 44th wedding anniversary.) Upon completion of my residency, I chose to join forces with two older brothers, both physicians, and the three of us established a multispecialty medical group in Dover, New Jersey. The group numbered more than 25 specialists prior to my retirement in 1984.
Carol and I have raised three children. John, of Conifer, Co., is 42 and V.P. for Real Estate Management at Children's World, a national Day Care Center. He is married to Julie (nee Blowers). They lead an active outdoor life with much skiing, kayaking, mountain climbing, mountain biking and all those crazy things younger people do these days.
Jamie ('81) is 39 and married to Dennis Scurletis. They both have their MBAs; Jamie's is from Stanford and Dennis got his from Wharton. After spending several years on Wall Street at Goldman Sachs, Jamie settled down to mother Zoe, 4, and Eleni, 1. She is raising her family while running her own firm, "A Road Less Traveled," a special interest travel consultancy, from her home in Rumson, N.J. Dennis is a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley in New York City where he runs Mortgage Capital Markets.
Peg, 36, climbed Mt Rainier at 15, graduated from Brown, hiked the length of New Zealand with a girl friend after graduation and has pursued her love of writing in the magazine field. While son Ben, 4, is busy at home with the nanny, Peg commutes from Montclair, N.J. to her position as Senior Editor for Child Magazine. Her husband, Paul Freundlich, is in rock music PR with Rogers and Cowan and handles Rod Stuart, the Beatles, Paul McCartney, Bonnie Raitt and others.
Before and since retirement, Carol, an anthropologist with an archeological bent and I have worked on a number of digs in Guatemala and Israel and studied some primitive cultures in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.
We've spent a portion of each. summer for the last 43 years on a camping trip on the islands
Of Lake George in upstate New York and found it to be a unique bonding experience as we
always include all family members who can make it. During the last few years the grandchildren have joined us on these ventures. Recently I assisted the elderly retired Head Ranger, Frank Leonbruno, compose his memoirs, "Lake George Reflections." Southwest Harbor on Mount Desert Island in Maine has been our late summer haven for 30 years.
Travel to an exciting but relatively untouristed location has been our answer to the cold, dank and icy winters in northern New Jersey and has brought us to the orangutans of Borneo, the moonlike islands of the Galapagos, the stone-age cultures of central Irian Jaya and Papua New Guinea; the El Alemain battlefield of Egypt; Victoria Falls and Angel Falls in Zimbabwe and Venezuela, respectively. Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the temple walls of Jerusalem, Borobudur and Prambanan in Java, Pagan, Rangoon, Inle Lake and Mandalay in Myanmar, the Valley of the Kings, Abu Simbel and the Pyramids in Egypt have not escaped our notice. Torajaland in Sulawesi was a never to be forgotten trip, not only for its unbelievable beauty but for its unique culture and architecture.
We've left our tire tread marks on the Garden Route along the Indian Ocean in South Africa; celebrated New Years Eve as ship doctor and spouse off the coast of the Canary Islands, prior to making an Atlantic crossing to Barbados from London; tiptoed through Vietnam before Americans could use credit cards there; got stranded on a sandbar when our long-tailed boat hit a rock and sank in the Kok River in northern Thailand; sidestepped guerrillas in Maputo, Mozambique and elephants in Botswana; not to mention drug dealers and kidnappers in Leticia and Bogata, Columbia; survived a tedious elephant hike in the foothills of the Himalayas in India, and rested our bones on the barren sands of the Cape Verde Islands off Africa's west coast.
We've made our way up the Sepik River of Papua New Guinea, paddled the upper Amazon from Columbia, past Peru to Brazil, sailed a felucca down the Nile and motorboated up the Zambezi River. We've whitewatered in Utah, Colorado and Costa Rica backpacked the Adirondack Trail, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Acadia and numerous other American National Parks, as well as the Canadian Rockies and Andes.
As a family, during the cold war, we crossed through a good part of central Europe, in a camper, overnighting in exotic campgrounds in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. Carol and I, and the children, got to see for ourselves, the heavy hand of the USSR during a winter visit in 1972. At one point, we even had the Secret Police breathing down our necks when we befriended an anti-communist Russian student who was trying to defect. The five of us sailed the Virgin Island Drake Channel together and shared our enthusiasm for Israel during one of our many visits. We've turned long weekends into family adventures, circumnavigating Manhattan and we have traveled the length of the Hudson from N.Y.C. to Albany in our small open outboard motorboat.
Somewhere in all of this there must be a message...l guess. Is it that once you leave Amherst you can still have a helluva lot of fun in life? Or is it because you are an Amherst alum you are still likely to have a helluva lot of fun in life? Or maybe it's both.
Carol and I look forward to reuniting with all of you.