Memoir 6: Columbia Memories

Columbia Memories January 2019, R 1/20

I ran for the Student Board for one of the two class seats as a freshman, and was elected and re-elected for my sophomore year. It was all fun and games. Steve Trachtenberg, a good friend and fraternity brother who was a senior when I was a sophomore, and later president of George Washington University, led an effort to impeach Bernie Pucker, the Student Council president, elected by the entire student body. Bernie was spending all his time at Vassar dating a woman who later became his wife; they opened the Pucker Gallery on Newbury Street in Boston. We failed to impeach him, but we did have the votes of Riordan Roett, who became Dean of SAIS at Johns Hopkins, Dick Merrill, who became Dean of University of Virginia Law School, and Ken Gros Louis, who became Provost at Indiana, as well as Steve and me!

Later, during my junior year I managed political campaigns, rather than running myself. I managed the campaign of Dave Blicker, a close friend, for president of the Student Board and he won. In the election that year for class officers, I managed the campaigns of a couple people who narrowly lost the races until the election was held over again due to some of our classmates voting twice in an organized effort. One person from my class was expelled for organizing the cheating. Imagine that in those days of student governments having no power, and certainly not rocking any boats or leading revolutions (that came to Columbia nine years later), that guys actually cheated to win a meaningless election. The reason we all took the elections so seriously was because the stakes were so low!! There was an article in the Columbia Spectator, the student newspaper, with the headline as I recall, The Kaplan Machine Versus the Tsucalas Machine. I would see John Tsucalas only occasionally later at alumni association board meetings or reunions and we would laugh about our political history at Columbia.

I remember once when Student Board leaders talked to the University officials seeking permission for women to visit in the dorms; the request was turned down, nothing happened; and no one did anything about it, not even protests! Finally, in our senior year, women were allowed to visit dorm rooms so long as the door was kept open and all feet were on the floor.

However, I also remember panty raids on Barnard, when freshmen particularly, then joined by others, raided the Barnard dorms in the mistaken belief that such particular rite of passage was going to be both fun and thrilling. Not really, unless one wanted to go on probation. Most of us simply watched guys breaking into the Barnard dorms (before all residence halls became locked) and stealing panties from bedrooms. No real bad stuff ever happened thankfully.

As a sophomore, I was elected to the Van Am Society, named for a famous Dean Van Amringe. It was an honorary service society that led to many long-term friendships: Dan Shapiro, Paul Nagano, Dave Blicker, Mal Jozoff, Burtt Ehrlich and others. Subsequently, I was elected to the senior Society of Sachems, along with most of my Van Am friends. It was one of the two so-called and self-proclaimed secret societies that sought to influence college and university affairs behind the scenes; sometimes with some success.

My friendship with Dave Blicker started during our freshman year, and at the end of that, the Deans chose Dave to be the freshman coordinator for the incoming class of 1962, and they appointed me to be the vice director, in charge of all logistics. Dave and I maintained our friendship, and I regretted having the honor of speaking at his memorial service in Sacramento after his untimely death in 2012. He had gone to law school in San Francisco and became a civil liberties lawyer, joined the Peace Corps to celebrate his 50th birthday, and I got the VKRF to fund a project of his in Kenya, where he was based, and he did some excellent consulting for us regarding grants in Latin America after that.