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NEWSLETTER
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President's Message, Summer 2014
This issue of the newsletter with its splendid coverage of the Foundation’s 60-year engagement with South Africa brings a deluge of memories of my time at Ford. I recall with pride multiple trips to South Africa with Bill Carmichael and Richard Horowitz, and the extraordinary gift of knowing and being able to help the lawyers and activists there in their struggle against the apartheid regime. I was able to share in a more personal way the successful end of that regime when my wife, Leona, served as Director of Communications for the United Nations Observer Mission for the first free elections in 1994.
Capturing and recording these memories is important for many reasons, both personal and institutional, and for the lessons they provide as we confront contemporary problems that, though not necessarily similar, might benefit from past experiences.
We discussed this at some length at a recent LAFF Executive Committee meeting during which Michael Seltzer, program chair of our New York chapter, suggested a synchronized approach to recovering our singular and collective Foundation experiences. This was within a broader discussion of how we can best provide our membership the benefits they seek when joining LAFF.
For most of us, LAFF represents continuity with a very meaningful period in our lives and careers and promotes, as our logo suggests, “social and professional contacts among former colleagues.” The question before us was how to give substance and depth to the face-to-face periodic contacts we have at LAFF meetings in ways that can contribute to our personal and institutional learning. The suggestion, now being put to our chapter heads, is to hold a series of near simultaneous chapter meetings focused on our individual and collective memories.
I recall LAFF’s first meeting in the Foundation’s auditorium when I assumed the presidency a few years ago. The meeting got off to a late start while we waited for Luis Ubiñas, who was caught somewhere in traffic. Someone proposed using the time to introduce ourselves and, nearly two hundred strong, we sat in an odd state of reverence as our colleagues told us who they were, what they did at the Foundation and what they were doing then. It was, in the words of the next generation, “awesome”.
The idea now is to replicate that experience in formats to be decided by each chapter head and the members, and then revisit the possibility of building an archive of sorts of our memories. As we face the inevitable and sad loss of members, preserving memories of our times at the Foundation becomes increasingly important for us and for the Foundation itself. The challenge is to figure out the best way to do it.
And, on the subject of loss, we take note of the passing of colleagues Tom Kessinger, Gus Ranis and Henry Dart, and of a deeply regarded adjunct, Deborah Geithner, who like so many of our spouses and significant others accompanied us and enriched our experiences on the wonderful journey we took with the Foundation.
My cup runs over with memories of those journeys: to South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Senegal; to South America (re-awakened this week upon reading about the uniting after 36 years of the president of the Grandmothers of the Praça de Maio with her grandson through a DNA database that I believe the Foundation helped establish); to Russia and Central Europe; and to China, Thailand and Indonesia, the latter with Tom Kessinger.
So many memories, so much to capture and record.
Shep Forman
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