BA '55
I attended City College of New York because it required no tuition at all at the time. I just had to cover the expenses of books and other materials. It had an outstanding reputation for scholarship and for vocational concerns. The teachers and extracurricular activities, like the school newspaper and the magazines, stood out to me. Because of my experience in the campus publications, I became interested in a career in journalism, but the school didn't have a journalism degree at the time. There was a very well-known professor named Irving Rosenthal who was the head of the course on writing for articles and newspapers. This course led to my going to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, for my first journalism job. It lasted for four years. I left that newspaper and went to a paper with a much larger circulation, The Des Moines Register in Des Moines, Iowa. It was among the top ten papers in the country. After a couple of years that I left that and took the exam for the Foreign Service of the United States and joined the United States Information Agency in Washington. I was invited to join the Foreign Service in 1962. I'd gotten married by then. I was assigned to several countries after that because all our work was overseas in relation to explaining about the United States and working with exchange programs and various other information, communication, and media activities. That led to a career of 25 years living and working in five countries: India, Vietnam, Indonesia, the US, and London, England. It all started at CCNY. Everything I did was related to my time there. Now I'm retired with my wife in Florida. CCNY is a place for people who recently arrived in this country or never attended an institute of higher learning. They represent what I lived through. I certainly feel that supporting CCNY and its good works are an essential part of our democracy, nation, and people, the ones who will eventually lead this country.