From wlitwack@gmail.com Wed Feb  3 12:39:52 2021
Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2021 12:39:31 -0500
From: William Litwack 

Here's my contribution. Feels very weird -- sort of like my own obit.

I was interested in reading Gabe?s take on OHS and Mr. Russell. Those years
obviously worked well for him but for me it was a very mixed bag. Academically,
or maybe pedagogically is a better word, it was a disaster. From my perspective
now, I feel that the most important thing high school can teach you is how to
learn. OHS didn?t do that for me. I learned how to get good marks but I didn?t learn
how to learn. Fifty-seven years later, I am still making up for that lack.

The best take-away from my time at OHS has been the friends ? a few of whom are
still part of my life ? and the crazy, non-academic stuff that we have been
reminiscing about in these emails. Otherwise, the key thing about those years is
that fact that every summer from the time I was thirteen I worked at a printing
plant. I learned more there, and grew up more there, than I did during the
school year. I earned 50 cents an hour the first summer ($20 a week cash!!). It
may not have been the gargantuan amount dreamed of by Evelyn and Oskar but I
felt pretty damn flush at the time.

My summer earnings also gave me a lot of freedom. The summer we graduated from
OHS, I went to New York for two weeks. My parents didn?t want a sixteen year-old
going off on his own but they didn?t forbid it. So I took the bus, stayed at the
YMCA and had a life-changing experience. Helen Mackey lent me a little book with
architectural walking tours of Manhattan and I did every one of them. I went to
the theatre every day, the beginning of a life-long passion. I explored the
World?s Fair which was on that year and saw the Mets at Shea Stadium. I discovered
the Frick Museum. My eyes were opening.

After OHS, I took a B.A. at McGill. That was a mistake. For someone who knows
why they are there ? to become an architect or a doctor or whatever, or just
because they love science or history or learning in general ? undergraduate
university can be a great jumping off point. But I got a scholarship and I was
the first one in my family to have the possibility of going to college, so there
was no question of not going. By that time, my job at the printing plant was
much more challenging and interesting than my courses and I actually continued
working during the year around my classes.

In retrospect, the best thing about McGill was the fact that in my French course
we studied the play Lorenzaccio and there happened to be a production of it on
at the Theatre de Nouveau Monde. It was fabulous and was the first step in
getting me plugged into French culture in Montreal.

When I graduated I realized I didn?t want to be a printer forever so I quit, took
my savings, bought a used VW Beetle in Frankfurt and travelled around Europe for
a year. It was one of the most formative experiences of my life and travel has
been an essential part of my life ever since.

The first half of my career was in the film and television industry. I started
in a junior research position at the National Film Board, then spent a year in
their New York office as a distribution officer. I was unexpectedly offered a
huge promotion and became Director of Distribution and Marketing at the NFB and
then moved on to Director of Planning at Telefilm Canada. After that I left the
public sector and worked for a private television producer in various roles
including running an animation studio. But someone ? I don?t remember who ? once said
that people who can?t get into the mafia go into the film industry and I decided I
needed to get out and do something else.

My work in the film industry gave me the opportunity to travel to many parts of
Canada as well as China (in the early eighties on an official cultural
delegation), Japan and Taiwan where we did animation sub-contracting, and many
other places.

I hadn?t been much of an athlete during my school days, although I remember
playing squash with Zipes and Klein. That changed when I worked at the NFB. A
close friend, Anne Taylor, was organizing a ski house and she invited me to join
in. Cross-country skiing became part of every weekend for years, and through
Anne I also learned how to white water canoe and have had many splendid (and
sometimes harrowing) trips on the Dumoine and other rivers. In the hiatus
between the NFB and Telefilm I learned to scuba dive and that may be my
favourite sport.

After my stint in the film industry, I consulted for a few years. Then a friend
who was setting up a new international management program asked me to manage all
of the non-academic aspects of the program. It was a consortium of five schools ?
McGill in Canada, and top business schools in England, France, Japan and India.
I did that for a few years, primarily because I enjoyed the travel. Most of the
participants in the program came from large multinational corporations but we
offered the International Federation of the Red Cross reduced tuition because we
wanted the perspective of people working in the non-profit sector. The Red Cross
offered to host a few of us on a visit to Sarajevo just a year after the war had
ended. That was where I spent my fiftieth birthday. The next year, they invited
a group to visit two of the refugee camps they had set up in Tanzania for people
who had fled from the genocide in Rwanda. Those were two of the most meaningful,
life-changing experiences I had ever had.

Then I consulted again for a few years and came to the point when I thought
about retiring but realized I wanted to continue working full-time. I decided I
needed a new adventure and have spent the last eight years working and living in
India. I worked at two of the Indian Institutes of Management ? two years in
Bangalore at IIMB and six years in Udaipur at IIMU. I provided various kinds of
support and mentorship to the students at both schools and managed
communications at IIMU. That was the most fun I have had in a long time. I
worked with a terrific graphic design company in Ahmedabad and we did all sorts
of off-the-wall projects.

I decided to leave India because of Covid and I?ve been back in Canada since
October.


William Litwack