Fathers and Sons

My father,  Robert Rosenblum,  in 1952

I spent the years 1977-79 traveling around the world with a camera.

I once thought I would be a photojournalist, and this seemed the best way to start.

My father was deeply disappointed in my decision, and thought I would be much better off getting some kind of professional degree, like a JD or an MBA or something that would lead to a ‘real’ career.

I found his attitude deeply annoying. He had gotten an MBA himself from Columbia in 1952.

In 1979, in my third year of wanderlust, I decided to try and cross the Sahara Desert with the Toureg Bedouin.  These once fierce nomads would take you, so I had heard, from Tamanrasset to Timbuktu, a journey of a few weeks, by camel, for $100.

I was game.

So I made my way to down to Tamanrasset, a fly-blown town on the northern edge of the great Sahara Desert in Algeria.  The highway at that time terminated in Tam. It just ended in sand.  And on the edge of Tamanrasset, there was a Toureg bedouin encampment where you could negotiate your deal for trans-Sahara passage.

With a few days to kill in Tam before departure, I wandered into the post office.  I had given my parents the Poste Restante address in Tamanrasset in case they wanted to get in touch with me. In those days, if you mailed a letter to someone and addressed it to Poste Restante, the local post office would hold the letter for you if and when you ever arrived.

At the Tamanrasset post office there was a letter for me, from my father.

I tore it open.

I had not had news from home in months.

Inside, there was not a letter, but rather an article torn out of The New York Times.

My father had circled the headline with a big red magic marker and had drawn arrows all over the page.

“LOOK” he had written in big red letters.

The headline read: “MBAs Now Starting at $35,000+ A Year”

That was all he had written.

The article and the arrows.

A notification that the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University is now going to offer joint degrees between the Engineering School and the Journalism school has set off a flurry of discussion amongst my classmates from the J-School, class of 1983.

It prompted Sid Kane, one of my classmates, to post the following story:

I’ll always remember a windy autumn afternoon on 1st avenue, back in the mid-1980s, when I was walking with my father to the NYU medical center where he was going to have some tests that would later show he’d need to have heart surgery. It was a few years after getting out of J School and I was writing for a few magazines around N.Y, and also for the Times, Sunday Business -– which I felt pretty good about. I was telling my father about this, again, when he stopped me outside the hospital, looked me in the eye, and said: “You know, son, you can still go back to school and go for a ‘real’ profession, like in business, there’s still time, and I can help you.”
I’ve remembered and thought about that windy, N.Y. moment … it made me smile then and still does today.
Maybe father’s do always know best  🙂

I have been arguing for some time now that the J-School should combine a degree not with Engineering, but rather with an MBA.

Maybe my old man was not quite so annoying as I thought he was when I was young.

There’s a famous quote from Mark Twain:

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant, I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.