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jimsjournal



The phone rings -- 07/21/13







Mike Wald was my housemate at two different colleges...

I had started college at C.W. Post College (a branch of Long Island University) but after two years there, I decided to transfer to SUNY/New Paltz to take advantage of the much cheaper tuition and of being able to commute from home. So, in 1963, i started my junior year at New Paltz. The next year, Ed Robbins, one of my friends at Post, decided to also transfer to New Paltz (again, to take advantage of much lower tuition). He stayed with my family for a while, until he could find an apartment to share in New Paltz. A year after that, Mike Wald also decided to transfer to New Paltz. Because the two schools having had different requirements, I still had a required course to complete in order to graduate, so I would have to attend during the fall term and then I planned to start taking graduate courses to get a head start on a master's degree. Mike and Ed and I found a small ranch style house to rent out in the countryside. You know that photograph of me and my VW Beetle on my index page? That was taken in the front yard of that house.

Now don't get me wrong -- we did go to classes and we did study. But did we have some parties? Oh yeah!

After graduation, Ed went into education -- first as a teacher and then as an administrator. Mike spent a couple of years as a probation officer on Long Island and then he joined the FBI for a long and successful career. I still remember Adam calling me into the den saying that my friend was on television -- and there (can't recall if it was a regular news program or something like 60 Minutes) was a FBI surveillance tape showing Mike offering a briefcase full of cash to a government official suspected of taking bribes and payoffs. It was the ABSCAM investigation -- where Mike was undercover, pretending to be a less-than-honest middle eastern business man offering bribes for favors. This was a fulfillment of why he had gone into law enforcement, to bring down dishonest public officials.

When he retired from the FBI, Mike did not just sit back and relax -- he got involved in fighting the cocaine cartels. (Here is the text of an interview he did with PBS Frontline.)

Three years ago he and his wife Eileen and Nancy and I got together in Newport. We joked about how our hair seemed to have become grey and we had somehow put on a couple of pounds since our undergraduate days.


That's Mike and me in 2010 at the Newport Tennis Hall of Fame.

Every once in a while I get a call from Mike. We talk about what we are doing and how we ought to try to get the old gang together for a reunion. He'd suggest his place in Florida since Ed was retired and spent a lot of time in Florida. That would leave me to fly down from Rhode Island (perhaps escape a week or so of winter, especially since I am going to retire in a few more months) and Tim to fly over from Arizona (where he is retired) and we'd have to try to track down Steve (who was undoubtedly retired as well since he was the elder of the group, have done a hitch in the Air Force before starting college).

Around noon time today today the phone rang. Caller ID: Robbins Ed.

I thought that can't be Ed... but there he was, sounding the same as he did thirty and forty and fifty years ago, a youthful voice still with a touch of Westchester County, NY.

And you know that it is very unlikely to hear from someone out of the blue like that unless either they just happened to be driving through your town and thought they would give you a call to see if you had time for a cup of coffee -- or there was something very wrong. And you know where this is going...

Mike had died.

He had seemed fine up until the time he got very sick, went to the hospital, a very malignant kind of cancer, never left the hospital, died in three weeks.

We chatted a bit, catching up on what each other had been doing, overwhelmed by the news he was sharing. Eileen had asked him to call the old friends network.

I'm completely blown away by this. I had just talked with Mike a couple of months ago -- he was given to making phone calls at random times just to say "hi" and chat for a while -- and recently I had been thinking that I should get in touch with him about actually trying to organize a reunion.

To quote from his obituary:
Mike was born and raised in New York. He leaves behind his beautiful wife of 48 years, Eileen Posselt Wald, and his two lovely Daughters Ginger E. Wald and Michelle E. Wald and his granddaughter, Liliana, the light of his life. He also leaves behind many friends and family who will miss his love, laughter and most of all, his humor. And, as always, “It is what it is!”

I think he must have written some of that himself because it sounds like his voice saying it, especially the "It is what it is."

But it still so hard to believe that he is gone.


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