Mar/Apr 2000

I trust that you are recovered from your New Year’s celebrations, have overcome any Y2K bugs in your personal lives, or in your personal computers, and are now back in the groove. My groove this month is full of news!! So much news that I will have to spread it out over two months. Technology Review imposes a limit of 1200 words on class secretaries, so if your information doesn’t appear here look forward to it in the next issue.

Roy Komack saw my travelogue about our Africa trip on the class web page. Roy was in the Okavango Delta during the same time last summer that we were there. He went with a group from the Philadelphia Zoo, under the auspices of the Wild Dog Foundation. They saw only three dogs, but saw lots of other animals close up. [Wild dogs are very endangered these days. They are voracious, wide ranging, and are always hunting, always on the move. We were very lucky to see a pack just after it killed an impala.] Roy writes "Our adventure was on a small flat-bottomed boat on a lagoon in the Moremi Game Reserve. Our outboard engine died, and we were out there in the approaching dusk with one oar. Our guide told us how to swim away quietly if a hippo overturned us. Hah! He would not let us paddle with our hands, due to the possibility of a croc encounter. I remembered that one of my MIT EE professors used to say, "Plug it in and try it." Using the closest mechanical analog I could find to a lab circuit, I used a small pocket tool to dismantle six of the plastic seats and handed them out to my fellow passengers to use as paddles. We made pretty good time for about 20 minutes until the assistant guide finally got the motor started. My wife showed her supreme confidence in me by telling me later that she was envisioning ending her life in the mouth of a hippo." The Komack’s took over 1400 pictures [!!] and got over 300 that are good enough to delight their friends without putting them to sleep.

William Zoller writes that he and his wife Janice became grandparents last May. His son, Christopher, and daughter-in-law, Stefanie, are the proud parents of Julianne Cristen, born May 23, 1999. [Congratulations and welcome to the club – with all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto.] Jeffrey Levinger wrote that 1999 marked the 23^rd year that Levinger Associates has provided "clear, concise, complete documentation." Jeff still composes piano pieces and practices Aikido every month or two. His son, David, is in Colorado, providing technical support to a large financial company, and his daughter, Leah, is a junior at Lowell High in San Francisco. He reflects that with California laws getting crazier each year he may move to Colorado. [But are you ready to endure snowy winters again? Now that’s crazy.] Lawrence Kazanowski retired at the end of 1998 after 34 years with Ford Motor Company. He says he flunked retirement, and took the position of President and CEO of Cambridge Industries, an automotive composites supplier. Ira Jaffe ‘61 is on the board of Cambridge Industries and handles legal matters for the company. "It’s amazing," Lawrence writes, tongue planted firmly in cheek, "that two MIT alums would gravitate toward a business called Cambridge Industries!" And, on another retiring note, Allen Clark has hung up his cleats after 31 years with Coca Cola. Most of his time there was spent in R&D, but Allen did 3-1/2 years as head of corporate quality assurance. He and his wife, Claudia, are moving [probably have moved already] to Vermont, and are looking forward to travel, reading, some volunteer environmental activities, and visiting children, grandchildren, and other family and friends. Allen, I remember being your partner for a freshman physics lab, and, if I recall correctly you are a New England native. I’m sure you’ll enjoy returning to your roots.

Gerald Cooperstein was awarded the IEEE Peter Haas Pulsed Power Award for 1999. Gerry is head of the Pulsed Power Physics Branch in the plasma physics division at the Naval Research Laboratory. The award recognizes his leadership and technical contributions to the field over the last three decades. His research group does pioneering research on intense electron and ion beams, plasma opening switches, intense X-ray sources, and inductive energy sources. Gerry and his wife Myrna, live in Rockville, MD. The Cooper steins have two sons, Jeffrey, a computer programming consultant in Seattle, WA, and David, an architect in St. Louis.

I have two sad notes to report this month. Michael Chessman passed away in February of 1999. Michael was living in Portola Valley, and working as manager of process management at Varian Associates. Our condolences to the family. And you may have read in the November Technology Review that Bob Ratner died last year after being ill with cancer. Bob was officially Class of 1964, but he started with us and had many friends in the Class of 1963. Bob had a colorful career at MIT, and later he was quite well known and respected in the fields of decision analysis and simulation, particularly as they applied to aviation transportation systems. After many years at SRI International in Palo Alto Bob founded a consulting company along with our classmate Bjorn Conrad, Michael Tashker ’68, and others. Recently he had been an MIT Educational Counselor, interviewing applicants in the Palo Alto area, and spreading the word about the Institute. I could tell you many stories about Bob, but one in particular comes to mind, as it happened in January 40 years ago. That was a cold winter, and several of us began growing icicles from our window sills. Never one to think small, Bob proposed a huge icicle, grown from the window of his 4^th floor front double at Baker House. Bill Tobin, and I did the setup work, Larry Krakauer supplied some key technology (siphons made from eyedroppers from chemistry lab attached to black tubing -- "Mariahs", we called them), Bob added red and blue colored dye for patriotic effect, and Steve Raphael had the chutzpah to call the NY Times collect. They published the story, the Times wire service picked it up, and the headline in The Tech was "Giant Icicle at Baker House Draws National Press Attention." Pictures of us hanging out the dorm windows ran in the Christian Science Monitor, the NY Post, Newsday, and elsewhere. Icicle growing became a fad at cold weather universities – students at Tufts, Northeastern, and Northwestern grew icicles and formed "The Icy League". This is what college boys did for amusement in 1960.

As I mentioned at the start, I have additional news from the MIT Alumni Conference, which was held last Oct. 1-3 and from the wedding of Ira Blumenthal’s daughter, Robin, last Oct. 10, at which there was a strong MIT presence. That news will appear next month.

Best regards to you all. You can reach me at: Mike Bertin, 22 Gillman St, Irvine, CA 92612. E-mail: MCB1@aol.com. If you want to schmooze, call me at (949) 786-9450.