Paul Simons

Sorry to hear about Mike Weiner passing. I wasn’t a close friend but I have a dim memory of lifting weights, maybe at Dana Cohen’s or Mark Kurtz’s place, friends through the music we were into. I was at the time the worst athlete on the planet and picking up a bar with weights on it was about all I was good for but I remember Mike accepting and encouraging me. He was a good guy then and from the posts here clearly a good man start to finish. Thanks Gail for posting the information and his own account of his condition. Rest In Peace Mike.

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

I just looked at Mike's last post on Facebook, in late April, about his condition and decision about discontinuing treatment. He received many loving and supportive comments from his friends, a tribute to how special he was. 
We have lost yet another of the class of '64 and each passing reminds me of my own mortality.  While I'm still here, I just want to tell all of you how much I appreciate your friendship that has continued throughout the years. 

Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

I was very sad to read about Mike Weiner. He seems to have had a good life, a full life, yet it is always too soon. 

I also want to echo Ann's comment. I cannot describe how much this forum has enriched my life, from sharing of phenomenal photos to reminiscing about fraternities to master sessions on slavery. I am touched by the level of caring shown by Gail and Ann, among others. We have really grown up! 

I just want to tell everyone before it gets taken for granted.

Stephen (Steve) Dixon

Gail,

It was off that April Facebook post that Mike and I reconnected. First via Facebook messages and eventually via email. We were cancer buddies, although Mike was being much more hard-hit than I am at this point. I sent him a book which he hated! 

What a great guy! Terrific outlook and sense of humor all the way through his last laps.

I am thoroughly bummed this morning. But I will get it back. I have a terrific example to follow.

Jon Singer

Whenever asked about male friends of my pre-Walnut youth, I rattled off what happily became my class of 64 playmates. Rather than an order that designated the "bestest", I've always placed them in geographic order, starting with the far out occupants east of Reading Road.  I can't tell you how many times I've replied with the order, "Weiner, Schloss, Steiner, Shapiro, Osher, Marks, Katona, Kreindler, Kanter, Bortz, Brower, and Mayerson." Every now and again I'd slip in the older/younger whiffle ballers, Goodman, Friedman, Sivitz, Kuby and Handler. It pains me to know that we all have lost another in our lineup. Mike, like the rest who were benched, will be with us forever.

Ira Goldberg

Thank you for sharing what sounded inevitable short of a miracle for Mike. I'll never forget that last dance at our wonderful most recent reunion. He and his smile, moves on the floor, sharing the good times. Gone too soon. 

Laura Reid (Pease)

So sorry to hear about Mike Weiner....such an all around nice guy.  I fondly remember his story about his search for lox and bagels in Fargo.  And thanks again to our "team" who keeps us connected through this forum.  We are so fortunate to be able to stay in touch and be updated about each other.....so much evident love and care for our fellow classmates.  We are all blessed to have each other.

Enjoy your holiday weekend with family and friends.

James Schloss

Mike Weiner's passing has made me sit back and think about how fortunate I have been to have Mike as a friend. The quote, "The real test of friendship is can you do literally nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy those moments of life that are utterly simple"? comes to mind. My time with Mike over the years since graduation has all been at reunions. Each and every reunion we always met, sat down for awhile, and talked as if time had stood still. Mike was always genuinely interested in what was going on with my life, my family and yes, my golf game. From the days growing up on Marion Avnue to Mike growing up on Lenox Place, we just bonded. Mike was a gift to me, thank you Mike. 

Jerry Ochs

Mike and I auditioned for the same part in Mary, Queen of Scots.  Was it ever performed or did the assasination of JFK force a cancellation?   I remember listening to a Reds home game on the radio as a tornado twisted its way up Vine Street.  They didn't postpone games due to imminent danger back then.  

Philip Spiess

Jerry:  Of course it was performed (see the photograph on my profile).  I have never quite understood what happened during my performance:  I was Lord Morton, one of the contemptuous Scottish lairds who despised Mary of Scotland; in fact, I was the one who killed her Italian secretary, David Rizzio (off stage).  The night of the performance, when I lunged into the wings to "kill" him, I stepped back on stage with my sword drawn and it immediately hit me:  my sword is supposed to have blood on it, and no good soldier would ever resheath a bloodied sword.  So I immediately wiped the sword blade on my sleeve and then resheathed it.  To my horror, here at one of the most dramatic moments in the play, the audience broke into laughter (which really irritated Wayne Gregory).  To this day, I'm not sure why they laughed -- it seemed the most logical thing for me to do.  Maybe Johnny Marks can explain it?

Let me just add that Lynn Gehler (Levinson) as Mary of Scotland was regal as all get-out, and Mike Weiner as Bothwell was appropriate unto the part.

Dale Gieringer

  Jerry -   Mary Queen of Scots was indeed called off on account of the assassination, much to my chagrin as I was very much looking forward to the cast party.   Sadly, it was postponed to the next day after the weekend of mourning, which happened to be a Tuesday.  We went through with the play on Tuesday evening, but you can't have a good cast party on a weekday.  Also, a couple pages of the play were skipped over because someone forgot their lines, cutting out one of my favorite lines.  I don't think anyone in the audience missed it.  I never watched the play straight through myself;  I thought it rather boring, but greatly enjoyed my own part, in which I opened the play by marching down the aisles playing the part of John Knox and loudly denouncing the dicing, games, whoring and other papistical uses of the flesh that were supposedly happening on-stage. 

Steven Levinson

I know that Lynn Queen of Scots skipped whole pages of the script, having not rehearsed since the postponement, and screwed a lot of the cast out of great lines.  Dale, you were in good company.

Jerry Ochs

I think Phil should have snapped his sword like a whip to throw off the blood, which is known as chiburi in Japan.

Philip Spiess

Unfortunalely, there was actually no blood on the sword (being near-sighted, I missed the kid who was playing Rizzio, otherwise I would have had him), so a shake would have just looked like -- a shake!  (I prefer malts, myself).  "Mary of Japan" is a play I would really like to see.

[Which brings us to the subject of the Japanese "Noh" play.  If you've ever seen one, or even read the libretto of one, you know why they're called "no play."  Any comment, Jonathan Marks?]

Jerry Ochs

I think it was Somerset Maugham who claimed the best thing about growing old is nobody expects you to jump off the high diving board.

Philip Spiess

(Except suicides.)  If you know anything about Somerset Maugham, it's that he probably drank one too many Gin Pahits in his lifetime.

Jerry Ochs

In an attempt to return to matters pertaining to our time at WHHS, I googled Mary, Queen of Scots and antisemitism.  I discovered the following.

The first recorded Jew in Edinburgh was one David Brown who made a successful application to reside and trade in the city in 1691.

In the Middle Ages, while Jews in England faced state persecution, culminating in the Edict of Expulsion of 1290 (some Jews may have moved to Scotland at this time) there was never a corresponding expulsion from Scotland, suggesting either greater religious tolerance or the simple fact that there wasn't a Jewish presence. In his autobiographical, Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood, the eminent Scottish-Jewish scholar David Daiches wrote that there are grounds for asserting that Scotland is the only European country with no history of state persecution of Jews.

Paul Simons

To further muddy the waters - they're already not only muddy, they're toxic, overheated, and ready to cut a giant iceberg loose in Antarctica - but when the matter of expelling Jews comes up I have something to say. When Christopher Columbus sailed to this continent he was the representative of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand who had just finished expelling Spain's Jews, by The Alhambra Decree of March 31, 1492. Columbus left months after that, August 9,1492.

From an Associated Press file: "Columbus had two goals in the Caribbean: to find gold and slaves. Columbus returned home to Spain and came back to the Caribbean with 17 ships and 1,200 men. His men traveled from island to island, taking Indians as captives. In 1495, in a large slave raid, Columbus and his men rounded up 1,500 Arawak men, women, and children, and put them in pens. They selected what they considered the best natives and loaded them onto ships back to Spain. Two hundred died en route. After the survivors were sold as slaves in Spain, Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."

I am not a fan of any of his activities, whether being in league with those who expel Jews or being an exploiter and slaughterer of indigenous peoples, so let the statues fall, or be moved to museums of oppression, along with those of defenders of slavery and owners of slaves.

Jerry Ochs

Paul,

Not many maps can make me sad but seeing the volume of resettlement in Poland in search of peace and security is heartbreaking.

Paul Simons

I agree Jerry. It’s was sorrowful and outrageous then and it is now as our own country is in the business of expelling people. Some cite “broke the law” as reason. Same as back in the sordid history we’re talking about when it was against the law for Jews to own land or be doctors. Laws are made by people in power and astounding as it may be people in power are often wrong. Very wrong.

Jerry Ochs

To turn the focus back to our time at WHHS, were we taught the history of any countries that didn't influence democracy.  I vaguely remember Mr. Knab's ancient history class and possibly something called civics.  When I became an adult I was shocked by how little I knew about the history of Asia, the Middle East, and even much of Europe when it was a bunch of small warring states.  Is anybody aware of the fact that Japan fought against the Axis in WW1 and was given bits of China and a bunch of islands tn the Pacific that had been German colonies as a reward?

Philip Spiess

Um, yes; that's what led to the major problems between Japan and China in the 1930s.  [N.B.:  They were called the Central Powers in those days, not the Axis powers.]  And then there was the matter of a certain young French Indo-China politician by the name of Ho Chi Minh, who was present at the Treaty of Versailles meetings, ending World War I, because he loved the United States and desperately wanted it to help free Indo-China from French rule.  But Woodrow Wilson would have nothing to do with the little nothing-at-all (I'm using a polite term here for a Vietnamese) and wouldn't give him the time of day (yes, Wilson was vastly impressed with himself) -- fast forward to the 1960s and you have one source of the Vietnam War.

As a student at Hanover College (with seven other of my WHHS classmates), under the Hanover Plan (the Liberal Arts Curriculum), we were required in our Junior Year to take a course called "Non-Western Studies"; you could choose between one on "India and Southwest Asia" or one on "China and the Far East."  Later, before I graduated, the college added a third course, "South Africa."  I myself opted for the India package, because I thought it fit in best with my major in English Literature (and so it did; we studied the works of Rabindrinath Tagore and Gandhi, among others).

Probably the biggest lack in our education (of those that you mention) was a failure to learn anything about the modern Middle East -- given the history of the world since we graduated, it would have been important, if not absolutely necessary.  I had to learn about modern Saudi Arabia on my own.  Was it desert or wasn't it?  Was it modern or wasn't it?  Was it tent villages or modern cities?  It was an eye-opener to learn that King Abdul Aziz (Ibn Saud) had contacted the United States in the 1920s to get the ball rolling on a joint oil production effort.  Modern Egypt I knew something of because of the Suez Canal Crisis and the United Arab Republic (remember it?). Iraq I knew only from following early news reports that its king, Faisal II, had been assassinated (1958).  I vaguely learned something about modern Israel in church and through the movie Exodus.  Much of the rest of the history of the Middle East and northern Africa I learned only starting in 2005, when I had to learn it for teaching 5th and 6th Grade History (Ancient and Medieval) and Geography. 

Dale Gieringer

    I fondly remember Ms. Baechle's (pron. Beckly)  Ancient and Medieval History course (9th or 10th grade), where we received an illuminating introduction to Middle Eastern history based on Breasted's aptly titled, if now outdated, classic text, "Conquest of Civilization."  It was fascinating to learn that the first written history came not from Egypt but Mesopotamia, the "cradle of civilization,"  specifically from ancient Sumeria, in present-day Iraq.  We went on to learn how the Sumerians gave way to the Akkadians, Bablylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians and Medes, Alexander the Great, and Romans;  all the while, Arameans, Philistines, Aryans,  two Hebrew kingdoms, Hittites and others nibbled around the edges.  That was ancient history;  moving on to medieval times, there were the Byzantine Empire, Mohammed and the spread of Islam, the Crusades, and finally the Turks' conquest of Constantinople in 1453.  These lessons came back to me forty years later when our nation's armed forces embarked on a crusade to bring the blessings of democracy to Iraq.  It occurred to me that no other part of the world had a longer,  uninterrupted tradition of autocratic government, stretching back 5000 years.  Subsequent events were hardly suprising in this light.    Too bad our nation's leaders never took Ms. Baechle's history class.

Jeff Daum

A bit of diversion .  Last night I tried to capture the comet NEOWISE.  After all, my expectation is that I won't be here when it comes around again in 6,800 years...

At any rate, from where we are up in the mountains looking across to where NEOWISE would be a little after sunset, it turned out that the path was directly behind Las Vegas, and the city lights were too bright to see the comet.  But it turned out to be a beautiful night.

Philip Spiess

Dale:  As George S. Kaufman said, "What's one man's Mede is another man's Persian."