What eighty looks like

Today, the last day of 2010, is the 80th birthday of my friend Herb Sturz, one of the most useful citizens this city, or any city, has ever seen.  In paying tribute to Herb on this occasion, it occurred to me that he is one of at least five people who are very important in my life who turned 80 this year, and I've given toasts at parties for four of them.   So let me shout out to all, starting -- and at greater length, since it is his actual birthday today -- with Herb.

A few weeks ago (since it's hard to hold a proper birthday party for someone born on New Year's Eve),  Jack Rosenthal, Fritz Schwarz and I, along with six other friends of Herb's, threw him a cocktail party at the Century Association.  Ed Koch, freshly turned 86 himself, who Herb served as Deputy Mayor and City Planning Commission head, gave the main toast (a funny and rambling review of the Koch administration with periodic appearances by Herb), followed by the ever-dazzling Amanda Burden, Jack and me.  Here is a bit of what I had to say:

When Jack and I talked last week about who would cover what in our toasts for Herb’s 80^th birthday, I think he suggested something along the lines of:  I’ll take education and housing, and you cover justice.  It IS tempting to use this occasion to catalog Herb’s public achievements, but fortunately, in the five years since some of his gathered to surprise him on his 75^th birthday, those have been well chronicled by Sam Roberts in the biography, A Kind of Genius.  So I want to take a few minutes to talk about Herb the writer, reader and friend.

Herb the writer.  Before he did any of the things we most associate him with, Herb and Elizabeth (Herb's wonderful wife, who left us earlier this year at 93), while living in Paris, wrote their novel Reapers of the Storm.  We can only hope this pioneer of encore careers, who has had more encores than Enrico Caruso in his heyday, may have another novel or two in him.

Is there anyone who uses language more carefully than Herb?  OK, maybe Jack.  But not many.  In the few years he contributed carefully-crafted editorials and essays to the Times as a member of its editorial board, Herb waxed eloquently not only on burning justice issues like the shackling of pregnant prisoners, but found time, Sam Roberts reminds us, to get around the city and write about … well, about people like himself, who see a problem and then get to work on it, like a street musician who set up a Lower East Side soup kitchen – “street people, taking care of themselves, and extending that care to others,” Herb wrote.

Herb the reader.  His famous letter to John Steinbeck, written while a graduate student in American literature at Teachers College, in which Herb told the famous novelist he was moved most by “the poetry, the toughness and the integrating beauty” of key chapters in The Grapes of Wrath, is an insight we could well apply to Herb himself.  “You are the first critical person,” Steinbeck replied to the young Herb in a handwritten letter, “who seems to have suspected that they had a purpose.”

Herb is often the first person to see the purpose, and there are legions of the young and now no-longer-young whose sense of possibility for themselves was first sparked by Herb’s vision of their future, and whose shaky confidence that they might make a mark in the world and do some good was bolstered, as Steinbeck did for Herb, by his critical attention and kindness.

If I had to use one word to describe Herb, it would be “kind.”  In fact I wish I had thought to say to Sam that he could have saved a word in the title of the biography, calling it instead, “A Kind Genius.”  I had the fortune to have Herb as a member of the board at OSI for over ten years, and while we became good friends over that time, and his judicious interventions in meetings were always laced with good and cogent – though never intrusive or directive – advice, what meant the most to me was the warmth of Herb’s support and the generosity of his compliments.  I am sure hundreds of others could say the same, but it detracts not a bit from the fact that each one of us feels that in Herb’s world we are special.  Because we are, such is the quality of his loving attention.

To bring things around full circle, there are few policy wonks among us – and Herb, if anything, is a certified policy wonk – whose eyes light up most when talking about the novel he’s just read, or the play or movie he’s just seen, and in the many meals of our friendship Oscar Wilde is much more likely to make an appearance than William Julius Wilson.

“Most good writers I know,” Steinbeck wrote to Herb, “have no time for immortality.”  And that, again, is the essence of Herb – too busy, too outward-directed, to think about immortality. Which is why he is well on his way, eighty years in, to achieving it.

I think it was Gloria Steinem, still looking fabulous at 76, who said, on her 50th birthday, when told how fabulous she looked,"this is what 50 looks like!"  So I'll go next to my Mom, Barbara LaMarche, who turned eighty on June 24, who could very well say the same, to incredulous admirers, about her own eight decades.  We threw her a big party in our hometown, Westerly, full of friends, family, an open bar, toasts, songs and a slide show panorama of her life.  The high point, of course, was Mom's own rendition, to the accompaniment of my brother the pianist, of her signature song, "It Had to Be You."  She can be seen above belting it out.

To say I would not be the person I am today without my mother is to state the obvious, though since it is not always obvious to her, I will elaborate a bit.

Along with my Dad -- dead thirteen years ago tomorrow -- she made me feel that I was the most special child on earth, that there was nothing that I could not do, and that confidence has helped me to achieve more than I ever thought possible.  She showed me a love of words and reading which are central to my life.  She is the most resilient person I have ever met, and when she takes a knock she gets up stronger the next day.  I learned to look forward, rarely back.  She made our home a welcoming place, and I love to play host.  She had and has all the time in the world to spend with the old and reach out to the young, and I carry that on in my work and life. She can not keep your mouth shut about what she thinks is wrong, as so many passionately intemperate letters to the Westerly Sun attest, and well, look what I do for a living.  Whatever is good about me bears her indelible stamp.

Lisa's Dad, Gerhard Mueller, is another 1930 baby -- what a remarkable year -- and we feted his  birthday, December 4, with a global assembly of family and friends in Corpus Christi, Texas earlier this month.  To appear, as I did, in a beloved daughter's life a few decades into adulthood, in a close and loving family, is to pose a bit of a challenge, and the shelves of libraries and the couches of therapists attest to how challenging that can be, and how often it doesn't go well.  From the minute I met him almost five years ago, Gerry (and Coralie, too, Lisa's terrific Mom, but she turns eighty in 2012) embraced me lovingly and fully, and my midlife entry into the Mueller world has been one of the great joys of recent years.  A big family guy myself, I find myself in awe of the way this accomplished man is at the center of communication and caring for dozens of relatives and near-relatives from California and Washington to the tiny hamlets of eastern Germany from which he came to the U.S. in his late teens (to live with an American family, the Shryers, who had an orange farm, and to whom he remained close all their lives; as the photo above indicates, the orange thing took, too).

Gerry's public life has been one of great impact in his chosen field of accounting education -- as a pillar of the University of Washington business school faculty, as a member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, past president of the American Accounting Association, and much more, all chronicled in a professional biography released earlier this year, which aptly gives him credit for virtually inventing the field of international accounting standards.  But despite a legion of academics and practitioners for whom he has been a mentor and inspiration, I am pretty sure Gerry views his highest accolade as the Opa of his loving family, and with a close vantage point on that, I can say that fewer of life's honors are more deserved.

Norman Dorsen, for almost fifty years a professor of law at New York University, is another person whose influence is seen in hundreds of former students who have taken their places in the leadership of public interest law in the academy, on the bench, and in the nation's leading civil rights organizations, and when a few dozen of us (I'm not a lawyer, nor was I his student, but more on that in a moment) rose to toast him in September at his 80th birthday dinner at the law school on Washington Square, the foundation he had built (to use Burt Neuborne's image) seemed more secure than ever.  I first met Norman when I was a 22-year old peon -- a minute-taker for the ACLU board meetings -- in 1976, on the Saturday in December when he was elected chair of the board, a position he held for fifteen years.  The ACLU board meetings, then as now, run over two weekend days, and were then held at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel near Central Park.  Norman pulled me aside at the end of the Saturday session and asked me to meet him the next morning a half-hour before the other board members showed up.  The board -- then, as now, an unwieldy and contentious group of over 80 (what a coincidence!) people -- had hardened into factions and social groups, and Norman was eager to shake it up, so he had me work with him to move the tables into different configurations so that when the members arrived they wouldn't know where to sit.  That bit of creative instability was the beginning of Norman's considerable influence on me, to be sure, but more importantly on a great American institution, whose leadership he assumed at a moment of financial and organizational challenge.  In the annals of organizations, board chairs rarely get the credit they deserve, for if they do their jobs well, others shine.  Norman has long since become a dear friend, and his influence on me is hardly limited to the board room, but I went on to serve with him in later years as a member of the ACLU's board and executive committee, and there is no one from whom I have learned more about organizational leadership, or from whose wisdom I continue to benefit.

George Soros, the most famous, and controversial, of the group here,  turned eighty in August, and I  missed his giant party in Southampton, as I was on our annual vacation with the Mueller family on Whidbey Island, here off the coast of Seattle, where I am writing this now.  His life and deeds have been well-chronicled, and maybe someday I will write a bit about what it was like to work for and with this remarkable man for 11 years in which I had the privilege of founding and leading his U.S. philanthropy, spending about a billion dollars of his wealth (in other words, what he made in a day breaking the Bank of England).  A true public intellectual, a global statesman, a canny philanthropist, a guy with a knack for making money -- George is all these things.  What impressed me most, though, in years of close association, and what impresses me more each day from a distance, is that he truly believes in open society, in the play of ideas as the central operating principle of democracy.  Truly un-orthodox and un-ideological, he could not be further from his public caricature, and may I say while I am at it that he does more for freedom in an afternoon than Glenn Beck and his acolytes will do in a lifetime.  I was and am proud to play my small role in his accomplishments.

To all of these magnificent octogenarians, I offer in closing this poem from May Sarton, from her collection, "Coming Into Eighty."  Happy birthday, and many many more.

Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It's taken 
Time, many years and places; 
I have been dissolved and shaken, 
Worn other people's faces, 
Run madly, as if Time were there, 
Terribly old, crying a warning, 
'Hurry, you will be dead before-' 
(What? Before you reach the morning? 
Or the end of the poem is clear? 
Or love safe in the walled city?) 
Now to stand still, to be here, 
Feel my own weight and density! 
The black shadow on the paper 
Is my hand; the shadow of a word 
As thought shapes the shaper 
Falls heavy on the page, is heard. 
All fuses now, falls into place 
From wish to action, word to silence, 
My work, my love, my time, my face 
Gathered into one intense 
Gesture of growing like a plant. 
As slowly as the ripening fruit 
Fertile, detached, and always spent, 
Falls but does not exhaust the root, 
So all the poem is, can give, 
Grows in me to become the song, 
Made so and rooted by love. 
Now there is time and Time is young. 
O, in this single hour I live 
All of myself and do not move. 
I, the pursued, who madly ran, 
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

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