Remarks by Jim Kahan, Reed '64

 Good afternoon.  I met Moshe Lenske in 2006, when we served together on Reed's Alumni Board. I quickly learned that this vibrant, humorous, friendly guy was all by himself as much a Reed tradition as the Doyle Owl. Both started life in Eastmoreland and both were seemingly omnipresent at major Reed events.

Moshe was on the board ex officio because he chaired the Foster-Scholz Club--whose membership is all alumni 40 or more years after their class year. He and his classmates from 1950 were so much the heart and soul of the club that it seemed to me that they had been there forever, but I learned that Moshe had been chair for only a few years and had other interests to pursue. In 2008, he recruited my wife, Kathia Emery, to join the Steering Committee and then at the first meeting she attended and with no warning, nominated her to replace himself as chair. I, of course, believe he made a brilliant choice, but I'll confess that I wondered how he came to know about her organizational skills. Maybe his classmate Barbara Weeks Shettler passed the word.

Around that time, when the Parker House kerfuffle became a campus crisis, I got to know Moshe a lot better. Reed had purchased Parker House--across Woodstock Blvd. from the campus--and wanted to use it as a hospitality and meeting center. Some Eastmoreland residents were violently opposed to this and appealed to the Portland City Council to forbid Reed from using the building for those purposes. Because Moshe knew me as an active Reed alum and an Eastmoreland resident, he asked me to accompany him to City Hall and speak to the Council in favor of Reed's efforts. After the opponents to the plan declared that everybody living in Eastmoreland was dead set against Reed's plan, Moshe got up and simply stated that he had lived pretty much his entire life in the Eastmoreland area, had looked carefully into the Reed plan, and believed it was of great mutual benefit to the College, the neighborhood, and--indeed--to the City of Portland. Our opponents scoffed that Moshe was weird and must be the only person in the neighborhood who believed this, which gave me the chance to stand up and say that I, a new resident in Eastmoreland, had moved to the neighborhood because of Reed's proximity and everything that Moshe had told them was absolutely true.  With the help of some lawyers, we won the day.

Over the years, I found myself involved in things where Moshe had blazed a trail, including working as a Democratic Precinct Committee Person for the neighborhood, getting involved in critical community issues (I became a frequent visitor to City Hall), and following Kathia for my own stint as Foster-Scholz Club chair. Following Moshe's lead has helped me make this latest chapter of my own life fulfilling, and my regret is that I never had a chance to sit down with Moshe and tell him exactly that.

So this is my chance.  Thank you, Moshe, for being a leader who taught me by example.