Why did you stay here after college?
I grew up in Washington Heights. The city was oppressive. My big escape was from my parents, especially my mother who was the child of Holocaust survivors. Unfortunately, second-generation survivors are often difficult parents. Before I came here, I was a very politically conservative person. I was for the Vietnam war. In New Paltz, vistas opened up in front of me. I could breathe freely. I met and was influenced by some of the quintessential New Paltz people of the time, especially Mikhail Horowitz, a ragamuffin, with disheveled hair, a brilliant, funny and loving person. I first encountered him playing a recorder on the steps of the temporary art building.
Through meeting Carlos Fernandez, the most generous person; he gave away money to strangers in need, I began a transformation. He encouraged me to join SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Like a lot of the New Paltz students, he was very intellectual. Where else but in New Paltz could I find young people reading Herbert Marcuse, the German-American philosopher, social critic and political theorist. So dry! I couldn’t get through it.
Most of my contemporaries came here to go to college and never left. We escaped from “straight” society, finding respite here in New Paltz. Margaret Mead, the famous cultural anthropologist, identified our generation as having the widest gap ever before and probably ever since between parents and children.
In the sixties and seventies, intellectualism was ubiquitous among young people here. It was common to see students hanging out on the stoop in front of the Bonze and Vlack Drugstore reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead. New Paltz was in the vanguard, going against everything our mothers and fathers believed in: music, values, government, political views, as well as our tastes in dress and food.
With all the changes lately, why are you still here? Did you ever want to leave?
I don’t mind the change, except for the traffic. I love change. I appreciate visual change. It’s good for things to not remain static. I have deep roots here, friendships decades long, many different social circles. Once in 1972, I visited a friend in Malibu, that’s the only time I thought of leaving. I said to myself: “If I get a job within a week, I will leave New Paltz and move here.” I didn’t get a job. Now I travel as much as I can while I still can. Then I come home. I am perfectly content in New Paltz. I love my life here.
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