The Marvelous Miss Maisel
Alice Jo with her daughters, from left to right, Sue, Joanne, and Pam
Today, Sunday, August 16, it was announced that The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel television series was nominated for 20 Emmys. That personality is fictional. The Marvelous Miss Maisel is the real thing. In the year of 1954, there was a bit of a recession. At spring recess of college, my chums and I loaded into a car and tried to line up one of our typical summer jobs; we had little success. In previous summers, I had worked at Bethlehem Steel, Sylvania Television, or the City of Buffalo department responsible for trimming or removing trees and dealing with grass and weed overgrowth on City property. That year, 1954, we extended our search to all the chemical plants and other industry in Niagara Falls, New York, a bit of a ride from Buffalo, but doable. We had no luck anywhere, or that was what I thought. That failure proved to be the luckiest day of my life. I soon learned the Jewish overnight camp outside Buffalo had a need for counselors; I quickly grabbed the opportunity and signed up. There I met and fell in love with a very good looking, smart, and talented co-counselor, Miss Alice Jo Maisel. We had a great summer and at its end Miss Maisel was off to Wellesley College and I returned to Cornell. After three years of courtship, we convinced our parents that our love for each other was immutable and we married and moved into a back bedroom and study room suite on the second floor of the Maisel’s home in Buffalo. From that perch, I finished medical school and the former Miss Maisel finished her senior year at the University of Buffalo, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa writing an undergraduate thesis on the Demand Theory of Economic Development using Brazil and Chile as Examples. After graduation, awaiting my completion of medical school, she went on to be the founding administrator of a psychiatric clinic sponsored by the Buffalo Jewish Federation in an effort to bring psychiatric care to those unable to afford psychiatric care.
Later in life, after our three daughters were older, she went back to school at the Rochester Institute of Technology to get an advanced degree in computer sciences and, after her degree, worked at a small firm that specialized in innovative custom software for business applications. She developed and installed these systems in many Fortune 500 companies and their subsidiaries in Latin America, learning Spanish to facilitate those interactions. (The CEO of the company at an annual dinner said to me, “My greatest wish is to clone Alice Jo.”). In 2019, she was named the 2019 Distinguished Alumna at the Golisano School of Computer Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology for her work and for developing programs to encourage women to enter the field.
Alice Jo receiving the 2019 Distinguished Alumna at the Golisano School of Computer Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology. From left to right: David C. Munson, President of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Alice Jo, Anne Haake, Dean of the Golisano College of Computer and Information Sciences at RIT.
Our greatest experience was to watch our three daughters succeed in their interests and raise a family with their husbands, each of whom is himself an outstanding person. Our seven grandchildren are an amazingly talented group with diverse interests from lawyer to medical student to singer-songwriter, to music producer, to commercial vessel deck officer, to high school student (honor student, artist and equestrienne) and to college student (merit scholarship and accepted into the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Special Research Program) . (The definition of a genius is a person with a grandparent.) So, the luckiest day of my life was the day I met the real Marvelous Miss Maisel.
Written June 2020