Alan L. Zaur – 50th Reunion Essay

Alan L. Zaur

128 Trillium Hill

Montpelier, Vermont 05602

AlanZaur@comcast.net

802-223-4176 or 802 272-8913

Spouse(s): Karen Berkman Zaur (1969)

Child(ren): Isaac Zaur (1977), Nathaniel Zaur (1980)

Grandchild(ren): Jean Marie Zaur (2005), Sophie Marie Zaur (2006), Natalie Marie Zaur (2013)

Education: Hahnemann Medical College Drexel University, MD 1975

Career: Private practice of adult and adolescent psychiatry 37 years

Avocations: Amateur Radio, volunteer at free community medical clinic, hiking, learning to cook, physics and mathematics

College: Silliman

My family has been my highest priority in the 50 years since I graduated from Yale. I began dating Karen Berkman during our freshman year in college, and we were married less than a month after graduation. We moved to Philadelphia for graduate school and post-doctoral training and remained there for 20 years. We are fortunate and proud to have two healthy, active sons who have charted their own courses in life and are now grown into adulthood with their own families.

During college I developed an interest in intellectual property through my involvement with WYBC and my part-time employment at WNHC television. The development of community antenna television, later cable television, raised new issues about the ownership of published and broadcast entertainment. After graduation I attended the University of Pennsylvania Law School with the expectation that I would make a career in the developing area of intellectual property. The dramatic political events in 1970–71 lead me to re-think my professional goals. Without the confidence that I had gained at Yale and my contact with the many clear-thinking “radicals” who befriended me, I doubt I would have had the guts to change my professional focus. I also had the strong support of my wife.

In 1970 I withdrew from law school and applied to medical schools. I managed to get a job designing and building split-beam spectrophotometers in the Department of Biophysics at Penn while I took biology and organic chemistry. Since I had no prior experience building scientific instruments and no background to apply to medical school, I am shocked by my own audacity. Nevertheless, I was very fortunate to be admitted to Hahnemann Medical College (Drexel University) in 1971. I have never regretted the decision to change careers.

While I liked nearly every specialty in medical school, I chose a psychiatric residency at Pennsylvania Hospital and subsequently completed psychoanalytic training at the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis.

I have had a very gratifying career dividing my time between treating adolescents and adults. For the first 10 years of my practice, we remained in Philadelphia where I had a teaching appointment at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1989 my family and I moved to Montpelier, Vermont, where I continued in private practice until closing my office in June 2017. I have retained a small adolescent consulting practice, which continues to be fun.

Since retirement I have taken several courses at the Osher at Dartmouth and our local senior center. These have ranged from a study of the fall of the Ottoman Empire to transfinite mathematics and quantum mechanics. It is reassuring that my brain continues to function, albeit at a slower pace than 50 years ago!

Some things have not changed since college. I still find pleasure in building electronic devices, and I have a well-equipped workshop where I spend as much time as I can. Over the years I have hiked extensively, and I am a member of the Adirondack 46ers.

Karen and I enjoy visiting our children and grandchildren and only wish they lived closer to Montpelier than New York City and rural Pennsylvania. We continue to love living in Vermont. While it is hard to leave Vermont, we have traveled extensively over the years.

I look back warmly to my years at Yale. The classes and the after-dinner conversations in the Silliman College dining hall were far more stimulating and enriching than I realized at the time.

With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I could have been more focused on academic and research pursuits, but the enormous breath of opportunities was almost overwhelming to an 18-year-old coming from a suburban public high school. Nevertheless, I have never doubted that Yale was the best place for me to begin my adult life.