Ira Goldberg

What a ride we've lived through....Perspectives...

My older daughter is 40 years younger than me...almost to the day. She started college in 2004..I started back in 1964. I remember leaving her at her dorm and in a moment of reminisence, wondering if she could ever imagine what America must have been like 40 years previously...and using that time frame projecting back 40 years from 1964...to 1924...Lindburgh hadn't even thought about flying across the Atlantic...

Could any of us have imagined using
devices such as emails...?? ipods....?? pda's....???...COMPUTERS....????

I was almost 19 before my first airplane flight...how many of us flew for the first time at an earlier age...?? [not counting free flights to God knows where for all of us people out there with American flags next to profile names]

We read or hear stories of teenagers or very young adults getting killed for doing some really stupid things....there are several entries in my PHS yearbook talking about how exciting it was one evening to be with me in my family's 1961 Oldsmobile 98 streaming down Route 17 from Mahwah at 100 mph -totally sober and drug free -just to see if I could get that car to move that fast.

Good God.....Someone in our class is a GREAT GRANDPARENT...????????

Meeting Dave West on on board a destroyer in Newport, Rhode Island while we were both in the Navy.

Meeting Andy Dunn in Seoul, Korea while he was assigned to the Army Hospital there as a Dental Technician and I was a member the US Navy Advisory to the Korean Navy. He did an excellent job providing me with a first class teeth cleaning.

45 years in one sentence....college- navy-grad and law school-lawyer-banker-lawyer-living in NYC-San Francisco-NYC-married-divorced two great daughters....save the next 6250 characters for 50th...

Yup.....I was responsible for tying up hall traffic looking for my "contacts".

Starting a driver's ed on the road class on a late November Friday afternoon and never getting out of the parking lot...Like Michele See, I ran back into the school and ran down to the school office and blurted out the news to Mr. McDonough. He threatened to expel me on the spot. I literally shouted at him, "Put on the radio"!

October 1962..lunch in the cafeteria...low flying plane and kids started screaming.

Mr. Lanzalotta in geography class describing the difference between loess and chernozen ...

My total non-appreciation of the dedication and musical talent of Mr. Frank Reyerson in the band room. Playing three instruments - ok, not simultaneously - in Mr. Reyerson's
Big Band Sound specialty group - playing Glenn Miller's "In the Mood" on tenor sax.

Miss Behr teaching biology.....many earthworms and frogs died for a good cause...

Mr. Nardelli in physics describing "impetus"...

Kevin Sabella and I doing a skit from "Mr. Roberts" in Mr. Sanzari's English class and being gently admonished for using the word "bastard".....