WOODY SILFIES NEW
To my fellow classmates. The life stories that you’ve written exude candor, grit, perseverance, and even poetry. They speak volumes about your ability to survive, adapt, thrive, and endure as you navigated a world turned upside down with the flick of a switch. Wow! You guys really rock. I’m sorry that I missed so many reunions—especially the 50th and 55th. I was in France for the former and in Canada for the latter. With that, let me humbly attempt to make a meaningful contribution to this impressive anthology. My memory of the years at Northampton is now informed by a lifetime of experiences and exposures to alternative cultures, ethnicities, lifestyles, mindsets, and tectonic shifts in mores, technology, and all the rest. In retrospect, I see my high school years as a sleepwalk toward a precipice of change born of war and ancillary movements—anti-war, civil rights, feminism, gay rights, counterculture, and gender identity. Get good grades, respect your elders (especially teachers), be a good Christian, go to college, get a good job and become a productive citizen. Those were the values instilled in me by my parents and by my teachers. True to my parents’ aspirations for me, I dutifully started on a scripted linear progression toward a degree in business administration. The event that eventually led to the initial jolt to this “preordained” trajectory was the defeat of the French army in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, which accelerated the Unites States insidious slide into the mire that became the Vietnam War. In the summer after I graduated from Northampton, I was shooting pool at the Poconos resort hotel where I played drums from midnight to three AM in a jazz/pop trio. In the background, from the TV, I heard President Johnson say something about some sort of kerfuffle in a body of water called the Gulf of Tonkin. I paid the newscast no heed. After all, I was on my way to Rider College (now University) and a degree in economics. Following my graduation in June 1968, facing the prospect of being drafted, feeling a twinge of duty, and blinded by a hope that the Army would give me a choice of specialties, I enlisted. Per the Army’s choice made for me, I provided logistics support for an artillery battalion in Vietnam while Janis Joplin warbled, and Jimi Hendricks strummed the National Anthem at Woodstock. I fared better than they. Although my tour in Vietnam was, happily, uneventful, I completely missed one of the worst events to befall my unit. A black soldier went to an orderly room and opened fire on five of his fellow soldiers. I had just arrived at the compound that evening and had not yet been assigned to a unit nor given any gear. From my cot in the “library” I could hear the doppler effect of the medivac helicopter blades and the incessant reports of outgoing artillery rounds—30-millimeter canons, quad-50 machine guns, 105-millimeter howitzers, and mortars—per the nightly Standard Operating Procedure designed to deny erstwhile miscreants access to Bien Hoa Air Base that our unit was assigned to protect. I later heard that the victims survived. One of them was put on the “dead” pile at the triage unit at Long Binh Army hospital but was moved after his body began to twitch. My only war casualties were my first, ill-advised marriage and a scar of cynicism about the war on my psyche that lingered much longer than I care to admit. Upon my return from Vietnam, armed with an extended invitation to Lehigh University and the GI bill I enrolled in a master’s degree program in business economics. I graduated in June 1971 and promptly joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a defense-economic analyst specializing in Soviet aviation industries. I moved to northern Virginia and stayed. In a rewarding career I was privileged to work with many very smart people. One colleague was an excellent economist (and one-time freedom rider) who spoke seven languages. He exemplified the caliber of people at CIA and the eclectic nature of the workforce. After 29 years, with a mid-career hiatus of 5 years, I retired. A couple highlights: I worked with the Lockheed team that designed the U-2 (of Francis Gary Powers infamy) and SR-71 reconnaissance planes; and interviewed in a safe house in Arlington a Soviet fighter pilot who few his MIG-25 jet to Japan and defected. The pilot and I were both in our late twenties at the time and had a sympatico exchange. I served during the administrations of Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43. Near the end of my career, I divorced my second wife and married my current wife, Margie. The third time was a charm and one of the very few exemplary decisions that I’ve made. She is my north star. She inspires me every day. She graduated from Smith College Summa Cum Laude. She reads hundreds of books every year. She is a volunteering juggernaut—Travelers Aid, hospital aid, hospice care, mentoring, animal shelter poop scooper, mediator for Virginia courts and US military, and food pantry distributions aide. Margie and her family introduced me to Jewish life and culture in New York city. Her parents, offspring of immigrants from Europe grew up poor in Alphabet City (when it really was Alphabet City) in lower Manhattan. On the City’s dime, her mother graduated from Hunter College and father from the CCNY. Her father became a successful CPA with an office in the PAM AM (now Met Life) building overlooking Park Avenue—a classic American success story. Margie and I have been together 30 years; married for 20. No kids. I am a part-time election officer and enjoy spending the occasional 18-hour day at our local polling precinct to help process and tabulate votes. I appreciate the earnestness with which my neighbors cast their votes, especially when they bring their kids and grandkids—wide-eyed as all get out when they diligently slide their parents’ ballots into the scanner. Otherwise, I relax with athletics, travel, and sessions at the pub with my friends. I would never call myself an athlete, especially by Northampton’s lofty standards. Nevertheless, I’ve discovered that a sustained fitness regimen offers life-long benefits. I’ve played golf pretty much my whole life. As my career began, I started running and continue to run to this day. Next up, skydiving. After 198 jumps I’d had enough but in the interim I added strength training to my fitness regimen. I also became pretty darn proficient at packing a parachute. Late in my career, I joined a gym close to home. My gym-rat friends comprise a veritable rainbow coalition who inspire me every day. They coaxed me into adding cycling, swimming, and, ultimately, triathlons to my fitness regimen. I completed 19 Triathlons from 2009 to 2013—including four Philadelphia triathlons and three New York City triathlons. Margie’s encouraging words to me before each triathlon: “Don’t drown, stay on the bike, and don’t collapse during the run. Otherwise, I couldn’t care less how you finish.” Foreign travel became for Margie and me another source of inspiration and connection to our European roots and progenitors. Land tours and river cruises became our go-to mode of travel. They educate us. They surprise us. They give us access to an impressive array of local guides who give us immersive exposure to histories, cultures, and legacies bequeathed to us. In Venice, we participated in a tour of the Jewish quarter (its own island in the maze of canals) whence came the word “Ghetto”. In Bath, England, our local guide told me he knew the late chief of protocol, George Eadie, who exchanged many visits with my late uncle, Archie Leigh, during Archie’s long tenure as mayor of sister-city Bath (Pa) in the 1960s and 1970s. In Trier, Germany’s oldest city, our local guide told me that Pennsylvania Dutch resonates with her because she sees similarities with the dialect spoken in Trier today. Trier is part of the German state of Rhineland Palatinate, whence our German ancestors emigrated to the Lehigh Valley via the Port of Philadelphia. In Edinburgh castle, Scotland, on a prison cell door, we saw a US sailor’s etching of a US frigate from the Revolutionary War era complete with an unfurled American flag at its stern proudly displaying the Stars and Stripes with a circular pattern of stars. The Scotts preserved the etchings on that door behind plexiglass. As an aside, the vista from Edinburgh castle includes the monument to Sir Walter Scott. My late Paternal Grandmother, Mabel Scott was a descendant of the renowned poet and author. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, we visited the cemetery where the victims of Titanic disaster are interred. The grave sites are arrayed in the shape of a ship. In Rouen, France, we visited the site where Joan of Arc was burned alive by the British, literally across the street from the restaurant where Julia Child got her inspiration to become a chef. In Vatican City, our local tour guide surreptitiously arranged an after-hours visit to the Sistine Chapel for 24 of us. We had the entire chapel to ourselves for a half-hour or so. Our myriad travels have taken us to dozens of cities and historical sites over the years. These experiences have been priceless and have given us an appreciation of our heritage and how small the world can seem. Although my horizons have been expanded considerably since my high school graduation, I look back with respect and appreciation of the public-school educators at Northampton. They etched a solid foundation of knowledge and sage advice onto the tabula rasa of this insecure, small-mill town-Pennsylvania boy and thus prepared me for the seismic change that we, all of us, were about to endure. The contributions to this anthology provide testimony to our classmates’ resilience born of qualities bequeathed to us by our teachers. I’ve been lucky!
