Izzie

The death of Isidor Feinstein Stone at 81 on Father’s Day triggered fond recollections of my brief contacts with him, phoning to set up the I.F. Stone Award for the Free Library’s Art Festival in 1975.

That award–dubbed the Izzie–sought to honor undergraduate journalism in his investigative tradition...Izzie and Esther were clearly thrilled by the title’s winning winsomeness. But with characteristic generosity when I told him we had made a special award to an Atlantic County journalism teacher who’d gotten into hot water when her class exposed fiscal hanky-panky in the audio-visual department, he turned to his wife to say “How blessed we were” to be party to the praise of such a courageous journalism teacher....

When some witless KYW reporter asked him how he felt about finally receiving his degree [on an honorary basis from University of Penn. on the 50th anniversary of his graduating class from which he had dropped out before graduating] Stone gave him the zinger his dumb question earned: “I got out of phys-ed.”

That wry sense of humor may well have been the most attractive trait of this idiosyncratic leftie. The American left has too often smothered itself in its lugubriousness. Izzie leavened his high seriousness with a delightful playfulness.

This was published in the Welcomat, After Dark, July 5, 1989.