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Celebrating the Life of William T. Golden

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for letting me join you in celebrating the life of William T. Golden. Thank you, Bill Schuster, for inviting me to make these remarks at the dedication of Golden Ridge. Thank you, Phil Ammirato, for introducing me with admirable brevity.

The video you have seen from the National Science Foundation (http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/golden/index.jsp) honors the public man. My purpose is to honor the private man, shown in my pictures of him which you see behind me. The public man we admire; the private man we love. The public Bill Golden summarized his labyrinthine public life simply: “The idea was to make a lot of money on Wall Street and then do interesting things.” Bill Golden did precisely that, though his public life was not as simple as this summary makes it sound. No less than his public life, his private life was enormously intricate, inventive, and interesting.

As I am not a member of his family, you might wonder what qualifies me to talk about the private Bill Golden. I knew him 45 years. In 1983, his wife Sibyl Levy Golden died, after more than 45 years of marriage. In the same year, my mother died. It occurred to me that it might be comforting for Bill and me if we got together and Bill told me his life story. For dozens of sessions, we met, usually in my office at Rockefeller University , and Bill dictated his remarks into my tape recorder. It was not a linear autobiography any more than his life was linear. The transcript of those conversations is his family’s property. Without revealing any confidences, I can share with you one or two aspects of what I learned about the private Bill Golden.

You may know that Bill Golden began negotiations with Daniel Steiner and Harvard University about the disposition of Black Rock Forest in 1981. In 1983, when Bill began his autobiographical taping, he was still seeking a path for the Forest and it was much on his mind. It took until 1989 for Harvard to agree that it would sell the Forest to Bill for the educational and scientific use of the Black Rock Forest Preserve. Harvard agreed to return the purchase price to endow the Forest , along with a contribution to the endowment from Bill. In short, Bill persuaded Harvard to pay him to take the Forest off its hands -- a remarkable concession from a university not widely known for applying to itself the maxim that it is better to give than to receive. This story illustrates Bill's infinite creativity in search of a favorable deal, his inexhaustible tenacity, and his enormous patience. Bill loved the Black Rock Forest and chaired the Consortium from its founding to the year of his death. Along with Sibyl and Pam, it is one of his children.

Last month, Phillip I. Blumberg, one of the trustees of the Black Rock Forest Preserve and Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut , sent me a hand-written card to express his regrets at missing today's dedication of Golden Ridge. He wrote: "Black Rock is one of Bill's most notable achievements and exemplifies his dedication to the natural scene. No doubt, it will be one of the most long lasting. How enriched those of us who knew him well have been."

Now I am going to make some remarks that you might think are a digression, but they are not. One measure of a person’s greatness is that his ambitions should exceed his achievements. The incomparable Isaac Newton spent his life trying to understand the nature and relationship of space and time. He failed. Darwin, who published The Origin of Species six years before Gregor Mendel founded genetics, never had a satisfactory theory of inheritance. Darwin knew the missing ingredient was a problem for his theory of evolution. Einstein, who never accepted quantum mechanics as the truth we now hold it to be, was unable to reconcile his cosmology with chance in the universe. Bill Golden’s ambition, his reach, surprised me one day. In the course of our tapings, he remarked that there was one thing he would like to do with his life which he feared he might never achieve. He said he would like to write a poem, just one poem, good enough to be included in the Oxford Book of English Verse. I wonder whether there is a trove of unpublished poems among his massive personal papers.

As an undergraduate, Bill Golden studied and loved English literature, especially the poets from the Elizabethan through the Victorian periods. He had an enormous fund of memorized poems, some serious, some humorous, which he could recite at appropriate moments. His recitations introduced me to poets and poems I did not know and came to love. I now realize that these poems will outlive both the speaker and the listener. The poems gave us both as close a contact with immortality as humans can have.

Here is a poem I first heard from him, which he recited from memory from A Shropshire Lad (1896) by A. E. Housman (1859–1936).  

Bill Golden was a man of humor and seriousness, of warmth and purpose, of spontaneity and discipline. To borrow the words of Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864), he strove with none, for none was worth his strife. Nature he loved and, next to Nature, Art: he warmed both hands before the fire of life.

I hope that the transcript of the recordings I was privileged to make with Bill Golden will someday become available so that the world can better know the personal side of the man who made possible the beautiful place where we stand today. How lucky we have been, those of us who knew Bill Golden the public and the private man.

Dr. Joel E. Cohen is a professor at Rockefeller University and at Columbia University, and is on the board of the Black Rock Forest Consortium.