David and Joan Dubin had taken me to the Greek Islands in Chicago for lunch. It was Greek Easter, 2005, and the restaurant was resplendent. We got brown Easter eggs, great bread, and marvelous food.
David Dubin gave me this photograph of the Cosmo brothers, I estimate for the year 1948. David Dubin is an erstwhile alumnus of the Cosmopolitan Fraternity and a famed Chicago architect; he is the handsome fellow in the middle front row. Joan Dubin is a financial consultant and a gracious hostess.
Looking at the photo, I see some grand people. There is Levente De Warga in the mid-back row; Levente escaped Hungary in 1948, after going there from Sweden for a communist youth festival. The rest of his family escaped during the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Levente and I left Chicago for California in 1954, and I was his best man when he got married in Los Angeles in 1956.
David Eisen is between me and Nejat Denizman. Eisen and wife Shuly live in Chicago and travel the world over. There is Tom Logue, who is an attorney in Mattoon, IL, a veteran of the Korean War. Logue was athletic and went out for varsity football; one fall afternoon, I saw him walking in town, half his body black and blue. Johnny Karras, an All-American halfback, had run over him during practice.
Not slighting others, in the bottom row are some who went on to fame and fortune. William Lewers, my pledge father when I came to the Cosmopolitan Fraternity in 1947, became an eminent law professor at the University of Notre Dame. Next to him is Frank Machalla. Major Machalla, a veteran of 50 bombing missions over Germany and a legal aide to General LeMay, head of SAC, became a judge in Chicago. Next to him is Elio Tarika, Executive Vice-President of Union Carbide and President of the Visking Corporation, who recently, along with his wife Nancy, endowed a chair in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois. Next is Glen Arai, a veteran of the Italian campaign, and a great architect. Then there is Victor Zavarella, who later obtained a Ph.D. in Education and who is now in Normal, IL. Victor was a good tenor, who, as was required of some of us who could, sang for us during Sunday dinners. His rendition of ‘Come back to Sorrento,’ sung in Italian, was as good as Pavarotti’s.
Then there is Muzaffer Gocek, who on my first Friday evening in Champaign loaded us in his gleaming-white Buick convertible (students with cars—not to speak of convertibles—were rare those days) and took us night-clubbing in Danville. And at the end of the row is Hjalti Einarsson, from Iceland, most admired for his cool and for his doing his math homework in ink from scratch. After graduation from Illinois, Hjalti obtained a Masters from Oregon State, then went on to become a big fishing company executive. Constantly disciplined, he sends me a Christmas letter every December.
Not in the panel are some other wonderful people. Steve Ivancevich, room-mate and great friend, would give you the shirt off his back. I recall that in 1962, I drove unannounced from Los Angeles to Chicago with three French friends that Steve Ivancevich and wife Florence served the best steaks in their larder and put us up for the night. And David Dubin emphasized Necati Akcaglilar and said that Necati had become a banking tycoon, and true, when I looked him up on Google, Necati was there, a mega-industrialist. Pity I was not aware of this, as instead of living in a hovel in Istanbul in July 2003, I could have lived in a mansion.
