OYSTER NEWS

NOVEMBER 2003

Newly-anointed Silver Professor, wife and friend, against the New York skyline.

s many of you know,  my uncle, Julius Silver, left a gargantuan amount of money to New York University for the purpose of creating new academic chairs.  When the gift was announced early last year, David Levering Lewis and his wife, Ruth Ann Stewart, were my guests at the celebratory dinner.  I invited them simply because I respect and enjoy them, although I admit it crossed my mind that David, then at Rutgers, would be an excellent candidate for a Silver chair.

Now that thought has become reality.  At a ceremony on October 9th, David and five other academics were appointed Silver professors.  I attended the investiture with pride and happiness — for myself, for David, and especially for the memory of Uncle Julie. 

At the dinner following the event, NYU President John Sexton stopped by our table and got down on his haunches between David and Ruth Ann to chat.  Faithful readers of this site will be gratified to hear that David immediately asked him, “Aren’t you going to kiss my hand?” (If you don’t get the reference, it’s because you have not kept up with Oyster news — q.v. 3/03 newsletter.)  At the least, one had to admire David’s boutade and his stunning lack of awe.

David and Ruth Ann are mildly amused by utterances of NYU Prez Sexton.

 

MORE PEARLS

nent Uncle Julie, I have received 169 bottles of wine from his estate.  Since he was a member of Les Chevaliers du Tastevin, they are pretty impressive, mostly Burgundies,  many of them from the ‘40s and ‘50s. I have been offered $500 apiece for some of them. The joker in the deck is that nobody paid attention to the wine cellar’s atmospheric controls for the last ten years or so of Julie’s life, and so the storage was poor. Opening the bottles is a crapshoot. I have tried six so far.  In all of them, the cork crumbled and the wine had to be filtered into a decanter. As it turned out, two were bad, four were good, actually very good.  I am looking for opportunities to pop some of the others. Any suggestions?

John Meeks and his wife Anita bought a vacation home in Santa Fe and soon thereafter attended a chamber music recital there at which violist Jethro Marks, grandson of Ed Marks performed on the same program with his mentor and colleague, Pinchas Zukerman.  The next day, John bumped into Jethro on the street and introduced himself as a member of The Oyster Foundation and thus an acquaintance of his grandfather.  A pleasant conversation ensued.

 


A worm attacked George Klein’s computer in Geneva and put it out of commission.  Solution: call cyberpriest Marty Moleski in Buffalo, NY, and have him set things right in a 3-hour conversation.

What’s new with Marty?  Only that his work-in-progress, “Michael Polanyi:  Scientist and Philosopher,” has been snapped up by Oxford University Press.  Polanyi was a Hungarian Jew turned Catholic, a physicist who was a contemporary of Leo Szilard and Edward Teller, although he followed a different path. The manuscript is due in March of 2004 and publication is planned for early the following year.  Scribble, scribble, Marty.

 

Eric Britton has been pouring every ounce of his prodigious energy into rescuing a Swiss manufacturing company on the brink of bankruptcy, but wants us all to know that he’s thinking of us.

Tim O’Brien is teaching law at either Loyola or Tulane (I forget which) which in any case necessitates his being in New Orleans two or three days a week.  He reports that one byproduct of his new role is that he is adding to his repertoire of Cajun recipes.

Elliott Jones attended the 50th reunion of the Harvard class of 1953 as Michael Halberstam’s widow, where many people remembered her late husband with great affection.  Due to her unusual first name (for a woman), Harvard bunked her in with a male member of the class, a circumstance that resulted in lots of excitement for all concerned.  Her suitemate turned out to be a suave Frenchman, who has been burning up the trans-Atlantic telephone lines ever since.  It will make a lovely movie, n’est-ce pas?

—Submitted by Stephen Banker
sbanker@aol.com