I went through the college as a young 16 year old, still living at home in Washington Heights, focused on a pre-med education and adolescent socialization. I helped out on the Columbia Review, wrote humerous poems for the Spectator under the pseudonym of "jog," was a "manager" of the baseball team (for which I won my letter C), and got to know the football stars. In the last position, I kept the score of the Yale game once and wrote in a left-handed first baseman for Yale named George H. Bush.

In retrospect, I considered my academic approach to Columbia adequate and sufficient for me to go on to medical school. My high point was in writing the lyrics for the 1949 varsity show and the pre-medical shows we put on irregularly. I really wanted to go into theatre, but the family roadmap was to medical school, with a personal goal of becoming a psychiatrist. To be honest, as a New Yorker living at home, I saw Columbia College as an extension of a local high school.

Today, in my life voyage at an age I never considered to be possible, I look at the college (and the medical school) with envy. Not only has the campus been upgraded, Baker Field been improved, but the college is actually in the world of both Morningside Heights and New York City while the medical school sends the students into the third world after the first year! How I envy both the college and the Med School students! The excitement of serving others early turns me on, and I experience envy for the present students.

This is not to say that I haven't done my share of serving others. As a psychiatrist in Boston, I taught both students and "patients." I started the Boston Family Institute to teach family therapy and did more in workshops in 40 of the United States, Canada, Mexico, England, Holland, and Israel among other venues.

I travelled extensively, raised three children, and stayed married for 35 years (till we divorced -- and remarried), adding four adult children to the previous three and becoming a grandfather to seven grandchildren. So life has been busy and I have done my share of useful and even stupid things in the 77 years.

But looking back at my years at Columbia College, I regret my then adequate approach and envy the exciting milieu for the current classes.

I will add that i have reconnected with my musical partner of the '49 varsity show, Dick Chodosh, with the common goal of writing another show. I also met Dick Hyman ('48), who was playing jazz in San Antonio, where I am currently living near my step-daughter and our two grandchildren. I miss the East Coast, both Boston and New York, being known as a "liberal" from New England and New York. I have discovered the Democratic party in Texas as an underground insurgent entity, and still made friends with Texans who have a Southern graciousness along with their Texan pride. I miss "you-all" and follow the growth of my Columbia College friends with my own pride, regret, and envy, telling my new friends what a special place Columbia College has become in my cataract-filled eyes, and encouraging them to send some high school football stars to the gem of the Ivy League. "Forget Harvard!" I say. "Columbia's the best. It lives in, and serves the real world!" I just wish I were a teen-ager again -- for many reasons, but mostly to attend Columbia fully and with pride.