A SHORT HISTORY OF MY LIFE SINCE JUNE 1963
 

I spent the summer of 1963 at home in Albany, with a brief excursion to Washington DC in August to participate in the great civil rights march that mobilized over 100,000 people to protest the racial discrimination and government-enforced segregation that were still widespread in this country at the time.  When you see those film clips of the crowds gathered around the Reflecting Pool, with Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech coming over the loudspeaker, I’m in there somewhere.

In September I headed to Ithaca NY for four years at Cornell University.  Marc Kessler was my freshman year roommate and a frequent contact throughout those Cornell years.  I also ran into Gay Simmons occasionally on campus.  Cornell was then populated by some students who later became well known, not always for the best of reasons.   I was lightly acquainted with Paul Wolfowitz, who as Donald Rumsfeld’s right-hand man at the Pentagon was one of the architects of the Iraq disaster.  He was a year or two ahead of me, but the Class of 1967 also included Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor, and Mark Green, a prominent New York City politician who was almost elected mayor.

I graduated from Cornell with a degree in history.  I also learned the Russian language and decided to pursue graduate study in the history of Russia and Eastern Europe.  Another thing I learned at Cornell was how to interact with the opposite sex, something that eluded me during my Milne years.  At Cornell I also became involved in protest against the Vietnam War.  I like to boast that I was protesting against the Vietnam War before most people knew there was a Vietnam War.  These activities continued when I entered graduate school at Columbia University in the fall of 1967.  I was a participant in the famous 1968 campus uprising, although I was not arrested, since I wasn’t one of those occupying a building.  I did have the honor of being walloped on the head and chased by the police on campus.

At this time, draft deferments for grad students were being phased out.  I had a deferment only for my first year of graduate school and by the summer of 1968 was classified 1-A.  As an ardent opponent of the war, I was determined not to serve in or assist the military in any capacity.  I planned to refuse induction, accompanied by a demonstration of support on the part of Albany anti-war activists.  I expected either to stand trial and face up to five years in Federal prison or go to Canada (I hadn’t decided which course to take).  At one point I received a draft notice, but it was canceled because of procedural irregularities.  Then, after a hearing in January 1969, the Albany draft board unexpectedly granted me conscientious objector status.

And so I didn’t have to emigrate or go to prison after all.  I was required to leave graduate school and do two years of alternative service, which I performed as a lab technician at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.  When that finished, in the summer of 1971, I had an opportunity to go to medical school but chose instead to return to grad school in Russian history.  That turned out to be an unwise decision from the career standpoint but an essential one for my life’s fulfillment, since it resulted in my meeting another Russian history student by the name of Pearl Spiro, to whom I’ve been married for the last 28 years.

When I went back to Columbia, given all the interruptions and distractions that had occurred previously, I essentially had to start over.  I passed my comprehensive oral exam in the spring of 1974.  I also managed to secure a place on the IREX academic exchange program and that summer headed off to spend a year pursuing dissertation research in the Soviet Union.  I was based in Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was then known) but divided my time about equally between that city and Moscow.  I also traveled widely in the Soviet Union, visiting the medieval Russian cities of the Golden Ring as well as several of the non-Russian republics that are independent states today, including Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Georgia.  Life in the Soviet Union was often difficult and frustrating, even for a privileged foreign visitor, but this was nonetheless a fascinating experience that I would not have missed for anything, even if it didn’t lead to a viable career.

When I returned from Russia, I needed several more years to figure out how to turn the material I had gathered into a dissertation.  I finished writing and defended successfully in the spring of 1979.  Later that year Pearl and I were married.  Unfortunately, as I was working my prolonged and interrupted way through grad school, the job market in my field was steadily eroding.  College teaching jobs in Russian history, the only position for which my degree specifically qualified me, were increasingly scarce.  For a few years I subsisted on post-doctoral fellowships.  In the spring of 1981 I got my one and only teaching job, a one-term replacement position at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.  Later that year, having been accepted for a second tour on the exchange program, I returned to Soviet Union and spent another ten months pursuing archival research.  This time I was able to share the experience with Pearl, who accompanied me as a spouse.

When we returned home in the fall of 1982, employment prospects in the field were especially bleak.  I continued to apply for the few jobs that were available but without success.  In the last year I was looking, there were six announced job openings in my field in the entire country, and it became clear to me that I wasn’t going to get one of them.  As I was by then in my late thirties, I felt I couldn’t wait any longer for steady employment and began looking around for another way to make a living.  The private sector seemed to have no interest in my services.  I sent out dozens of resumes but got no response.  I guess I was either overqualified or underqualified for any possible position, and there also was a recession going on at the time.

One thing I could still do, however, was score high on an exam, and so it seemed that civil service would be my meal ticket.  In the fall of 1983 I took an exam for a low-level position with the Social Security Administration and within a month was offered the job.

After a few years I was able to move to a somewhat higher-graded position as a claims representative in a field office in the Bronx.  In 1993 I was promoted to my present position as a supervisor in another Bronx Social Security office.  I haven’t tried to advance further.  Given my long record of protest against the policies of the Federal government (which, after Vietnam, included mass demonstrations in Washington against the Reagan Administration’s policies in Central America and in favor of a woman’s right to choose), it’s more than a little ironic that I ended up as a Federal employee.

In the meantime, Pearl was moving up through the ranks of the Columbia administration.  Today she is an Assistant Provost, and it is widely viewed that without her the university would collapse entirely.  I can readily believe that, given the amount of work that gets dropped on her.

After living for many years in Manhattan, I decided that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my days in an apartment and began to yearn for the kind of surroundings I had in Albany – trees, grass and a certain degree of separation from the neighbors.  In 1992 we bought an old house in Rockland County, a few miles north of the Tappan Zee Bridge, from which we now commute to our jobs in the city.  I enjoy the house a lot, although it keeps me very busy during the warmer months with various maintenance and repair activities.  I’m amazed by people who have second homes.  This one is enough of a handful for me.

I look forward to retiring in about three years, at which point I hope finally to have enough time to pursue my major interests.  I plan to spend some time visiting New York City – despite having spent nearly all my adult life in and around the city, I’ve never had time to do justice to its museums and other cultural amenities.  Travel to more distant points is also on the agenda.  My bookshelves are crowded with unread volumes that await my attention.  But classical music is what gives me the greatest pleasure and spiritual renewal.  Collecting and listening to recordings as well as attending concerts occupies most of my spare time now, and I hope to have much more time to devote to this pursuit in retirement.

I’m sorry to say that I haven’t had much contact with Milne classmates since graduation.  I’ve already mentioned seeing Marc Kessler regularly and Gay Simmons occasionally at Cornell.  While home for holidays during freshman year, I went out to the movies a few times with Janine Donikian.  I ran into Paul Feigenbaum several times at Columbia, where he was then a law student.  I saw Marc, Richard Luduena, Katie Wirshing and Sue Weinstock one time each in the 1970’s.  After that, there was nothing until I re-established contact with Marc and Richard in the last few years.  I greatly enjoyed seeing them again, and I’m looking forward to meeting many more classmates at the upcoming reunion.  Hopefully we’ll be able to recognize one another after all these years.