About 1943 - About 1996

Memories of "Laz" by Jeanie Graves, RAHS Class of '61

He used to come over to my house a lot, just to hang out. I loved his mordant humor. I remember him telling me one time that he was going through the annual and kind of wondering why he wasn't ever popular. Then he saw his picture in the orchestra and all was clear to him.

Well, now I'm started. Here's some more. He adored his Dad and really admired him. He told me that he kept an idea man on his staff at the furniture store. The idea guy kept coming up with bizzarre ideas that Dad would make workable. For example he decided that they should paint the whole store chartreuse, so Dad picked out a nice celery green. Laz loved that.

He knew he would be drafted because his number was low. A lot of guys kept out of the draft, you remember, by staying in college. Others with a low number enlisted so they'd have more choice. Not Laz. For him it was a moral stance to be a conscript, not an enlistee. My sister Moira had just had her daughter Mary and she offerred to come down to the train station with the baby and weep and wail as a gesture of protest to the whole war thing. I don't think that happened, though. So Laz was conscripted and he went to Germany. Don't think he did any time in Nam, thank goodness. After he was out, he wrote a letter to the military suggesting a change to some policy or procedure that he felt was ridiculous. And he got an answer and they changed whatever it was. He explained to me that he felt the reason for his success was that he specific about the one thing he wanted to address and he only mentioned that one thing.

I also remember him telling me that Jews believed that there was no afterlife. The memory people had of you was as close as you got to afterlife. I've since come to know that not all Jews believe that but Laz clearly did. And when I found out he had died, I believed that he had just 'winked out.' But I remember him and you do too. He had children and I think nieces and nephews, too. So his memory will live on I hope.