Long line of Women

This photo represents Len’s encounter at age two or three with the maternal line back to the nineteenth century. At the head of the table is Mae Cleary, known as Aunt Mar, the youngest of Len’s great-grandmother’s seven siblings, born about 1890. Next to Len, his grandmother (“Gram”) and across the table, me. The place is NYC, off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, an apartment from which Len’s great-aunt (“Auntie “) walked to Hunter College where she taught in the biology department, one of the first generation of women on the faculty of this college founded to educate women. She was an important figure In Len’s first 20 years. Along with much else, she taught him to clean a fish with fine attention to details of anatomy.

            In the 1970s, Hunter became part of the City University of New York where, in the summer after his sophomore year in college, Len studied Latin before joining the program in spoken Latin given by Father Reginaldus, the Vatican scriptor, in Rome.

~submitted by Virginia Nalencz