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In Memory

Edwin Stokien

 
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10/16/13 06:39 PM #1    

Leonard Santos (Santos)

Ed was my Freshman year roommate and we remained good friends throughout our four years at Mount Hermon. We shared a love of classical music and a kind of outsider's mentality- he was from New York City and found the country school a bit, well, isolating, and I felt  totally disoriented by my transitiion from Caracas to Gill. Although Ed was not a happy Hermonite, he was very bright and managed to compile good academic record.

We gradually lost contact after Mount Hermon, but we did meet for lunch once during my year's clerkship in San Francisco, shortly after I graduated from law school. He was living in Berkeley and told me how much happier he was being part of the larger world. Those were tumultuous times in Berkeley and Ed was thriving in that environment. He was even more emphatic about being unhappy at Hermon and told that he had made a big mistake by going on to Union College, which, with its emphasis on engineering, and its upstate New York location, was the wrong place for him. He never finished at Union.

I have thought about Ed over the years, wondering where he was and what he was doing. It has come as a  real shock to discover that he died in 1984, when he would have been in his late thirties. I believe he is buried in a common grave with his parents near Keene, NH. Ed was an only child, and it appears he left no other family behind. It saddens me to realize that he had such a short life, especially since he "found" himself relatively late in life.


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