UCityClass1957

Dear Channing,
Many thank for the kinds words in your lengthy communique. I greatly appreciate the time and care of
sending them to me. I well remember you, your teenage appearance, your seat in class and your rather
singular calligraphy. How warm it is to renew our friendship. I spent two years from 1957-59 on a
teaching Fulbright in Italy at the Univ. of Rome, where I got to hear a speech by T.S. Eliot (a fellow St,
Louisan) in French and at the Univ. of Trieste.
My two years there afforded me the opportunity to travel throughout Europe. I returned to U. City in the
Fall of 59 and moved to Long Island in 1960 to head the English Dept at Adelphi Suffolk College
located in Sayville, Long Island. I then tranferred to the newly established Suffolk Community College
as head of the English Dept. I taught there from 1960 to 1991, when I had a massive heart attack. I have
since taught a class a year, including graduate courses at Stony Brook Univ. and Baruch College of the
City University of New York. My 46 years in New York have also afforded me the chance to lead many
educational tours to foreign countries, namely Egypt over thirty times (where I have become
acquainted with the only Muslim to win a Nobel prize for literature, Naguib Mahfouz whose works I have
lectured on a number of times), Morocco over 25 times, India and Nepal 3 times, Sicily, Italy, Tunesia,
Spain, Israel, Jordan, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. I led these tours with a colleague who was an art
historian who major was Islamic culture and who died five years ago. The aim of these tours was to
examine the cross cultural influences in history,art, mythologies,(religions), sociological conditions.
These travels have been profoundly rich in educational understanding. In these tragically bloody
times, the needs to understand other cultures, and to seek common interests, and roads to peace are
most imperative. In the middle East, I thought we might have had peace solutions at the end of the
Clinton administration