fhfabend@msn.com

Update 2015
Since our last reunion, Firth has published a number of articles and chapters in books and also a new book of her own: New Netherland in a Nutshell: A Concise History of the Dutch Colony in North America, commissioned by and published by the New Netherland Institute in Albany. She and Carl have moved from their wonderful house in Montclair after 48 years to a condo in neighboring Verona, one zip code away. It will be soooo good not to have to deal anymore with the endless problems of house and gardens. Our daughter Lydia married Steve Connelly in Mill Valley, CA, in May, and we thus happily acquired two step-grandsons, making our total five, four boys and a girl. Firth weathered a nasty bout of cancer in 2013, but surgery fixed it. Carl is working on selling his company. And then it's party time! Hope to see everyone at our 60th!

School/College Highlights - Barnard College, B.A., New York University, PhD.

Marriage and Family Highlights - Ten years after high school, I bumped into a former classmate (Carl Fabend) at McDermott's Milk Bar in Nyack, and we were married a few months later! (What did they put in those milkshakes?) We had two daughters, Caroline and Lydia, now 33 and 30. Caroline is married with three children of her own, living in the next town to us. She has just started law school. Lydia is single and works in San Francisco as a Marketing Manager for Globe Wireless.

Update 2005
Our daughter Caroline is now a lawyer, working in Newark. Her three children are Hugh, 10, Will, 8, and Ione, 6. Our daughter Lydia is an interior designer working for an architectural firm in San Francisco. 

Career Highlights - After college, I worked in book publishing in New York for fourteen years, writing novels on the side, five of which were published between 1968 and 1985. (One of these, The Woman Who Went Away, originally published by Holt in 1981, has recently come back into print as a paperback.) Then after finishing my doctorate, I switched to writing history and have just published my third book about the Dutch in New York and New Jersey (Zion on the Hudson, Rutgers University Press, 2000). I taught briefly, but found it too exciting! I'm much better off staying at home and writing books!

Travel/Vacation Highlights - Carl and I have been fortunate to have traveled a lot, especially in Europe and in the Far East. But then of course we don't have any hobbies, and we don't do sports! (Donny Kastner took care of that at a certain football game in 1954.)

Civic/Church/Political Activities - I spend a certain amount of time trying to do good on assorted committees and boards, including church, League of Women Voters, and various garden clubs and historical societies.

Achievements/Awards/Outstanding Events - My book, 'A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, 1660-1800', won two major awards (New York State Historical Association Annual Book Award and the Hendricks Prize of the New Netherland Project). This book, a version of my NYU dissertation about the Haring Family, originally published in 1991 by Rutgers University Press, was reprinted in paperback in 1999. (All of the books mentioned can be ordered on line or through any earthly bookstore.)

Update 2005
"A Catch of Grandmothers" has gone into a second printing since publication last fall by the Historical Society of Rockland County and has been nominated for a prestigious poetry prize to be decided later in the year. Download a PDF document with synopsis and pre-order form A Catch of Grandmothers PDF
I am also writing a historical novel set in eighteenth-century New York and New Jersey, tentatively called Land So Fair. I've had about six essays published in academic journals or forthcoming books since our last reunion. 

Anything at all that you may want to say - I realized when I read the names of our seven departed classmates that my name could easily have been among them. I have had three bizarre, near-fatal medical emergencies over the years, the latest in May 2000, and I can say with all my heart that I feel very happy and very fortunate to be planning to attend our 45th reunion!

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