Reunion Weekend

Brotherly love, tragedy, joy.

Jerry Alpern's ILR story has many chapters.

Returning to campus this week for Reunion Weekend, Alpern will celebrate the 60th anniversary of his Class of 1949 graduation and seven decades of ILR memories.

A series of events during Alpern's teen years led him to a lifetime of involvement with a school that didn't yet exist.

His father, critically injured in a car accident, was in a Boston hospital. Alpern's mother was at his side there during a long recovery.

Jerry, at home, started to flounder academically at Stuyvesant High School in New York.

He failed three state Regents' exams.

His brother, Daniel Alpern, a student in Cornell's College of Administrative Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, told his mother, "Send him up here.  We'll watch him."

Who, Jerry Alpern now asks, "needs a 15-year-old brother living with them in a fraternity?"

Daniel was glad to have his younger brother with him.

Jerry enrolled at The Cascadilla School, a private school in Ithaca.

There he jokes, "I was valedictorian, voted most likely to succeed and most likely to fail."

The punch line:  He was the only person to graduate in January 1945 from Cascadilla.

Daniel, who had volunteered for the U.S. Navy, became a radio technician and was sent to Korea in October 1945.

The following month, ILR opened its doors for the first time.

Jerry Alpern, who transferred from New York University to ILR, was 16, younger than most of ILR's other 106 undergraduates, many of whom were World War II veterans in their twenties.

Jerry told his big brother, whom he adored, that he, too, would like ILR.

In January 1946, Daniel wrote the fledgling school's admissions director to inquire about transferring to ILR when he resumed his education at Cornell.

Four weeks later, boarding a small boat from a ship where he had been working, Daniel slipped and drowned.

ILR, Jerry said, "helped me get through that grieving period.  They were so supportive."

"I always felt I had a debt to the school and felt I should be active," said Alpern, who has served in numerous ILR and Cornell volunteer leadership positions.

The university honored Alpern with the Frank H.T. Rhodes Exemplary Alumni Service Award in 2001.

In recognition of Alpern's dedication to ILR, The Jerome Alpern Award was established by the school in 1997.  It is given annually to a professional who provides outstanding service and support to ILR and whose career achievements have been outside industrial and labor relations.

Two other annual ILR honors bear the Alpern name.

In Daniel's memory, his parents established ILR's first scholarship in 1946.  In 1947, Sophie and Harry Alpern also established The Daniel Alpern Prize, awarded annually to two seniors.  More than 500 students have benefitted from the scholarship and prize.

Jerry graduated from ILR in 1949, earned a Cornell MBA the next year and went into business with his father.

A resident of Englewood, N.J., Alpern continues to work as a business and financial consultant.

Some of his lifelong friends have been people he met during his first months at ILR.

One became his wife.

Enid Marjorie Levine, a 1947 graduate of what is now the College of Human Ecology, and Jerry met in the Ivy Room of Cornell's Willard Straight Hall.

The Alperns celebrate their 58th wedding anniversary June 21.  They will be joined by  daughters Susan Alpern Fisch A&S '81 and Dr. Dana Marjorie Alpern; sons-in law Richard Fisch ILR '79, MBA '80 and John M. Pollick, and granddaughters Emily Alpern Fisch, Sarah Allison Pollick and Abigail Alpern Fisch.

Another would-be friend started out as a scary professor.

Professor Maurice Neufeld so frightened him, Alpern said,  he "hid" in the back of the room during lectures by the legendary professor, now deceased.

When Alpern learned he had missed his final exam with Neufeld, he couldn't hide any more.

"I was shaking in my boots," Alpern said, when he told his professor he mixed up the day of the test.

Neufield was blasé.

"Come to the office. I’ll give you the final."

Alpern has been forever grateful, so much so that when he turned 50, Neufeld sent a greeting: "Dear Jerry, I forgive you.  I've always forgiven you.  Get over it."