Memorial Service for Marvin Ramer '40 in NYC on September 9
Bob Wells '40 forwarded the following email message from Joan Ramer to us:
I am sorry to inform you that my father, Marvin M. Ramer, passed away on July 18, 2001, of cardiac arrest. Marvin retired as vice chairman of the Lummis Company and was very active in RPI Alumni Affairs. We will be holding a memorial service for him at the UN Chapel in NYC, 777 UN Plaza (First Avenue at 44th Street) on September 9 at 1:00pm. I would greatly appreciate your informing other classmates.
Obviously, the RCNJ would like to express its condolences to Marvin's family and friends. Read on for a couple of comments from Bob Wells about the importance of staying in touch with alumni in failing health, and an editorial comment about the posting of bad news....
In the message he sent on August 9, Bob Wells included the following postscript:
We included a note from {Marvin Ramer's} wife Stella in our Alumni News of March 2001 suggesting that he would like to hear from class mates at his Boca address. I hope others realized how important those notes can be, and shouldn't be postponed.
Upon posting this article, Dave Aiello wrote:
RCNJ.org is, first and foremost, a forum for Rensselaer alumni news. We post the good and bad news in the hope that it helps us all to participate more fully in the support of Rensselaer and the lives of our friends and fellow alumni.
We would have been pleased to carry the note from Bob Wells that encouraged people to write to Marvin Ramer when he wrote it last year. If you have a piece of news or an announcement that you think alumni in New Jersey, the New York Metropolitan Area, or the Delaware Valley would be interested in, please submit it to our Web Site at http://www.rcnj.org/cgi-bin/submit.pl. That's the "Submit Story" link on the RCNJ.org home page.
Regarding the posting of bad news such as a death notice, we will not publish such information without confirmation either through a newspaper, Rensselaer Alumni Relations, or a credible third party. We won't publish the fact that someone died solely on the basis of an email we receive from someone who has never communicated with us before.
The reason that we did not publish this story earlier is because we could not find anyone at Rensselaer who could confirm it. Perhaps it would have been sufficient to re-contact Bob Wells directly, but we did not think to do that.