In maybe the 8th grade I pushed him down tagging him in a touch football game in gym class and he fell and broke his collarbone. We were two of the smallest kids. Doesn't seem right tht he has died.
I was good friends with Alan ("Hooey"). We lived near each other and he was a fixture at our house over the years. He was as impish as he looked, a curmudgeon who could really piss you off one moment and a good-natured, kind-hearted buddy that you could actually talk with the next. We spent many years together through grade school, high school, college, graduate school and much of the 60's. Sadly, the end of our time together was a downward spiral from which Alan never escaped but that's history and another story for some other time. I know that most of us never appreciated the struggles that Alan went through, on the one hand trying to fit into a group of kids that were often not receptive to his being a bit different and on the other, trying to deal with what was a truly debilitating disease. It was something called, as I recall, "osteogenesis imperfecti" (brittle bones), and by his 20's he was actually considered a long-term survivor. After graduating from college, Herb Kuppin, Alan and I went off to Michigan- Herb to the business school, Alan to the medical school and me to the law school. None of us survived, but we had one hell of a time. Who didn't back then? I still shudder at the many times I would open the refrigerator door only to find a severed hand or foot that Alan bootlegged out of his anatomy class and stored there for further study. I was a pretty good artist and would sketch pictures for him as he teased apart the various bits and pieces of some limb, and then we'd stick pins with little paper flags onto his speciment and he would write the name of the parts based on my drawings. Unfortunately, I did better with anatomy than law and for other reasons he spent more time with the law than anatomy, and in the end, we were both heading south on I-75 trying to figure out what we'd do next. I got drafted and he took a job at the morgue, both of which were "dead-end" career moves. We got back together a few years later but by then we had moved in different directions and eventually disappeared from each other's lives. Alan was a lost soul but my friend, and my memories of him are good ones.
Gordon G Agnew
Stanley A Hirtle
In maybe the 8th grade I pushed him down tagging him in a touch football game in gym class and he fell and broke his collarbone. We were two of the smallest kids. Doesn't seem right tht he has died.
Thomas M Gould
I was good friends with Alan ("Hooey"). We lived near each other and he was a fixture at our house over the years. He was as impish as he looked, a curmudgeon who could really piss you off one moment and a good-natured, kind-hearted buddy that you could actually talk with the next. We spent many years together through grade school, high school, college, graduate school and much of the 60's. Sadly, the end of our time together was a downward spiral from which Alan never escaped but that's history and another story for some other time. I know that most of us never appreciated the struggles that Alan went through, on the one hand trying to fit into a group of kids that were often not receptive to his being a bit different and on the other, trying to deal with what was a truly debilitating disease. It was something called, as I recall, "osteogenesis imperfecti" (brittle bones), and by his 20's he was actually considered a long-term survivor. After graduating from college, Herb Kuppin, Alan and I went off to Michigan- Herb to the business school, Alan to the medical school and me to the law school. None of us survived, but we had one hell of a time. Who didn't back then? I still shudder at the many times I would open the refrigerator door only to find a severed hand or foot that Alan bootlegged out of his anatomy class and stored there for further study. I was a pretty good artist and would sketch pictures for him as he teased apart the various bits and pieces of some limb, and then we'd stick pins with little paper flags onto his speciment and he would write the name of the parts based on my drawings. Unfortunately, I did better with anatomy than law and for other reasons he spent more time with the law than anatomy, and in the end, we were both heading south on I-75 trying to figure out what we'd do next. I got drafted and he took a job at the morgue, both of which were "dead-end" career moves. We got back together a few years later but by then we had moved in different directions and eventually disappeared from each other's lives. Alan was a lost soul but my friend, and my memories of him are good ones.