Alan A. Reich Memorial Service     

Foundry United Methodist Church

Washington, DC

We met on a New Hampshire playing field, college freshmen, 1948. We stared at one another, ten yards apart. He held the football. "Reich, get by him!" growled the backfield coach; "Dey, stop him!" yelled the line coach. Alan was too quick. He got by me....with one leg; the other, I held with both arms. He could have dragged me down Pennsylvania Avenue. I wouldn't have let go.... I never did.

That embrace lasted 57 years. Your presence this morning suggests that I'm not the only one who didn't let go.

Alan was different, whether majoring in Russian or bounding across campus on a below zero winter morning -- T-shirt, arm full of books, radiating enthusiasm for life and all of its possibilities.

He was intrepid. Tell him he could not do something? He did it.

As a sixteen year old, to prove to his doctor that he no longer needed a leg brace, Alan crossed the George Washington Bridge, jettisoned the brace and ran 123 blocks to the doctor.

When the Dartmouth coach told Alan that he was ninth on the halfback depth chart and would not be invited back in September, Alan trained all summer and showed up anyway. By opening game, he was the starting right halfback.

Long before his accident, Alan was leading.

As fraternity president, he persuasively argued our responsibility to sponsor a teenage orphan from a WWII European refugee camp. An Estonian -- no family, no belongings, no English -- arrived one night in our midst, the pronoun, "our," slightly misleading. I awoke to find a cot with our newest arrival squeezed in next to my bed. Alan was around the corner, in splendid isolation!

Today, somewhere in the mid-West resides an Estonian-American.....husband, father, professional..... fulfilling his version of America's promise and Alan's vision of the American dream.

Indefatigable in promoting opportunity for others, Alan loathed self-promotion......except when holding forth with his dopey jokes, "knock-knock-who's there?"

New Year's Eve, 1950. "I'll bring the music," said Alan. He did. Songs of the Red Army!

Last December, celebrating the 50^th anniversary of their 1954 wedding, Alan's toast to Gay? "And it's been smooth sailing ever since!"

Alan was masterful at galvanizing others, worldwide or local.

His public crusade for FDR’s wheelchair statue caught the imagination of a New Jersey schoolteacher and her Sixth Grade students. They invited Alan to address the school.

I was alerted by his routine morning call, "Doooc , this is Alan, can you meet me Monday at Newark Airport?" You would have thought royalty was arriving at that school -- trumpets, balloons, bunting, welcome signs. A packed auditorium gave Alan a tumultuous standing ovation as we wheeled down the center aisle. With that sly mischievous grin, Alan turns and over his shoulder, "Doc, they think I'm FDR!"

Following Alan's slide presentation about the importance of historical monuments, the students proudly presented him with $376.23, the first funds committed to the statue which now greets visitors to the Roosevelt Memorial.

From irrepressible Alan, ideas cascaded -- plans, strategies, goals.

Most of all, action.

He embodied hope. Dreams impossible? Perhaps, but without dreams, hope withers. Magically, Don Quixote-like, Alan fashioned dreams, inspired hope.

Two days after his death, from someone who knew him only through my telling, I received the following

"One never quite knows what the meaning of another person's life might have for shaping one's own destiny. Clearly, Alan was a shaper of lives."

To paraphrase one of Alan's favorite poets:

Fifty-seven years ago, two lives converged on a New England playing field, and that, for me, has made all the difference.

Charles "Doc" Dey

December 13, 2005