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I don't know who reads these things, so I guess this is from me to Brian. I met Brian the first day of 7th grade and we were fast friends for 6 years, ending up as Co-Captains of the football team after 4 years side by side as guard and tackle, and side by side first team All Albany mates our senior year. We did everything together.

While at CBA, for reasons I never clearly understood, but which had something to do with the health of his parents in East Greenbush, Brian drove his family car, day and night, all six years. He never got caught. When he was not legally permitted to drive he parked it in one of the lots near the school, so the Brothers wouldn't see. I would also meet him away from home, pretending to take a bus, so my parents wouldn't know I was driving with a classmate. That gave us unusual mobility and ability to get into trouble, but really we never did anything too bad: I guess we were both good "Brother's Boys": off with our dates to the dances, swimming with them in the lakes late at night with Hedrick's beer in the cooler and do-wop music on the radio.

After graduation Brian had a football scholarship, along with Lindemann and Cary, to the University of Bridgeport, but none of them liked it and quit. Brian then went into the Special Forces, where he was the Medic on a 12 man A Team in the mountains with the Montainards. He was proud of and happy with his service and , knowing him as I did, I'm sure was the perfect teammate and that they could absolutely rely on him when the going got tough. Brian was that kind of guy.

Now that I am older I am remembering the adventures we had together more clearly: sneaking into New York and going to bars, chasing girls in Kingston and Glens Falls we met on football outings, and bowling after proms. In the picture of the formal on this site we are in line together in our uniforms. He met his future wife, a wonderful girl, through me and they had what I understood to be a great marriage. He knew my wife Ellen very well after countless double dates in his car, and he was in our wedding party. I visited Brian and his wife a few times in Connecticut, but we were a continent apart by then and involved in our own lives, so the friendship became muted and distant. I always thought the MS he died from was especially cruel for such an active guy, but I know that he was a great Dad and Husband...just as I always knew he would be.

At this stage in my life, when I am reaching out to the good friends I had at various times and in various endevours throughout my life, to laugh about the good times we had, I miss Brian, my oldest and best friend for six years, reliably next to me on the football field and in his Oldsmobile, and the possibility of reviving and sharing those memories. Now the memories live only with me. Brian was one of the best men I ever knew, and I miss him, while the times we had together fade further into space.

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John was kind of my "other best friend" for six years at CBA. My first and most obvious being Brian Buckhoff. He lived near to me(four blocks away) and we, kind of secretly and surreptitiously, shared intellectual interests all six years. I was, I think, mostly percieved as a Jock in school, and John was the opposite of that, but he was my primary companion in intellectual adventures. We played chess together and even tried GO. We snuck over to Rennseleer to find the mysterious drink, Sake( a little bar near RPI was the only place in the Capital District we could find it). I got as drunk as I have ever been with John when we decided we had to try all the different wines of the world in one night, because that's what sophisticated people seemed to do. I hated wine for years after that. We even ventured into Protestant Churches and a Jewish Synagogue, sure that we would be sent to hell, or at least kicked out of school if caught, to try to find out what the big deal was.

We couldn't get answers to our questions at CBA, so we haunted the big State library together and sometimes the library at Milne, which had "condemned" books and a librarian who would talk to us. As I look back it was kind of funny and sad, the picture of the two of us trying to understand Kant's Categorical Imperitives and the conflicting precepts of different religions and philosophies all by ourselves. We were asking questions the answers to which were way over our heads, if they existed at all. We did have one Brother who would talk to us, Brother Benedict, to whom I am eternally grateful. But even he was confused by our fragmented, and perhaps dangerous, questions and inquiries. We tried to start a philisophical inquiries club at CBA, which we were going to grandiously call the "Red Berets" (I think we thought French intellectuals were cool and we had tried to read Sartre) which was quickly shut down. But we kept going.

After CBA John went to Bard and I went to Yale. Bard was even more different from CBA than Yale, if that is possible. We met in New York for drinks and to look at art a few times, but the friendship fell apart after a pretty terrible car accident in which John was driving my Sophomore year in college. The car rolled 3 times on a curve and hit a stone wall and I was thrown out of the back window. Amazingly (God takes care of kids and drunks sometimes) we were both bruised and battered,  but OK. Unfortunately John's brother was a lawyer and was primarily concerned about liability. He cautioned John about talking to me and tried to get me to sign things I knew I didn't want to sign and treated me as a threat, which I was not. He kept after me, even visiting me at Yale, and wouldn't let John talk to me until I signed. The end result was a chill on the friendship and we never saw each other after that. Which I regret. John was a fun guy with an honestly inquiring mind and an Irish sense of humor and irreverence. He was my mate, my wing man, in my first intellectual adventures and I miss him and the laughs we had together.

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