May/Jun 2000

Picking up where I left off last column, I’ve got more news from October of 1999. I’m in the unusual position (for a class secretary) of having plenty of items for this column and the next one. But don’t stop sending me information about your doings. If you don’t keep me out of trouble I might write another travelogue, or worse, another poem.

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[Class of ’63 Special Addendum Notes for the Web Posting. Here on the Web the editors aren’t so strict about the word count, so I’ve added this extra section. Last week I had an E-mail from Jason Wasfy, a junior at MIT who got my name and email address from Technology Review. I didn’t put it in Tech Review because it’s time sensitive material, and Jason would have finished his junior year before this arrived in your mailboxes. He wrote:

<< I'm a student journalist for the MIT/Wellesley monthly journal Counterpoint, and along with Sarah Cussen from Wellesley, I'm writing a story on the history of MIT/Wellesley relationships, social activities, and marriages. If you'd be willing to help us, we're looking to get in contact with MIT alumni from your class or others who have married Wellesley grads. We'd be especially interested in contacting people who check email regularly. Also, do you know any stories about how MIT/Wellesley couples you know met? We're also interested in anecdotal memories about how students from the two schools interacted when you were at MIT.

I'd really appreciate your help finding more information about any of these issues. Thanks a lot!

Jason Harmon Wasfy phone: (617) 225-9531

MIT Chemical Engineering email: jwasfy@mit.edu

450 Memorial Drive

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 http://web.mit.edu/jwasfy/www/home.html >>

Always being one to encourage budding journalists I responded to Jason –

<<The image of the "Wellesley girl" was the stuff of legends during my tenure at the Institute. It was what every self respecting Tech man of the 50's and early (pre-movement) 60's aspired to in female companionship. One of the requirements for dating a "Wellesley girl" was having a car or a friend dating a Wellesley girl who had a car. I had neither. Of course, for me (a person who was a nerd before the word was invented), I knew that "Wellesley girls" were hopelessly out of reach anyway. And fortunately so. I married the girl I dated during the MIT years -- she was from CCNY and lived in the Bronx. We're still married 36 years later and still havin' fun. Mike Bertin ‘63 >>

Those of you who have input to contribute, let’s have the class of 1963 do its part for the class of 2001. And now on with the regular Class Notes Column...]

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Regular readers of Technology Review’s MIT News probably saw in the January issue about classmate Kenan Sahin’s extraordinarily generous gift of $100 million to MIT. Congratulations on your success with your company and on your generosity. Kenan was studying at a technical institute in Turkey when a visit from an MIT community member made him think about enrolling at MIT. When he announced his gift, Kenan said coming to the Institute changed his life. After MIT he started Kenan Systems and developed software that does billing and tracks operations for telephone companies and others. The company was very successful and in January 1999 it was purchased by Lucent Technologies. Apparently, the decision to make this major gift was something of a spur of the moment event. I’m sure your gift will benefit future students at MIT in the way you know that MIT benefited you.

I attended the Alumni Conference in October. The weekend was spectacular. On Saturday I took a break from the luncheons and speechifyin’ and watched MIT’s football team snatch defeat from the jaws of victory against that perennial New England power, Curry College. We outplayed Curry for all but ten seconds of the first half and three minutes of the second. Alas, those intervals were enough to do us in. Two students I interviewed in my role as an Educational Councilor, Alvan Loreto ’01, and Mike Mulvania, ’03 are starters on the varsity. In the afternoon I attended the re-dedication of Baker House – a seminar and reception to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of Baker’s opening. While there I chatted with Laura and Tom Goddard, who are enjoying retirement on Cape Cod. I spotted class Webmaster, Ron Young. Ron told me he heard Bob Johnson speak on a panel at the conference. Ron was taking a break from an intense project at his company, Comverse Network Systems, where he’s leading the development of a key component for transporting voicemail over the Internet. I saw Martin Schrage and his wife, Karen Mathiasen, GM ’71, and son Seth at the reception. Afterwards Martin, Seth and I went to a Logarythms concert in 10-250. I hadn’t attended one of their concerts since my days on campus, and I had forgotten how good the Logs are. If you get a chance to hear them, in person or on CD, do so. They’re musical, and they have that irreverent sense of humor that is characteristic of MIT students. Later we were walking down the Infinite Corridor, and we passed a room with a computer monitor that showed a map of MIT and a blinking cursor. I told Seth that students who enroll at MIT have a microchip implanted in their heads, and the blinking cursor was tracking one student around the campus. It took him a minute to realize I was only kidding.

The following weekend, I attended the wedding of Ira Blumenthal’s daughter, Robin, to Luc Verbist, in Palo Alto. Our table was all MIT. Ellie and John Graham, one of Ira’s freshman roommates, were there. John is medical director at a mental health clinic in Daly City, south of San Francisco, and also maintains a private practice. When he’s not working John plays tennis and rides his mountain bike. Victor Scheinman and Sandra Auerbach didn’t have far to come. They live in nearby Woodside. Victor is one of the gurus of the robotics industry (my words, not his.) He is a consulting professor in the mechanical engineering department at Stanford, and has been working with a company that processes 500,000 lbs of chicken nuggets daily, automating their processing lines. Last summer he climbed Mt. Shasta with his 16 year old son, David. Victor said David wouldn’t have been able to make it up if Dad hadn’t been there to pull him up. (Hahaha.) Victor’s daughter, Tenaya, is a senior at Swarthmore. Peter Van Aken came all the way from Winchester for the wedding, with his son, David, MIT ’02, and daughter, Christy. Christy just started a Ph.D. program in psychology at Berkeley. After attending Stanford and working in the Bay area she seems to have morphed from a New Englander into a Californian. I sat next to Bob Spivak, ’61, who I hadn’t seen since then. Bob lives in Lafayette, CA, where he has a consulting practice helping medical device manufacturers navigate the regulatory maze. The wedding was lovely. Robin, who does biological research at Stanford, was a radiant bride, and her husband, Luc, who’s in the software business, (what else for a Bay Area resident?) was a happy groom. The many of us who had known Robin since before she was born shed a tear at the ceremony, fressed up a storm at the dinner, and danced until we dropped. Good band, good party, good friends.

Krzysztof Ryback, ‘2000, and Paula Vo, ‘2001, who I wrote about in TR last fall, have been renewed as Class of 1963 scholars. Krystof is a chemistry major. A native of Poland, he’s active in the Polish Students Club at MIT. Much of his time is spent on his research in physical chemistry. Last summer he held an internship with DIAS Gmbh in Dresden, Germany. Paula is a course 6 major. She volunteers in the MIT Admissions Office’s Project Contact, an initiative aimed at informing prospective students about MIT. She worked in New York City last summer.

Room for one more item. An E-mail from Steve Johnson was prefaced with "I don't know if you remember me -- I was in the class of 63, lived in Baker House, but haven't been active in alumni activities since." One of the pleasures of being class secretary is getting notes like this and being able to answer, "Of course I remember you. Sophomore year you spent a lot of hours playing bridge (poker too?) along with others of us who were determined to lower our cum's. And you worked for the Baker House dining service, didn't you?" Steve said though he was quite successful in his efforts to lower his cum, he still made it through (to his surprise). After graduation he worked for 5 years at Arthur D. Little in Cambridge, got a Ph.D. at Northeastern, then came out to California to SRI International in Palo Alto where he stayed until 1998. He’s now semi-retired and recently returned from a 10-month, single-handed sailboat voyage to Mexico and Hawaii. Now he’s trying to figure out what to do next.

If your news hasn’t appeared here never fear, it will. The editors at Tech Review have us on a short leash word count wise. 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.