Living by the Sword

When Earl Jagust started the Far Rockaway High School fencing team, I was recruited from the ranks of the The Chat. Jagust was Faculty Advisor and I was Sports Editor. You couldn’t buy better publicity.

I was slash-and-burn. Teammates would shout C-H-A-R-G-E, and I’d barrel down the strip. I compiled a 12-2 record, same as team captain Richie Berke. But don’t let the numbers fool you: Richie took on the opponents’ top fencers, while I engaged the lesser talents.

Richie was poetry in motion—good hand-eye coordination, great footwork, speed, perfect timing, mobility, poise. I was get-them-before-they-get-you. Richie went on to fence for New York University, lured by a four-year athletic scholarship. I went the way of Michigan State. There was no scholarship—Michigan State invested in football players, not fencers. I had to c-h-a-r-g-e my way onto the team.

As a freshman, I was MSU intramural foil champion. My varsity career, however, lasted all of one sophomore match, a loss to a University of Iowa foilsman. Like high school, I also worked on the student newspaper—and the day came when I had to choose one activity or the other. I chose the newspaper: The pen was mightier than the sword.

Richie went on to new heights. But—wait—there’s more to the MSU story. Another '62 FRHS graduate, Mark Haskell, also went to State…and I coaxed him into trying out for the fencing team.

Mark had no high school experience—you’d never have mistaken him for a jock at FRHS. At MSU, he came under the tutelage of a great coach, Charles Schmitter, the first American-born, European-accredited fencing master. Mark immediately took to the sport.

Unlike his Far Rockaway schoolmate, Mark didn’t bring bad habits with him. He mastered offense AND defense. Schmitter molded him into a disciplined sabre fencer. He became captain of the team. With his arrival, Michigan State won its first Big Ten title. As a junior, Mark placed second in sabre at the Big Ten championships. As a senior, he took first place and was named first-string All-American by the U.S. Fencing Coaches Assn.

I was on the sidelines, pen-in-hand, to report about it.

Back at New York University, Richie—today known as Richard—took on an even greater challenge. He competed on college fencing’s biggest stage, the Intercollegiate Fencing Assn., affiliated with the Eastern College Athletic Conference. The IFA includes Columbia (Jagust’s fencing alma mater) and most Ivy League colleges.

NYU and Columbia were the powerhouses. The Public Schools Athletic League and local fencing salles served as breeding grounds for the arch-rivals. NYU scouted Richie at a tri-state high school tournament. “Somebody wants to talk to you,” he recalls Jagust saying. That somebody was Hugo Castello, coach of the NYU Violets.

The name Castello is synonymous with U.S. fencing. Castello was a three-time National Intercollegiate Foil Fencing Champion, a member of the U.S. Olympic Fencing Committee, and an assistant coach for the 1960, 1964 and 1968 Olympic Games. His dad had been NYU coach for 20 years. His family operated Castello Fencing Equipment and Castello Combative Sports. They outfitted athletes everywhere.

The sales pitch began. Castello asked about Richie’s grade school average. He said he had the grades, but not the money for a private university. NYU cost $40/credit—whopping tuition in those days. “If you fence like that, you don’t need money,” Castello parried.

Six weeks later, Richard was offered a full scholarship on terms he maintain a C average. He did that, and more: He went on to earn an MBA, which led to a career as the top banana in the HR departments of Squibb and ADP/Broadridge. Today he chairs the Board of Directors compensation committee at health food giant Hain Celestrial.

The “full” scholarship did not pay for dormitory housing—something that still irks the compensation specialist.

For its part, NYU’s investment paid off. Richard went undefeated in his freshman year. A foilsman in high school, Castello decided Richard’s moves were better served with sabre. He became the varsity sabre unit’s third man, alongside Paul Apostol, who later would become a member of the '72 (Munich) and '76 (Montreal) U.S. Olympic teams. Richard competed in the Junior Olympics development camp in Strasburg, PA, but fell short of an Olympic berth.

At NYU, the wins kept coming—individual IFA medals of all colors and team titles. NYU was NCAA runner-up champion in his sophomore and junior year. They won it all in his senior year—best in the nation! In Coach Castello’s talented arsenal, Richard could fence foil or sabre as the match-ups warranted. When the team brought home the NCAA championship, Richard was named NYU Outstanding Athlete.

None of this would have happened if his mom hadn’t refused to sign a form to allow him to play football at FRHS. “I had a Jewish mother,” Richard recalls. “She said, ‘I will die first and you’ll have to bury me before I sign the form.’”

He remembers walking down the high school hallway when a friend spotted a poster announcing formation of a fencing team. The friend said he should try out. Richard told him he wanted to play football. The friend said “your mother won’t let you—try out for fencing.”

The rest is history. When the boat left the dock, Richard was on it.

Richard says fencing taught him focus, discipline, and a level of independent thinking. The other lesson: Listen to your mom.