Life after Reed

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When my sister, myself, and a Yalie-driver left the boarding schools of Easthampton, Massachusetts, I was a mirror of the political, social, and economic make-up of my diplomat parents. My father (click photo link), was a Nationalist KuoMingTang Foreign Service Officer, a 1921 Graduate of the University of Chicago, upper middle-class in the China of that time, but of moderate means in the US scale.

I, being a second son obtained as good an education as my first born brother. He had graduated with honors from Williston Academy (click photo link), a Seminary when Yale was a Divinity College; this automatically enrolled him into Yale. I was expected to follow him there. However, he knew all my regrets and when I received an invitation to enter MIT + another Liberal Arts College in a 5 year Plan, he was the one who suggested far away in the West, Reed College over Amherst and Swarthmore.

My conversion from a right wing Douglas MacArthur Republican came in the first months at Reed within the lunch confines of the Commons. Other notions about the world and life further changed me when I became close friends with Karl Metzenberg. He reminded me of my earlier chum, Paul Emin, at St. Francis Xavier College for boys in Calcutta, India.

1941-1945. Paul's father, the owner of a profitable shellac factory, lived in Gaulston Mansion. My family lived next door on the top floor of Stephens Court on Park Street. He invited me for dinner once and I attended my first dinner outside of my own home, Years later, I realized it had been a seder.

Earlier in 1952, I had fallen in love with Willoughby and feeling bereft, Karl invited
me to spend a summer in Chicago. The Metzenbergs lived on the Near North Side of Chicago not far from Astor Street. They lived across the street from the Ambassador Hotel in a Residence attached to the Hotel. They were German Jews who had arrived in the 19th. Century and by dint of hard work and marriage achieved the upper strata of society. Karl's grandmother, Mrs Weil, parents, sister, and especially his cousin Tony Rosenwald became a template for me of the new world. Over the years I have found their humor, their irony, and their love of life recurrent in many of my later friends.

I am thinking especially of my late friend, Billy Wilder, who had honed many of these traits. (I took a portrait of Billy in the '80s.) I regret I do not have one of the famille Metzenberg.

My two years at Reed were years of change and discovery. For someone as naive as I, secluded from society by gated prep schools, the freedom of action, the newly made acquaintance of the other sex, and the involvement of weightier issues all helped to...

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