Class of 1962

Memories 2007

The following four CNR-connected stories come from Doris Sieck Dubac:

Dr. Rogick
Around 1964, I was working on my first computer software project as a contract/consultant programmer at Western Electric at Fulton & Broadway (architecturally mediocre itself, but from the inside looking out, great views of the steeple of St. Paul's Chapel and upper-storey decorative stonework on a building to the north). One of my co-workers, who knew that I had gone to CNR, said -- Oh, he had just that morning read (? in the New York Times) the obituary of Dr. Rogick. I guess I was struck that he read the obituaries, that it was in a major paper, that he noticed that it was the College of New Rochelle. Back then, I tended to think of CNR as relatively unknown, not the best and not the worst, never had Dr. Rogick as a teacher, and seemed to remember her visually as dressed in subdued clothes and with a never-changing severe 1930's hairstyle. In ? 1972, Mary Dora Rogick was honored in the bryozoan name Rogicka.

Pelham Manor
In 1962, after the last CNR exam, I was up in Ithaca at Cornell, visiting an international student I had met at the National Student Association (NSA) summer 1961 national convention in Madison, Wisconsin. He arranged for me to stay at a house used by some graduate students in Ithaca. When they found out I went to CNR, they remarked about Barbara Lofrumento, whose 4 to 5 month pregnancy, abortion death, dismemberment, and garbage disposal and toilet disposal, I then knew nothing about. They told me the story was plastered on the tabloid front pages, and gave me a newspaper, which I remember spreading and reading on the ironing board I was then using. Later, back in the NY area, I think a fellow CNR student said her MD father, knowing the danger of such a late abortion, couldn't understand why Barbara's family, who presumably could have afforded it, didn't just send her on a European vacation to have the baby there. Another fellow CNR student friend remarked-- I'm Italian and proud to be Italian, but that damn "family pride / family honor"! Every time I come to CNR reunions, and drive through the Pelham area, I look at some of the lovely homes but imagine the turmoil/misery for Barbara Lofrumento.

The ambulance
My son Eric has been involved for almost twenty years with the Briarcliff Manor Volunteer Fire Department, first as a Whitby Junior High School arranged intern, then through years as a fire-fighter, and in more recent years, as an ambulance corps volunteer. We grew used to hearing the pager going off at all hours, giving the location and a brief description of the nature of the emergency - unresponsive woman at 85 Evergreen Drive, motor vehicle accident with multiple injured at Chappaqua Road and 9A, . . . Sometimes, afterwards, comments -- the van flipped over on the curve and the two workers inside, on their way home, were thrown, crushed, killed; the man was coming down to be with his young son at Thanksgiving, but was hit by another car and killed, and now the boy has no father anymore; . . . The ambulance takes some to Phelps Hospital in Sleepy Hollow, some to the Valhalla Medical Center. So, it especially struck me when I read obituaries for Nancy Quirk Keefe, (CNR '56), outstanding Westchester newspaper writer, who died (2004) of breast cancer. There was no wake -- she wanted her body donated to the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla. But somehow, what was most poignant to me was that, on the way from her Larchmont home to a New Rochelle hospital, that death finally came in that small, transient place, the ambulance.

The diamond
I do not remember all the details, but it was something like this: When I was working in IT ("Methods Research" then) at Equitable Life 1962-1964, one of my co-workers turned out to be a friend of the surviving fiancé of a CNR student (class of ? 1961) who was killed by a teenage driver in an auto accident -- they were in a little Volkswagen -- while they were going home to Long Island after the Senior Prom. (I remember on Sunday morning, going on the main path past Maura Hall, the Chapel and the Castle, and seeing a nun walking with her arms around a student with her head down, -- I later gathered that this was the roommate/friend of the student killed.) So at Equitable, I heard more of the story. Her fiancé had wanted her buried with her engagement ring on, but unknown to him, her parents had arranged for the ring to be removed before the casket was finally closed, and they had the diamond set into a pinky ring for him. What a good transformation I thought: the memory of the relationship is still with him, but the engagement is of the past. Life's journey continues.