H. Paul Reynolds

H. Paul Reynolds lived at the end of the corridor on the fourth floor of Cascadilla Hall, a freshman dormitory at Cornell University, where I was also a freshman.  My room was on the other side of the corridor from Paul and his three suite mates, somewhat further down the corridor from them.   A member of the swimming team and one of the university’s premiere fraternities, Paul was tall, good looking, athletic, and charismatic, but he was also gentle, kind, and a good listener.  Of course I both liked him and admired him immensely.

Alas, my mother died towards the end of my sophomore year, I transferred to Harvard so that I could live at home and help my bereaved father with my younger brother and sister.  When I made a short trip to Ithaca in my junior year to visit my friends, Paul was one of the people I most wanted to see.  And when I received notices of class reunions, which up to now I’ve never managed to attend – partly because we were living in Israel for much of the time since I graduated college – I imagined meeting him again.  Whenever I opened the Cornell alumni magazine's class notes, I looked for his name, hoping to learn something of what happened to him.  I found his address in a class reunion booklet – he had moved to   California – but that’s all I knew about him.  Still, he was such an outstanding figure during my college years that he remained very much in my mind.

By now our class notes have migrated to the front of the class notes section – very few classes now precede us – and the obituary notices for our class continue to grow longer each year.  I now check the obituaries before I check the class notes and it was in the obituary column that I found Paul’s name. He had died in January. 

I found an obituary notice at http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sanluisobispo/obituary.aspx?n=h-paul-reynolds&pid=155645101 from the San Luis Obisbo Tribune, which included a photograph of him, white haired but still unusually handsome.  He had been a successful businessman, first as an executive for the Ford Motor Company, then as the proprietor of a Ford Motor distributorship, and finally as an investor and real estate developer.  He had been an observant Catholic when I knew him and I guess he remained one inasmuch as he became the father of ten children.  Besides his wife and children, he left 20 grandchildren and three great grandchildren.  Active in community affairs, an MG and sailing enthusiast, he seems to have led an exemplary life.  It was Parkinson’s Disease that killed him.

Why do I feel so sad at his loss?  Our friendship was brief, lasting no more than two years, and I have had no contact with him since, other than on that brief trip to Ithaca in my junior year, 60 years ago.  He seems to have lived his life well.  And at 80 it was a long life, if not long enough.  But the friendships of one’s youth have a special flavor, and the death of such friends is particularly poignant.  My sadness proceeds not especially from his death's reminding me of my own mortality, which is pretty central in my thoughts these days, but from the death of my youth.  As long as Paul was alive, my youth seemed to exist unimpaired in some parallel universe.   Now it’s finally gone.

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