Funny Half-Century Old Picture / Epochal Moment

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Shelly Lowenthal ’74 was a shooter (photographer) for The Tech. Like most photographers, he saved every negative he ever shot (an option available to all of us now, thanks to digital photography and Google Photos).

While preparing a slide show for the 50^th reunion of the class of 1974, he ran across this photo, taken on March 5, 1971. Third from left was MIT’s new president, Jerry Weisner. On the far right, there is a boy radio reporter who apparently had never heard of a microphone stand.

Photo by Sheldon Lowenthal

I wasn’t sure it was me, but Google photo said it was my face. Then, like on any bad police procedural from decades ago, I just said “zoom in” and discovered that at the end of this guy’s perfectly shot cuff

was a familiar cufflink; 54 years later, I still have that cuff link. Some people save their negatives, some their high school cufflinks.

The five-shot above is not a picture of an epochal moment in my life, but it is epochal adjacent. Had Shelly stayed after the news conference, then walked into the next room, he would have seen this epochal moment (as described in a contemporaneous journal entry):

I asked Alex Makowski  and Lee Giguere (The Tech news editors), to stay.

We talked for about 45 minutes, and finally, I asked Alex: “Would you want me on The Tech? Would you let me keep doing my column?”

“I haven’t read it much. Let me look at it. My first reaction is, sure we want you. You work hard.”

I called Alex a week later and he invited me over to The Tech’s luxurious corner office. “We’ll be happy to have you and your column too, although you’ll have to write it more carefully.” The die was cast: I asked for a month to clear up my affairs at Ergo. But from then on, I was a Techman for good.

(See a luridly detailed description of the day I recruited myself to The Tech)

In 21 months I was editor-in-chief.

Comments

[Robert E. Malchman]

Can you name the other people in the shot off the top of your head? I can (though I had to double check the fellow on the right to confirm).