I was no great shakes at performing acts of public interest during my legal career, but I’ve tried to make up partially for this in retirement, especially in two areas. The first is leading singalongs for senior citizens – for many years, hosting weekly gigs at three Manhattan senior centers, and more recently, for performances at assisted living centers in Connecticut. The second is my role in a public service entity founded and sponsored by my Princeton alumni under the present name of ReachOut56-81-06.

  My principal contribution to ReachOut has been the creation and leadership of annual fellowship awards to graduating Princeton seniors that enable them to perform domestic and foreign public service projects. Another undertaking of ReachOut has been mentoring disadvantaged high school students to cope with the challenge of getting into and graduating from college – and it’s an early stage of this activity that I’m focusing on here.

         About two decades ago I came up with the idea of taking a group of students from Brooklyn’s Paul Robeson High School on a photographic tour of Central Park. As this was before cellphones took over, ReachOut supplied the students with disposable cameras for the occasion. Believe it or not, many had never handled a camera before, and few had ever been exposed to the wonders of Central Park.

  I led the annual tour instructing the students on how best to use their cameras and suggesting various choices of subject matter. I then had their films developed and printed, including making an enlargement of each student’s best shot, from which my colleague Raymond and I made a montage for the wall of the school. We presented this at a class where I pointed out why each of these pictures were good, and then awarding a framed photo and the prize of a digital camera to the student who took overall honors. I considered this a worthwhile learning experience for the students, and that’s the way they treated it.

             Raymond followed us around the Park during the 2007 excursion, taking video and stills of what went on. The edited results – a 20-minute video and the best photos – are in a dropbox for viewing. I was very proud of this activity, and I recommend your viewing it now.