EMA laureate Stan Ritchie's remarks on Albert Fuller

Stan Ritchie

Anthony Martin writes: 

Dear Paul, 

I read with interest the acceptance speech of Stan Ritchie for an award from EMA and thought part of it (actually, much of it) should be on your AF blog. 

Keep me posted!

apm

Stanley Ritchie received the Howard Mayer Brown Award for lifetime achievement in the field of early music at the EMA Annual Meeting in Boston on June 12, 2009. Mr. Ritchie, a pioneer in the early music field in America, has been a professor at Indiana University since 1982. 

Stan Ritchie's acceptance speech:

I’m deeply honoured to be standing before you today as recipient of the Howard Mayer Brown  Award and grateful to the Early Music America board of directors for having chosen me. I’m  told that Howard’s last words, when stricken by a fatal heart attack, were “Don’t worry – this  always happens!” Well, this doesn’t always happen to me! Indeed, this is the first time anything  like this has ever happened, and so, when I received the call from Ron Cook informing me of  the EMA board’s decision I was stunned.  

I also feel humbled because I’m really sharing this honour with the hundreds of young people  whom I have taught at Indiana University, the many colleagues in the world of Early Music with  whom I have been associated in the past four decades, and two very special people who  changed the course of my life. I have learned so much from all of these people, and in accepting this award I am their representative.

The two people to whom must pay tribute today are, in inverse chronological order, Thomas  Binkley and Albert Fuller, both of them visionary leaders in the world of Early Music. When  Tom Binkley wrote to Elisabeth Wright and me in 1982 to ask if we’d like to join the fledgling  Early Music faculty at Indiana University, I remember him saying, “If it can happen anywhere in  this country, it will be at IU.” Remarkable visionary and shrewd politician that he was, Tom  overcame numerous bureaucratic obstacles to create the Early Music Institute, and our  membership in its faculty for the past twenty-seven years has enabled us to work with gifted  and talented students, many of whom are now among America’s foremost Early Music  performers.

(Parenthetically, Elisabeth and I often reflect wryly on how successful we’ve been at creating  our own competition!)

It can often happen that an innocent question is the cause of a significant turning point in one’s  life. In the 1970-71 season, after escaping from the Metropolitan Opera, I joined The New York  Chamber Soloists, a modern-instrument ensemble, whose harpsichordist was Albert Fuller.  One day I mentioned to Albert that I’d like to learn more about Baroque music, and asked him  if we could get together sometime and read some sonatas. No New York freelance violinist  had ever said such a thing to Albert and he grabbed me and said, “When?” During our first  reading session he said, “You know what they’re doing in Europe now?” I said, “What are they  doing?” He said, “They’re tuning their instruments down a half-step and using gut strings and  old bows.” I said, “Why on earth would they want to do a thing like that?” And he said, “Well,  why don’t you try tuning down and find out?” Naturally, tuning a modern, steel-strung violin  down half a tone does not produce the most convincing result, but neither did a recording of  Leonhardt and the Kuijken brothers playing Rameau! Mine was a typical modern violinist’s  reaction: I said, “That doesn’t sound like a violin! It’s like some sort of viol!” However, Albert  was a very persuasive man, and soon I had had an old Tyrolean violin reconverted to Baroque  specifications and a copy made of an old bow and was on my way to becoming a Baroque  fiddler.

Albert Fuller was a remarkable man: an excellent keyboard player, a dedicated humanist, a  fascinating raconteur and a gifted teacher. One of the aspects of his teaching that inspires me  is something he frequently alluded to – he would refer to his teaching as “sharing”. For those of  us who were privileged to work with him there was never a sense of being talked down to, or  criticized for one’s shortcomings, but that he was sharing his ideas and experience and that he  was encouraging us to be ourselves. I try to emulate him in these respects, and he remains my  mentor. 

The late cellist and gambist, Fortunato (Freddy) Arico, and I teamed up with Albert and started  playing concerts in the New York area. Once in the summer of 1972 we played for an elite  audience in western Massachusetts on a property named Aston Magna. That evening the idea  of having a Baroque music workshop on the property was proposed, and the following summer  Aston Magna, the workshop, festival and, subsequently, academy was launched. 

In a very real sense, we, together with other members of the original Aston Magna family such  as Ray Ericson, Steve Hammer, Bernie Krainis, Judy Linsenberg, Anthony Martin, David Miller,  Loretta O’Sullivan, Ed Parmentier, Linda Quan, Jim Richman, Marc Schachman, John Solum,  Mike Willens and Nancy Wilson, and others across the country such as the Caldwells and their  colleagues in Oberlin, Malcolm Bilson, Sonya Monosoff and John Hsu at Cornell, Jim Weaver  at the Smithsonian, Alan Curtis and Laurette Goldberg in California, were “pioneers” in the new  field of Early Music in this country. The OED definition of pioneers is “foot soldiers”, specifically  those whose job it is to go ahead of the main body of troops to dig trenches and erect  fortifications, etc. We - pioneers all - motivated solely by curiosity about early versions of our  instruments and by dissatisfaction with traditional approaches to Baroque music (since there  was at the time no money to be made in this country playing the way we did!) following in the  footsteps of an earlier generation, broke new ground and paved the way for the army that has  followed.

Inasmuch as this is a Handel year, I would point out that, in a way, BEMF and our being here  together this afternoon, four decades after the birth of the Early Music movement in America  as we know it, symbolize Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, which means literally “the  triumph of time and disillusionment”. What we in America, and others throughout the world,  have managed to achieve in the past forty years is a reshaping of musical taste that has  resonated throughout our profession. Back in the seventies, those wonderful, exciting early  years of our at times tentative, and yet always enthusiastic exploration of the world of  Historically Informed Performance, and the bad old days of New York Times music reviews,  one of their critics snidely predicted, “This, too, shall pass.” Well, was he ever wrong! Whoever  it was who said that must be so disillusioned! Forty years later we’re still here, we’re here to  stay and we’re triumphant. This shall never pass! 

Thank you, EMA, for the honour you have conferred upon me today. This is a very special  moment, and this period in my life is very special for another reason as well – not two weeks  ago I became a grandfather for the first time!  But besides that, now that some of my ex-  students are also teaching, I‘m a musical grandfather as well! And I’m very proud to be both.     

The Legendary First Aston Magna Group Photo

Aston Magna, June 1973 (click pic for larger image)

Courtesy of Anthony Martin, who writes:

Dear Paul, this might be worthy of posting, so that we can get corrective ID’s on the folks I have misremembered or misrepresented. This is from June 1973 after the two-week debauch that was the beginning of Aston Magna. Missing from the photo, among others, Michael McCraw.

[Editor's note: if you have an ID correction, please email me at paulfesta at gmail dot com and I'll update this post.]

Seated in front, left to right:
Deborah Robin
Frances Fitch
Ross Keiser
Mary Wyly
Jane McMahan

Next row, standing:
Nina Stern
James Wyly
(?)

Ray Erickson
David Behnke
Hannah Rose
Paula Stone
Judy Linsenberg
Anne Hornbostel
(?)
Jane Eston
Randee Berman

Next row, standing
Anthony Martin
Stanley Ritchie
Jay Bernfeld
Leland Tolo
Jaap Schroeder
Albert Fuller
Bernard Krainis
Robert Dunbar

Standing in doorway:
Edward Parmentier
Emily Romney
John Metz

Aston Magna tribute to AF

Aston Magna, the music festival in the Berkshires that Albert founded, posted this tribute to him along with the photograph above (with Jaap Schroeder, Fortunato Arico, and Stanley Ritchie).

Article by violinist, Anthony Martin published in "Early Music America" Winter 2007

Albert Fuller (1926–2007) in memoriam vitae bene peractæ et spiritus semper viventis (an article by Anthony Martin from “Early Music America Magazine,” Winter 2007, Latin courtesy of Otto Steinmayer)

Performer, teacher, conductor, thinker, catalyst, eloquent speaker and sympathetic listener, Albert Fuller was mentor, guide, and friend to the generations of students and colleagues he influenced and inspired and brought together. Among his many accomplishments was the creation of Aston Magna, where performers, artists, and scholars would work, play, and eat together—oh! the heavenly meals created by the virtuosi that Albert installed in the kitchen! One memorable summer there he brought forth the first performances and recordings in America of the complete Brandenburg Concertos. His Helicon Foundation will continue that multi-disciplinary exploration in New York. Albert taught at the Juilliard School for over forty years, seeking always to put technique and repertoire into a wider, humanistic context. Many who heeded him are now at the center of early music activities throughout America. His book on Alice Tully is also his own spiritual autobiography.

There is little I could add to Albert’s legacy, except to quote his own words, taken from various sources dating back to the beginning of our friendship. Most touching were his holiday letters, in which he shared his hopes and his fears, readings and poems that had excited him, and his feelings of love and connection with his worldwide family of friends. I hope this selection gives some idea of what moved Albert, who so moved us.

"We know where we have been: in high spirits, on a flight without always knowing where we will land and, with only a few and happily rare exceptions, in a collaborative effort characterized by kind words, hard effort and joyous feelings at the moment of performance." (1978)

"Our desire to contribute to the stylistic discernment of the various musical periods, and hence the true meaning of the music, is unique, strong and revelatory in new and unexpected ways. That you can share this adventure with us is a source of the deepest satisfaction of comradeship in the feelings of which all artistic works are the metaphors." (1978)

"In these hard times I feel that adding anything of good, even whatever little drop we may have of our good feelings and our benevolent aims, adding that to the rampant evil such as the confrontation of nuclear war, is a valuable thing." (1982)

"The love that we all share has been the real glue of our work together. The musical products of that work are themselves the testimony of the power of exercising that love. In addition many other facets of our lives have been illuminated by the brightness of all that loving effort together." (1983)

"To Aston Magna’s musicians as well as to those spiritually close to them, there was an underlying dynamic focus to the effort that was more important than the aural exoticism [of “original instruments”], a focus that was not so apparent to a large segment of the public nor even to many close to the foundation’s support. That was the feeling of newness of discovery or better, re-discovery, that attached itself to each performance. This new feeling derived not so much from the simple exercise of the “original instruments” themselves; rather, and more importantly, the instruments, as the true starting line, were the new tools that beckoned and prodded the players to exercise their art within a further and hitherto unsuspected spectrum of musical expressivity. This new territory was in effect the rediscovered chambers of psychological perceptions and emotional preoccupations of segments of our inherited past, of our own direct 17th- and 18th-century musical ancestors … Those who participated in this expansive growth of physical gestures and psychological conceptions formed into a network of musicians bonded and characterized by the intense camaraderie of initiation. Love for one another was fueled by the effort of new learning, and was fired on a regular basis by the excitement, the thrill, the frisson of participating, each with all, in the living performance results of the work." (1983)

"Although I can’t think of any time when I have been busier, nevertheless, it is almost 1991 and, boy, does that ever cause me to pause and to think over so many years of knowing people and working hard at what I love! I conclude that the work will be here long after I have departed hence and, thus, in the end it is the people who have shared what we love together that matters most to me." (1990)

"Gratitude is on my mind for all the musical experiences that continue to demonstrate the mysterious workings of the human spirit and heart, especially in the manner that only musical art can reveal." (1992)

"As we all hurtle toward the new millennium I suspect, I pray, I may know a little bit more than previously about what to do about each day." (1995)

"My 70th birthday isn’t a surprise; after all, you know I’ve been counting! Nevertheless, I can easily say that it’s the happiest birthday I have thus far celebrated. According to my parents, getting old was a drag. Not so here! I know more, I understand more and I love it more." (1996)

"My own problems over the past year have been far outweighed by the blessings of understanding and experience. In whatever the future brings I pray that our spirits may intertwine in some productive fashion to bring us all the measure of personal freedom that we can use for our benefit and that of our brothers and sisters." (1997)

"The cement that binds us together is our understanding that music holds an almost supreme place in our bodies, in our psyches and in our life’s study and work. What a great joy and comfort it is for each of us, and for those friends with whom we share the precious and unique understanding: the meaning of musical art!" (1998)

"I thank God, whoever she may be, that the Internet is really founded on the network of friendship that has held us all together." (1999)

“'Insanity is when we keep doing the same thing and go on expecting different results.' It turns out that, from my earliest years, this particular dictum has been the major reason for my growth in coming to terms with my own life, and for my success, if I may call it that, in being a teacher. Now, as an old geezer, I’m disappointed that I couldn’t have passed this idea on to more than I have." (2000)

"Sharing the heartfelt beauties of music and the other arts encourages me to continue to cling to my normally optimistic view: good finally triumphs over evil and mankind will one day fulfill the role to which all sages have always pointed us!" (2002)

"Now that the late century is behind us, I pray that each of us will do his/her part in attempting to 'calm the waters,' and pass the word and example of loving one another amongst us all, each in his own way. What else can an individual do except to offer one’s unique and individual energy in an attempt to steer the mass of humanity toward a truly creative and joyous existence?" (2003)

For Albert Fuller, music, the arts, and the sciences were all means to the end of uniting all human beings of the past, present, and future into one continuum of love and understanding. His faith in that project was the foundation of his life and work. Let us each endeavor to carry it on!

Tribute by Barbara Bogatin

Albert Fuller, Mentor Extraordinaire
It’s amazing how many people who had the great pleasure of working with Albert consider him not just teacher, but mentor. Yes, he was a “specialist” in early music, but what he taught was all of music, and not just how to play with others, but how to play with life. To be caught up in his world was to look deep inside the music, to get “the shivers,” to meet an extravagantly colorful cast of characters, to read and think and laugh, and to eat and drink very well. What a stroke of luck to find Albert early in my Juilliard years, when he was just beginning Aston Magna, and eager to recruit interested students to come to Great Barrington, exchange our steel strings for gut and try out his Baroque bows. I spent eight summers there, learning that music is not in a world by itself, but integrally connected to the art, architecture, literature, dance and historical context of its time. In that musical and scholarly community that he created, we learned to make spaces between the notes, relish the symmetry in the gardens of Versailles, and dance the sarabande.

But it was all of life that Albert cared about, and I find his wisdom so relevant today as I try to guide my own children and students. At a time when I was feeling particularly lost, struggling to find my place in the daunting professional world, I saw Albert dining alone in a café on Columbus Ave. He waved me in, bought me lunch and at once tried to sort out my confusion. He told me to “make a list of everything you want to accomplish in the next year…..then in the next 5 years….then the next 10 years……then 20 years….and now listen to that still quiet voice inside, that’s connected to your heart and your gut, and let it guide you…..”

The big picture, and the most essential truth, that was Albert. He once told me that he loved museums because if he got very quiet and looked at great art for a long time, the paintings spoke to him. I didn’t have any idea what he meant at the time, but 30 years later, a quiet hour in a museum fills me with a calm joy. So take a few minutes out of your busy day, sit down somewhere, just be still, and listen very carefully…..you just might hear, way in the distance, Les Sauvages played on Baroque harp.

Barbara Bogatin
Cellist, San Francisco Symphony
(and occasional viola da gambist and Baroque cellist)

Aston Magna's Notice in the New York Times

For Daniel Stepner's tribute to Albert in the New York Times, click here.

Article by David Fuller, Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Buffalo

For half a century, I have watched happy faces fall as they tell me how pleased thay are to meet me and how much they have enjoyed my recordings, my concerts, and even my books, and I tell them, I’m sorry, you’ve got the wrong Fuller. It happened easily, since we moved in many of the same circles, he was less than a year older, and I even played the harpsichord, sort of. In fact, that was how we met. It was 1953-4. I had come back from three years abroad and had developed enough curiosity about harpsichords to want to get one. Since I was knocking around Boston and Cambridge, I bought one of Hubbard & Dowd’s first four instruments, already second-hand, and joined the little club of which Thomas Dunn and Albert were the principals. Albert had just come through the hands of Ralph Kirkpatrick at Yale, and was willing to give me lessons (like him, I had begun as an organist). The setting of those lessons, spaced out informally over two or three summers, was one of the great shingle-style “cottages” at Manchester-by-the-Sea on Boston’s north shore, belonging to the brilliant and infinitely cultured Gregory Smith and his family, one of Albert’s very closest friends from his Washington days to Gregory’s death. I never spent more than a night or two there for my lessons, but those visits were non-stop party-time with non-stop music. Albert, who spent summers there, christened it “Nerve-Ending-by-the-Sea,” exactly right for bunches of high-powered people living on the edge. He was the Smiths’ window onto the world of professional music, to which in those days their social position decreed that they must ever remain fascinated outsiders. Albert was then playing on and off with the New York Chamber Soloists, and I remember one party that culminated in a couple of Brandenberg Concertos in the living room with both Albert and Tom at their harpsichords (which normally lived in a sort of conservatory they called the “tile pile”), the orchestra, and invited guests. No matter whom the house-guest list included during my visits, it was clear that that it was from Albert that the fun and the life radiated.

This capacity to illuminate whatever he touched reached its culmination in the enterprise that he called “Aston Magna,” after the Berkshire estate of Lee Elman where it began in 1972. An idea of its pioneering importance in the period-instrument movement in this country can be had from the article in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2001). I knew it for the interdisciplinary Academy it spawned in 1978, and at which I lectured on aspects of French harpsichord music in 1979, 1980, and 1982. Why French? Because I had been sufficiently ravished by Albert’s playing of this elegant and elusive music in the old days at Nerve-Ending to make it my career and write my dissertation and a great deal more besides on it—and to dedicate an edtion of music by Armand-Louis Couperin to him (A-R Editions. 1975, and still in print!). The original mix of disciplines and outlooks at Aston Magna was enormously stimulating, but what was so peculiarly “Albert” about life there was the cooking. He managed to find chefs who could turn out three meals a day for weeks, each one different and each one sensational, and this for dozens of people in an institutional setting. He was a first-class cook himself, by the way, and developed a particularly violent passion for Chinese food, becoming a close friend of the New York restaurateur Sheila Chang and even learning a bit of restaurant Chinese to use with waiters. I had a lot of this cooking, since for years I used his apartments at 162 W 54th St. and 27 W 67th St. as my New York hotels. In 1968, I stayed with him a few days in a rented house in Fire Island Pines, whither he had brought a clavichord on which to prepare his recording of Bach’s E-minor partita. I shall never again be able to hear that toccata without the remembered sound of the surf almost drowning out the whisper of the clavichord.

The reader who would like to experience something of the rich, enveloping personality of this extraordinary man can find it reflected in a remarkable and engaging way in his memoir of Alice Tully (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999). For the sake of his memory I hope that it, too, is still in print.

David Fuller (no relation), September 23, 2007.

INTRODUCTION (Feb. 06)

After I made my New York recital debut in November of 1957 I got swept up into the local music scene as I had hoped. I had known for a long while there were virtually no local harpsichord players, with the exception of the international giant artist, Wanda Landowska. Thus, I came to be involved in a great deal of important musical works I had never previously had a chance to become acquainted with. Among them was Handel’s Julius Caesar in Carnegie with no costumes or scenery, but it was Montserrat Caballé’s debut alongside the already well-established Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. It was in this performance that I had my first experience with personal competition among performers of such glorious music.

Because, as harpsichordist, I was required to accompany all the recitatives in the Handel work, my position in the orchestra was at the very front. This allowed me to observe before my very eyes the audience’s wild reception of Caballé’s first New York performance and the unusually large number of curtain calls she was demanded to make. Before each of these Schwarzkopf stood aside, stamping her foot, and shouting at the conductor, Ich bin die nexte, i.e., “I’m the next one (to take the bow).” This ever-smiling fury between the two sopranos continued for 20 minutes at the least. This was my introduction to the fact that glorious singing didn’t require glorious personalities to bring a musical work to life.

Through the many performances of such splendid compositions I met and befriended many musicians at a rapid rate. At that time (1950s-1960s) most harpsichordists, or pianists who were pretending to be harpsichordists, performed from scores written out by 19th-century editors, while the original practice was that the harpsichordists improvised all of what they played. They were said to “realize the figured bass” i.e., create what they played by reading the bass lines of the scores. These were only sometimes accompanied by numerals or other signs to indicate what the composer expected the harmonies were to be. Having had no experience in playing thus, this became a challenge that I took on with great delight. It wasn’t long before it was clear that I was very gifted in this enterprise and had no competition among the “free-lance” musicians in the New York area.

Soon I was playing more chamber music requiring a facile harpsichordist than I could have hoped. Much of this was music that I came to love, even adore; this set me up in our music world as having taste and special understanding of the styles of performance, often of music many people had never heard a note of. And many happy concerts were the result of all of this.

But that does not mean that all was happy; my harpsichords were made in the authentic 18th-century French style. Over the years I have owned twenty-two harpsichords. “Why on earth?” some would ask. The answer was that builders (most of my instruments were made by William Dowd of Boston) were coming more and more to understand that the fine 18th-century instruments were a result of several hundred years of continuous experimentation until the superb results that were expected were almost always achieved. Naturally there were differences in the instruments of different countries but I stuck almost entirely with the French models.

The unhappiness came from the fact that all my colleagues played modern versions of all their instruments; these had all grown much louder in order to sound well in the ever-enlarging 19th-century halls. Musicians complained that I was too soft and I complained that they were too loud, creating an artistic confrontation something like a Picasso not being entirely appropriate in the Galérie des Glaces at Versailles. What to do? One of my colleagues, Stanley Ritchie, was not at all reluctant to try gut strings on one of his violins. (Gut strings had been used on all string instruments —violins, violas, cellos and double basses—from their very beginning.)

But halls had been getting larger and larger, so that by the time of WWI players and makers alike began to be drawn to steel strings because they were louder and stayed more easily in tune. Hence the sharp discrepancy between my sounds and that of my colleagues. Note also, that the bows of all Western string instruments have always been made of horsehair. When horsehair meets gut it recognizes a material that it knew from birth; but with steel it encounters something like a piece of avant-garde modernistic architecture. Thus, rubbing horsehair on slippery steel required all string players to make vast changes in the manner of using their bow arms.

When my ‘cello friend, Freddie Arico, had no objections to trying out gut strings, Stanley and I could play 17th- and 18-century sonatas on instruments close in sound and techniques to that expected by the composers of the music that we all had come more and more to love.

But then an idea straight out of the blue hit me: if we could find another violinist not only could we more than double our repertory but we could have the basics to begin to form an orchestra. I mentioned this to one of my students, Helen Katz, and she said she had met a Dutch guy at Aspen who was dying to play on gut strings; his name was Jaap Schröder. When I wrote to him in Amsterdam to invite him to join us he responded with instantaneous enthusiasm.

But, having only dreams and no money and no place to situate such a new organization, my old Yale friend, C. Ray Smith introduced me to one Lee Elman. Over lunch at the Great Shanghai restaurant of my dear friend Sheila Chang, Lee told me he had purchased the former residence of Albert Spalding, of tennis ball fame, and he wanted to have a concert in Spalding’s former studio in order to introduce himself to the music lovers of Western Massachusetts’s Berkshire region where he wanted to be accepted by the often powerful locals, Mme. Koussevitzky, etc.

I organized a concert, Lee invited the “swells” he had wanted to impress and it was all a big success, especially the viol da gamba piece of Marin Marais describing the operation for removing a gallstone (c.1690). Lee’s home was called “Aston Magna,” after an ancient Roman town in England where the original builder of the house had lived. In 1972 Lee and I decided that we would start a foundation in honor of his dead sister and simply call it The Aston Magna Foundation for Music. We would raise money to invite students who wished to learn how modern music performance differed from that of the 17th- and 18-centuries, and hence meant something different to the hearts of the performers and listeners that we 20th-c. music lovers had never known or completely forgotten about. The results were regularly new and often stunning to all concerned.

This Aston Magna venture grew very successful not only as a school, but also as a performing group in Great Barrington, Mass. By 1977 we had enough players to do the famous Brandenburg Concerti, with the exception of someone who could play the trumpet of Bach’s time. After much inquiry I found a guy named Friedemann Immer in Germany who said he could do it and we hired him immediately. Bach’s beloved works became the centerpiece of Aston Magna’s festival of 1977, and places in Great Barrington’s St. James’ church, which had become our concert hall, were all sold out weeks before the performances. These were the first complete public performances on Bach’s instruments in the world, ever, and naturally they brought a certain unique prominence to the name, Aston Magna. The National Endowment for the Humanities supported us to the extent that we were able to invite scholars in all fields relating to 17th- and 18th-century musical performance intentions. Thus the invisible art of music drew many, often surprising relationships into sharp alignments where most of us had never known them to exist.

Later we were invited to open the Tanglewood Festivals for two years in a row and the future looked more exciting than we could ever have imagined. But—the board of directors and I had some serious disagreements: they thought I was spending too much money. I thought that was a really stupid concept because it was I and my closest colleague, Raymond Erickson (who had been at my side from the very beginning, first as a student and then crowned “Dean of Students”) who had raised all the money while the board had supplied almost none. Finally, at a board meeting in November of 1983 at a meeting I kissed the hands of the ladies, shook those of the men, and told them all good-by, and to “shove it”—and forever.

Oh, oh! I had just left the precious garden that I had planted and didn’t know what to do next. I asked Alice Tully’s lawyer, Jim McGarry, if I should start another foundation; he responded, “If you want to raise money you’ll have to.” And thus, with the help of dear Alice, and blessed Gregory Smith, and McGarry’s legal associate, William (Bill) Simon, the Helicon Foundation became an honest-to-God 501 (c) 3 organization in the state of New York in the spring of 1985. And, although a few of our cherished companions have gone to what Alice called “My next act,” we’re still here and that alone in my life is the single, happiest and unexpected gratification.