My two daughters asked me years ago why fish eat worms. So did my grandson only moments (years) ago. I have another grandchild due in early October. The same question will be asked. I know it will. “How come tulips only come up in the Spring?” How come nightcrawlers only come out at night? They ask questions about the natural world before “education” rips them away from it.

Your grandchildren are fortunate!

Ken

That was worth reading. Very good!!

Ken

My word of advice – savor High Summer! Spreading rock salt on the walkway is months away. Don’t rush it!!

Seriously, a good story!!

Ken

I used to stock salmon. Now I’m a program basher. Why? Because after 40 years these guys know what the answer is but they continue with this program which is now a waste of resources.

You probably know that Bruce came from relatively a relatively modest middle class section of Brooklyn’s southeast shore. He was a scrawny kid back then but he was highly regarded as a very gifted student. At some point in junior high, Bruce would organize Saturday pickup football games. We played these games, unsupervised, without the benefit of formal coaching and relatively unequipped. Bruce would gather all the information he could about the game of football and he would teach us the game. By what seemed to be his sheer force of will, Bruce became a superb football player. He worked out a lot. He would
run 3-5 miles along the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn as a youngster and with his natural speed and athleticism he soon developed into a tough competitor and an excellent football player. He was mischievous and loved to tease but he was never mean and never got into fights. After graduating junior high school in Brooklyn, Bruce and I (and a handful of other guys from that junior high) attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan- a math science all boys’ high school. We would ride the
“Canarsie Line” into Manhattan’s lower east side early each morning, sometimes freezing our butts on that dilapidated train-often using that time to catch up on homework or reading.

Bruce made the football team his first year at Stuyvesant and devoted that Van Boeckel effort and talent to become a star player (playing in both the offensive and defensive backfield) on the city champ team of 1968, his junior year (the first year that Stuyvesant had won the city championship in many years). He was fast, quick, tough and smart. Bruce became captain of the football team during our senior year and was a star wrestler as well. Our paths crossed socially more often during that year as I struggled to make the team, my first year trying out as a senior. I got to know the guys on the football team and would
hang out with Bruce on occasional weekend nights doing the stuff that sixteen year olds do. While a superb athlete, Bruce was an outstanding student. He could do the math as well as the humanities – in fact there was nothing he could not do. I was in a senior English class with him when he wrote a research paper entitled “Poverty in America” That paper became the prototype research paper for our high school. Bruce graduated as salutatorian of our class at Stuyvesant- a school that had one of the highest SAT and NMSQT scores in the country. It was no small feat.

Bruce could hold his own with the bad guys and the good guys. He was highly respected by the football players, coaches (especially our head coach – Merle Thrush- an old transplanted Oklahoman –there in the middle of Manhattan in the late 60’s) and intellectuals at Stuyvesant. He could tease with the best of them and he could take it and dish it right back to you if you teased him. But no one ever did. He was genuinely humble and modest. While most of us were in awe of his accomplishments, he never mentioned them at all. He was, as you noted, a private sort of guy. I can remember that he was uneasy about
talking of his acceptance to Yale when I asked him about it.

Our paths crossed briefly several times in college. I remained in New York at SUNY Stony Brook and once or twice our paths would cross during a night out with the old Stuyvesant contingent when he returned from Yale for a weekend. Bruce had met my girlfriend (wife to be) but my kids never got to meet him. I did see him briefly at George Washington Hospital in about 1980 where he was already a junior or senior resident and I was first applying for an internship in internal medicine but unfortunately that was the last time I saw him. I never really got to know him as a man or as a physician. I expect that that
he was extraordinary at both.

One reason that I really enjoyed your article was that it gave me some insight into the man that he became. I never really got to see his compassionate side. I guess that we were too filled with vim and bravado to let that side of us show through. If it was there in Bruce while we were sixteen-year olds, I would have been too self-absorbed and immature to fully appreciate it. I am sorry that I never really got to know his politics or philosophy on life. And he got married a long time after we had parted ways so that I never got to meet his wife.

I did recognize the mischievous glint, the keen intellect, hunger for information, the guy’s banter and camaraderie that you talked about in your article. I could really see Bruce, the once Brooklyn kid as an outdoorsman. Same guy- just a different sport. The valedictorian of the class at Stuyvesant in 1970 – the year Bruce and I graduated was Benjamin Chu and I understand that Ben Chu became head of Kaiser Permanente in Southern California. Bruce Van Boeckel instead chose to become a country doc and to found a hospice in a small town in Western Massachusetts. How perfect.

My travels take me to Fitchburg on occasion and my eye catches that BIOMASS power plant on the edge of their town. Looks like a clean, orderly operation and I can’t seem to find any complaints on the web.

What will Greenfield stop next????

Ken