Coach Henry Harutunian receiving the Legacy Award in his US fencing team jacket from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. Flanking him are Selena Kaing, chair of the US Fencing Foundation Board of Trustees, and Wei-Tai Kwok, co-president of the Yale Fencing Association and captain of the Yale 1984-85 men’s varsity fencing team. As friends, […]
The year still has a couple of weeks to go, so this may not be quite the most logical time to consider it in hindsight. However, if I’m to create the annual — or, in my case, “annual-if-I-ever-get-around-to-it” — holiday letter before Santa Claus squeezes down the chimney we don’t have … there’s no […]
Coach Henry Harutunian Yesterday, at long last, about 160 alumni of Yale University’s fencing teams Zoomed together to honor my friend — our friend — Henry Harutunian, who had served as Yale’s fencing coach for nearly half a century. The celebration had originally been scheduled to take place in person in New York City on […]
Last week I wrote about the adventure of teaching Henry Harutunian, my ex-Soviet Olympic fencing coach friend, to drive. As promised, there’s more to his story. In those first couple of years after Yale, with a recent graduate’s typical enthusiasm for the success of his alma mater’s teams, I followed the ups and downs of […]
With my friend Henry Harutunian at Harvard, spring 1968 The story I’m about to recount took place over half a century ago, in 1966–68, when I was working on my master’s degree in Soviet area studies at Harvard‘s Russian Research Center. During the first year of this two-year, multi-disciplinary program, I continued my study of […]
