Thank you.
Len - Speaking for myself and on behalf of my family, let me thank you for leading this memorial service to honor Paul. And thanks for your friendship and all the support you gave to Paul as well as helping Joe with the Fieldston swim team.
Thank you to everybody for coming. We have felt the love and support from so many of you as we've struggled to cope with Paul's death.
As Len said, I'm Karen Fortoul, Paul's sister. He was 3 years older than I. We shared a lot over the years and had a lot in common - swimming, computers, and family time; and we also fought a lot (who knows now about what). In truth, there was nobody in the world who could irritate me more than Paul (and presumably the reverse was also true).
So, who was Paul? And what was he like?
Well, first of all, Paul was one bright guy. He was always curious, wanting to learn more. When he was very little (and these are stories from before I was born), once he figured out that words corresponded to objects, he would sit and point at things having our mom tell him what the word was so he could rapidly expand his vocabulary. Then, when he figured out that the alphabet was used to spell words, he would systematically have our mom spell words out with lettered blocks.
At age 5, he was adding, subtracting as well as multiplying simple numbers. In those days, it was already considered old-fashioned to memorize the arithmetic tables so he did flash cards with our Dad. He strived to improve his speed as our Dad made graphs to chart his progress.
He was also a perfectionist. This combination didn't always serve him well.
In 5th grade, his teacher informed the class that leap years and presidential elections coincided. "No", Paul pointed out, that's not true. After all, there were presidential elections in 1800 and 1900, yet those weren't leap years. He knew the exact rule for leap years and exceptions for every 100 years and the exception to the exception every 400 years. His teacher didn't believe him. Our Dad had to step in. The same year, to his teacher's dismay, he pointed out that she incorrectly said we follow the Gregorian calendar, when in fact we follow the Julian calendar. The teacher insisted Paul was wrong and our Dad was back at school.
He loved astronomy for as long as I can remember. In 2nd grade, his science project was a model of the solar system. This wasn't any ordinary model for a 2nd grader. He researched and meticulously made each of the planets to scale, as well as noting the relative distance of each planet to the sun. On Saturday mornings, he took classes at the Hayden Planetarium. He actually found a mistake in one of the exhibits. Unlike his 5th grade teacher, the mistake was acknowledged and he got a nice note from the head of the Planetarium. In 1970, our family made a trip to Virginia Beach specifically to see a total eclipse of the sun. Paul regularly read the Sky and Telescope magazine and years in advance of the event, had his sight set on seeing a total eclipse of the sun in Venezuela - we have family there and given the climate there wasn't a risk of missing it due to poor weather. We did in fact make that trip in 1998. After the eclipse Paul spent a couple of more weeks driving around the country with my parents. He enjoyed traveling - he was inquisitive, wanting to learn about the places he visited.
We grew up in Washington Heights, attending the local public school. Everyday we went to and from school together, coming home for lunch. We would often run to school since we would invariably be late. I guess procrastination started at an early age. I also distinctly remember how Paul would run just a little bit ahead of me. Given my competitive nature, I would run a little faster to catch-up. As soon as I almost caught up, he would pick up the pace, which prompted me to push harder to catch-up again. And this repeated itself until we arrived at school. This definitely helped me get faster and I think has carried over as I compete in athletic events - there's always just a little bit more to push, and a little bit more, and a little bit more.
In junior high school, he particularly excelled in and really enjoyed math. In 9th grade, he joined the math team. The team participated in competitions where schools would compete against each other. Individual students would have to answer questions within a short time limit. Mind you, these weren't standard questions that you could answer based on the regular math curriculum. As a matter of fact, an average student might not be able to answer any of the questions. Well, Paul scored the most points of all the math team students in New York City that year by correctly answering 17 out of 18 questions. His one missed question was a "clock problem" that you had to determine the exact time the two hands of a clock were at the same location. Len, having read this story, wondered if this triggered his subsequent obsession with watches, clocks and timing. Good question.
What else can I say about Paul? He was gentle and sensitive - he adored the cat we shared with our aunt and helped take care of her in such a caring way. Over 20 years ago, he spoke at our aunt's funeral having written a loving tribute about her. In 1986, when he came out to our parents about being gay, he spent a lot of time carefully planning how he was going to do it so as to be most supportive to our parents. Paul loved to read. He was a science fiction fan but was particular regarding the kind of science fiction he read. It had to be based on scientific fact. That's why Isaac Asimov was his favorite science fiction writer. Alice in Wonderland was a favorite book. By high school, he was reading the New York Times everyday. Later he would religiously also get USA Today and Newsday. He very much enjoyed the Harry Potter books, which I actually introduced to Paul since I had been reading them to my kids. Most of the books were already out and he quickly devoured them. As a matter of fact, the last time I saw him smile - and there wasn't much to smile about during those last few months - was related to Harry Potter. I was getting ready to fly back home to Boston and although he was very weak and tired I had rapidly gone over some medical information and choices to be made with him, I apologized and asked if he could use a pensieve. (For non-Harry Potter fans, a pensieve is a receptacle used by a wizard to store memories extracted from oneself for closer examination and relieves the mind when it becomes cluttered with information.) I will always remember that smile.
Our Dad worked for years at IBM so Paul was exposed to computers at an early age. Today it's not unusual for kids to know more about computers than their parents. But in the late 1970's computers were definitely not commonplace. At the Bronx High School of Science, Paul spent hours in the computer room learning all about computers - mostly teaching himself. He learned machine language on the IBM 1620. Machine language is the lowest level of programming which means numeric coding of every precise instruction the computer needs to execute to accomplish a task. Unfortunately for my mom, I too got into computers and there were many dinner conversations about computers that were extremely boring for her.
Some other memories I have are annual Thanksgiving concerts given by Pete Seeger and later, Arlo Guthrie (And as an aside - never going anywhere without his stopwatches - he had a habit of timing Arlo's long rendition of the Alice's Restaurant song to see how the length grew over the years). As kids I remember us helping our parents with the tenants association by distributing leaflets to 240 apartments, walking down the stairs from the 32nd floor to the 3rd. We followed local and national elections and at times went to candidate's headquarters for returns to come in. And on Halloween we weren't interested in candy but every year we rang the doorbells of all the apartments in our building collecting for UNICEF. Then there were the day trips to Washington D.C. for protests against the Vietnam War. When I went away to college at MIT, we had regular lengthy phone conversations - we went over each of our workouts or meet results in detail - and I do mean detail - if we did a set of 20 x 50 easy hard we would recite each of our 50 times.
We had annual vacations at Lake George - hours of playing catch. Many (many) games of ping-pong - always keeping score - after we had warmed up. And it goes without saying, swimming in Lake George. There was a tiny (and I mean tiny - 1 small tree was all that fit) island that was 1/4 mile away. When we first starting going, it was an accomplishment for us to complete the swim to the island. Later, how fast we could swim it was the challenge. Once, Kate and my kids, Jamie and Nora were born, it was a perfect place for them to spend time together as Paul absolutely relished his role as an uncle.
Let me say a few words about Paul and his stopwatches. For those that don't know he started with analog watches. He appeared to relish it when there were multiple swimmers in a heat - relays were even more challenging and fun- and then to have all the splits calculated by the time the swimmers reached the side of the pool was a thrill to him. I'm guessing that when scoreboards started displaying splits, and watches calculated splits and had memory included, that took some of the fun out of it for Paul. On the other hand, that allowed him to put his brain to other challenges.
In 1983, Paul volunteered to help run the Metropolitan Collegiate Swimming Championships and I agreed to help. This was before meet management systems. It was in the early days of automated timing, but no connection to computers. There we were, maybe a week before the event, when we realized that although we had thought and talked about what was needed, we hadn't actually done anything and we had better start writing the programs. There were a few late nights but we pulled it off in fine fashion. Now this was before word processing programs such as Microsoft Word. To produce the printed results he used a program called Script. He pushed the language to its limits and I'm sure beyond what it was intended for - coding logic so page breaks would occur at just the correct spot, precisely the "right" spacing and number of lines between events, heats, etc. He went on to run the PSAL (public school athletic league) championship meets for many years with this homegrown system.
Paul's illness was obviously quite rapid - he was seemingly healthy when we vacationed together in July. Given the circumstances, I know very few of you were in touch with him. Let me say that he remained "Paul" throughout his illness. No matter how weak and tired he was, he would perk up when someone called or stopped by and talked swimming - whether it was about swim workouts or meet results. His intelligence and his dry sense of humor remained. He was repeatedly asked questions to assess his neurological status. There was the time he said "please don't make me say again who the president is; I'll tell you that the mayor is Bloomberg". And there was another time he was asked to count backwards from 100 by sevens. He did this with relative ease (although not as rapidly as he would have if healthy) and when he reached 65 and the doctor said he could stop, Paul simply asked why, and whether that was as many numbers as the doctor had memorized. The answers satisfied the doctors that Paul was fine. "Trust me", I would tell the doctors - this is diminished capacity because they didn't know what his baseline was. To this day, given the spread of the cancer, I have no idea how he thought as clearly as he did or was able to stand as well as he did. I suppose it was the same thing that got him through his 200 flys - whether he was in or out of shape. Even though he talked to very few of you - I do know that he felt the support of so many.
It will take quite a while for me to absorb this loss. I am grateful for the memories I do have and appreciate hearing what Paul meant to others.
Thank you.
I would now like to introduce you to the person who got Paul started both in competitive swimming and then coaching. From a personal perspective, I consider myself privileged to have done many a "Marce workout" whether it included a set of 15x200 or a get out swim to cut down on yardage at the end of a long workout. Marcelino Rodriguez (or Marce as we all called him) was the City College of New York (or CCNY) swimming coach from 1974 to 1988 and he is a member of CCNY's Athletic Hall of Fame. For many years he was principal at P.S. 72 in East Harlem and then became superintendant of District 4. Here's Marce ...