MIT Class of 1963 Class Notes
April 2004
MIT Class of 1963, Class Notes for April 2004 issue of Technology Review
This is the fourth column of notes from our 40th Reunion, and I've still got more to go. Sandy Auerback and *Vic Scheinman were at the brunch on Sunday, the final day of last June's Reunion. After the reunion Vic and Sandy were headed to NY City to see some plays. At MIT Vic was a member of Hobby Shop. Senior year he used the shop's equipment to build the original Baker House athletic trophy cabinet. He also built a kayak that he kept in his room. On weekends he would take it out on the Charles and paddle from the Longfellow Bridge to the Watertown dam. Victor told me a funny story about trading a box of wood for a lifetime subscription to VooDoo. In our years Baker House had a fireplace in the Master Suite Lounge. Vic reserved the lounge for a romantic Sunday morning date with a young woman he was seeing at the time. On the Friday before the date he went over to Hobby Shop and filled a box with wood chips he was going to use as fuel in the fireplace. On his way back to Baker he was passing through Lobby 10 with his box of chips when a VooDoo pitchman accosted him. "I'll trade you what's in the box for a lifetime subscription to VooDoo," the barker exclaimed. (This was before anyone had ever heard of Monte Hall and Let's Make a Deal.) When Vic expressed interest the pitchman wanted to look inside the box. "No deal," said Vic. Well, he got the subscription to VooDoo, and the pitchman got the box of chips. A few hours later Vic went back to Lobby 10, and bought back the box for $1. The barker was happy to get rid of it. I guess the "lifetime" subscription to Voodoo was for the life of the magazine. We have outlived it by many years. Do any of you have favorite VooDoo stories you'd like to recount? VooDoo seemed so "bad", so "avant-garde" at the time. It was really pretty tame, wasn't it?
After brunch we went over to the athletic fields to take in the Tech Challenge Games. There we ran into *Bohkee Yap and his wife Roseann. Bohkee is retired from Yap Analytics, the company he started to make instruments for infrared measurements and analysis. He enjoys playing bridge and is working on his bronze life master's rating. He does some hiking and still plays badminton from time to time. When I was at MIT I used to think badminton was a backyard game for old folks. I remember seeing Bohkee, who was a badminton champion in Thailand, play for the first time. I realized that this kind of badminton was definitely not a backyard game; this was a high speed, high energy racket sport. Roseann and Bohkee's son, Bruce, MIT '88, was married last year. Their daughter has made them the grandparents of a boy, 4, and a girl, 1.
As the reunion weekend wound down, Barbara and I sat talking to Dee and *Tony Geisler. Dee and Tony live in Diablo, in the San Francisco bay area. Both are retired now, Dee from a career as a resource teacher, and Tony from the food brokerage business. Their daughters, Wendy and Rebecca, both have MIT connections. Rebecca, MIT '93 was attending her own reunion. Wendy was at the Institute for two years before following her MIT graduate boyfriend (now husband) to the West Coast, also in 1993. I often repeat Tony's story that in a short time in 1993 he went from being "In Hock Tuition For-to Pay" to having an extra $50,000 per year of disposable income.
Dee, Rebecca, and Tony Geisler.
Here's some non-reunion information. *Mark Epstein wrote that after reading the Class Notes forever he thought it was time that he contributed. Following almost a dozen years in the Pentagon leading the US Army's electronics R&D programs, Mark joined Qualcomm in 1986 just after its founding. He's still with Qualcomm as its Senior VP for Development. He's been President of the MIT Club of Washington, a member of the MIT Corporation and is on two MIT Visiting Committees. He points out that the Class of 1963 has the largest number of members on the MIT Corporation. He also chairs the Circles Board of the JFK Center for the Performing Arts. One son is a lawyer in NY and one is a programmer. Mark lives in Potomac, MD, just outside Washington. *Alan Kamin retired from the state (AZ) superior court in January 2003, after serving 20 years as a trial judge. Alan is now "of counsel" at the Phoenix law firm of Brown & Bain, where he does mediation, arbitration and special master work. *Bill Barnett has moved from the economics department at Washington University in St. Louis to the economics department at the University of Kansas.
Sadly I'm reporting the passing of two of our classmates in the fall of last year. I was reading the LA Times when I came across the obituary of *Stephen Benton. It was a shock. Stephen died in November of brain cancer. He grew up in Santa Barbara and became an optics enthusiast at age 11 when he donned a pair of 3-D glasses to watch "House of Wax". Optics became a professional passion as well. After his MIT years Stephen worked at Polaroid, then received his Ph.D. from Harvard. He was a holography pioneer who invented the familiar rainbow holograms used on credit cards. He was a passionate inventor, who saw no distinction between his science and the art he created. Stephen returned to MIT in 1980, directed the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and was a founder of the Media Lab. His wife Jeanne, who met Stephen at Polaroid, said "He was just always a kid in a toy store, just wanting to take things apart, put it together, and put it together better. He really appealed to the average 10 year old kid." Eleanor Klepser, class secretary for 1966, sent me an obituary she spotted in a Buffalo, NY area newspaper. *James Keenan died unexpectedly last October at his home in Richmond, NH. James was born in Los Angeles and graduated from Lafayette High School in Buffalo. After his MIT graduation he earned a master's from Harvard and worked for many years at the Draper Lab in Cambridge. Our condolences to the families. If anyone has any personal memories of Stephen or James that you'd like to share send them to me and I'll put them in this column. It will help us remember our friends.
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.
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