On April 25-26, five of my closest friends from high school days and I had a 50+year reunion. Of the six of us, three of us knew each other from Joan of Arc Junior High School (JHS 118, circa 1953), and, of the other three, two met at the nearby Booker T. Washington JHS, while another two met in the second grade (1948). Maybe a better way of parsing this would be to say that the latest that all six of us knew each other dates back to 1955. As such, we are--by almost any measurement--old friends.
I'll use first names only, since (a) each of us knows who we are, and (b) the rest of you are unlikely to care. We are, in no particular order, Ray, Vic, Henry, Gene, Mike and John. The reunion was Ray's idea. Ray has lived in Israel for many years, and has been married to the same woman, Janine, for over forty-five years. They have three children and eight grandchildren. Ray is strikingly handsome in a Warren Beatty sort of way, and--replete with a full head of white hair--is hale, healthy and fit. He is an engineer, and has a large number of people in his employ, including Israeli Arabs as well as Jews.
The other expat is Vic, who grew up a few blocks from me on Manhattan's Upper West Side and lives in Italy, where he holds a senior position with an international news organization. I'll never forget his first scoop as a young reporter. He somehow convinced the reclusive Svetlana Alaluyeva to give him an interview. She was better known as Stalin's daughter, and the interview itself was news. Of the six of us, Vic is the only one who still smokes cigarettes--unfiltered yet--something all too evident in his raspy voice. At one time, we all smoked, although Ray, as I recall, was the only one to smoke a pipe. Starting out with the extra-mild King Sano, graduating to Kent, and finally becoming Marlboro men, we mostly stopped smoking in our mid-twenties. But, as some of you may remember, it was unusual back then not to smoke.
While Vic, Mike and I all attended the same Junior High, I didn't really get to know Vic until the 9th grade by which time each of us were attending different high schools. Mike, Henry, Gene and I all left junior high after the 8th grade to attend the High School of Music & Art. Ray went to Stuyvesant, and Vic, after a year at Brooklyn Tech (something I didn't remember until the reunion) left to attend the Franklin School, a private school in Manhattan.
Mike and I met in junior high in a schoolyard fight that started with insults (mainly reflections on each other's incipient manhood, lack of courage, and sexual orientation), led to shoving and, happily, little more. After that, we became fast friends. Since he lived just up the block from me, we spent a lot of time at each other's apartments. Mike introduced me to Vic as well, and soon we were all hanging out. Mike's father was a dentist, while both Vic's father and mine were lawyers. My father specialized in international law and Vic's in literary property and civil liberties law. As libidinous teen-agers, we were thankful, to a boy, for Vic's father's role in allowing all America to read "Lady Chatterley's Lover" in (at last) unexpurgated form. (Vic, while still a young man, was later to lose his father in a senseless mugging, something which shocked us all.)
As mentioned above, Gene, Henry, Mike and I met as high school freshman. Since Mike & Vic and Henry & Ray were already friends, they were quickly integrated into our little clique. Because girls, at this point, were largely a pipe dream (wet or otherwise), we were able to devote our copious spare time to honing our smoking and poker-playing skills. In the interest of full disclosure, Ray was the earliest and most successful of our group in attracting girls. This, however, inspired more admiration than jealousy, as he was never boastful in that regard. The rest of us were quite modest about our conquests, and with good cause. (I remember our once collectively visiting a hooker--Carmen by name--and, after dickering over price, only one of us chose to meet her $10 price at the expense of his virginity. It was not me, and that's all I the identification I will provide. The rest of us were able to brag that "we never paid for it." (For a while, that was to prove an empty boast, since none other of us was to get "it" free or otherwise, for several years to come.)
Ray and Gene's parents both came from immigrant backgrounds, Ray's came from Eastern Europe by way of France and Gene's from Russia. Both Ray's father and Gene's mother and step-father were in the jewelry business. None of us was an only child, although, apart from Ray's younger brother and Mike's younger sister, the other four of us all had older siblings. Henry was the youngest of three brothers, and lived with his mother, who not only was in the furniture business, but the person to whom I turned when my wife Riki and I were furnishing our first home. While some might challenge our "retro" sense of style, we still utilize some of the things we bought many years ago. Henry was the only one of the bunch who came from what was then called "a broken home." After leaving Henry's mother and children, he continued to visit his sons on weekly basis for a few years. By the time I met Henry, at age fourteen, his father (by what seems to have been mutual consent) had long ceased having contact with his children. Henry's late mother, Lillian, was a strong and fine woman, who, in addition to running a furniture business, looked after her sons with love and devotion. Although my parents were married, my father's international law practice kept him abroad for several months of the year. As such, I understood (at least in part) the heavy burden a mother faced in raising a family on her own. Friday evening chicken dinners with Henry, his mother and two brothers (prepared by their gruff maid, Ivy) were a welcome tradition in which I was frequently fortunate to participate.
Henry and I were in the same "official class," and quickly bonded. While there were always shifting alliances, we became best friends, much in the way Mike and Vic were. But, given the adolescent nature of always jockeying for position ("my turn to walk in the middle"), there were times throughout high school when each of us had "special relationships" with others, which usually enabled us to gossip about those not present. Gene had an older brother, Alex, who was a couple of years ahead of us at Stuyvesant and, as such, bigger, tougher (an easy one) and cooler (equally easy).
Henry had two older brothers, one of whom--though short-- was a star basketball player in high school. (In one of life's many ironies, Henry was, by far, the tallest of the three brothers, and limited his basketball contacts to being assistant manager of our high school team.) Although Music & Art had no fencing team, Gene later joined his older brother, Alex, on the fencing team at NYU (along with Neil Diamond, who was to go on to musical stardom). Ray was also a varsity fencer at City College, one year winning the national saber competition. It must have been in their European blood. Needless to say, whatever our petty differences, none of the rest of us ever challenged either Ray or Gene to a duel. Differences were, more often than not, resolved by "choosing" (i.e. "once, twice, three, shoot!")
Vic and Mike were also good athletes. Although I was the only one of us to "letter" in tennis in high school and college, both Vic and Mike were good tennis players. We used to play tennis in Central Park's public courts, and frequently play pick-up basketball in the 79th street playground on Riverside Drive. Our favorite indoor sport was unquestionably table tennis, which we played on the table my father had been cajoled into permitting me to have in my room. While this left room for little else than my bed and a (largely unused) desk, it seemed a worthwhile "sacrifice."
Gene and Henry (unlike Vic, Mike and I) hit their growth spurts early, and were six-footers by the time they were sixteen. They were both handsome guys, and used to argue about which of them more closely resembled Ricky Nelson (the heartthrob son of television's Ozzie & Harriet). In fact, neither of them looked remotely like Ricky, but they did fine looking just as they did. We were (he says modestly) a good-looking bunch, although, as indicated above, that was not validated by an early rash of social successes.
For reasons I still cannot understand (apart from his living above 100th street), I do not recall ever having been in Gene's apartment. The last time I had seen Gene (prior to the reunion) was at his wedding, thirty-three years ago. Although Gene was partially Jewish (his brother, Alex, was bar-mitzpha'd, and actually lived in Israel for a couple of years), Gene had no apparent religious identity, and later married a woman in an elaborately Christian ceremony, in which his new mother-in-law recruited the balance of the big six to stand by the pulpit and loudly lead the congregation in the singing of Christian hymns. With Mike half-Jewish and the rest of us completely so (lapsed or otherwise), we were odd choices for such a choir. Although I had no recollection of it, Gene mentioned at the reunion that this was not only his second marriage, but that my father had handled the divorce from his short marriage. While Henry was also on his second marriage (his divorce being the first case I, sadly, handled as a newly-minted lawyer in 1972), each of the big six has been married (Henry included) for over thirty years, with three of us, much longer. Given the dismal national statistics, this should stand as our signal collective achievement. As for children, Ray Vic, Henry and Mike each had three three (In Vic's case, his oldest child tragically died many years ago in a terrorist attack in Europe). Gene and I have two each, and Mike, Ray and I are each grandparents, several times over. Vic's son, who runs a large soccer-related website, joined us for dinner and enjoyed being with his father's old friend. Henry's youngest child, though confined to a wheelchair due to cerebral palsy, joined us as well, and had a very good time.
College more or less split us up, as it has a way of doing. While Gene started college at George Washington and Mike at Upsala, they later transferred to NYU, where Henry was already a student. Ray did his undergraduate work at City College, and got his master's at Columbia. Vic and I had both gotten into Hobart, but I decided to opt for Alfred University in upstate New York based less on academic reasons (heaven forbid!) than the easier possibility of making a varsity team (which wasn't as difficult as it would have been at bigger schools). Hobart and Alfred were close enough for Vic and I to visit each other frequently, and he once floated me an interest-free $80 loan to help out with a portion of a poker debt that already had me waiting on tables at my college fraternity. That and Vic's loan spared me having to tell my father (who--as it turned out--would have understood better than I would have then suspected) of my dissolute ways. It was, happily, the last such indebtedness I was to endure, and for that, I remain indebted to Vic.
You might wonder (I know I did) what it was like seeing these once inseparable friends after so many years. Although Henry and I have stayed in reasonably close touch (once or twice a year), I hadn't seen Michael, Ray, or Vic for at least ten years (our last reunion) and Gene, about twenty-five years ago, at a still earlier reunion. Apart from Henry and me, neither Gene nor Michael had (to my knowledge) ever attended a high school reunion. Interestingly, Vic and I had an odd falling out many years ago. While neither he nor I were parties to it, something was apparently said between our wives (of which my wife has only a guess), which resulted in us only seeing each other in reunions organized by others. That said, we had a very good time together during this reunion, and I think have buried whatever hatchet may have existed in the past. Vic, by the way, and I were counselors at the same summer camp where I met my wife, Riki, and I was able to share some old camp pictures with him.
As with camp, each of us had special connections shared only with one other person. Vic and Henry enlisted in the Army reserves together (the so-called "six month deal" in which one's short stretch of active duty was followed by five and a half years as once a week reservists). While Ray served in the Israeli army, Mike married early, and was draft-exempt under the "Kennedy rule" then in effect. Gene spent two years in the Army as a writer for "Stars & Stripes," and afterwards became a writer for an aviation magazine. The rest of us nurtured our very own "urban legend" that he was in the CIA. I wound up serving a four-year (count-'em) hitch in the Air Force as an officer, which is something for another blog.
As for weddings, while we all went to Gene's, the rest were only sparsely attended. I think Mike got married in a private family ceremony. I went to both of Henry's weddings. He was best man at my wedding, and Vic (who, as mentioned above, was friendly with both Riki and me) was an usher at mine. Vic got married abroad with Gene and Mike in attendance and Ray, I think, was overseas and married prior to 1965.
Of the six of us, Henry and Gene are the only ones fully retired. Ray and Vic, as mentioned earlier, are still working full-time. Mike and his wife, Eileen, have largely retired from her family's packaging business, but still consult. In addition, their downtown loft (where we had the Sunday part of our reunion) reflects much of the extensive art collection that they have amassed over the years. In addition to all kinds of works of art on display, they have a large collection of museum quality masks and photographs. Considering that four of us were once art students, it is nice to see that at least one of us has devoted much of his spare time to keeping the flame alive. I retired from a career as a corporate and securities lawyer in 2008, and continue to do some legal consulting, blogging, and indulging my log-time love for folk music as a singer/songwriter (see www.folklawproductions.com). In addition, I continue to love playing tennis, something I hope to do as long as I am ambulatory (so far, so good).
As for health, the only major issue of which I am aware among the big six was Gene's having had a multiple by-pass a few years ago. That said, although his once red hair is thinner and whiter and his face-full of freckles have long-since vanished, he looks terrific. Henry and Ray both have full heads of white hair and remain handsome and healthy-looking. Mike has lost some hair, but remains trim and otherwise looks much as he did. Only Vic, who always had a wiry and athletic physique has developed a bit of a paunch. Along with me (and I appreciate the company), he is the only one among us to still drink hard liquor. Perhaps the others know something we don't--or vice-versa.
The reunion was great, and it is surprising how little we have actually changed. I had gone to it with somewhat ambivalent feelings, all of which vanished within minutes of seeing my old chums. I think my mixed feelings stemmed from my recollections of a time in which we all were struggling with what were then called "growing pains." It is, as you doubtless know, difficult being a young man of fifteen. As Mike correctly said to me in a post-reunion e-mail, we are older, but the same. I reminded him of (our contemporary) Paul Simon's stanza from a version of "The Boxer" that he reserves for live performances--"...it isn't strange, after changes upon changes, we are more or less the same; after changes, we're more or less the same." That proved to be true for the six of us, and--I believe--all to the good.
