In Memory of Caryn Amy Shalita

1968-2005

Love on the Beach
A husband remembers the highs in front of Low.
By Richard Yaker
Columbia University, School of Engineering and Applied Science 1990
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/connection/connect/mycu/2562.html

When I was an engineering student in
the late 1980s,I spent much of my time
on the steps in front of Low Library.I sat
just to the left of Alma Mater,facing But-
ler.I went there every day — on nice days
when everyone was out and we should
have been in class, and on cloudy ones
when I sat there alone with my head-
phones on. I was a member of Sigma
Alpha Mu, and the pledges called me
Steps Yaker, because they knew they
could always find me there.

There were two major parties that
spilled out onto the streets when I was in
school.The first was when the Mets won
the World Series in 1986,and the second
was when Columbia beat Princeton at
Homecoming in 1988. It ended a 44-
game losing streak that had lasted six
years.My friends who graduated the year
before me had never seen a winning
game in their time at Columbia.That day,
everyone came out to the steps,fraterni-
ties brought kegs,and even though it was
a dry campus, the administration left us
alone,probably because it was a once-in-
a-lifetime event.

In the spring of my senior year, when
the weather started warming up,my frater-
nity brothers and I decided to have a bar-
becue on the steps.We brought charcoal,
ground beef, and hot dogs, and set up a tiny hibachi.At first it was only five or six of us,but by the time the sun went down,
40 people had come by.All Campus Secu-
rity did was tell us to put our beer in
paper bags.We assumed that if open bot-
tles were forbidden,an open flame in the
middle of campus certainly would have
been too,but we did it anyway.

As a senior,I lived on 11 Schapiro,the
new dorm that opened in 1988 on 115th
Street between Riverside and Broadway.It
was named after Morris Schapiro ’23CC,
brother of the art historian and University
Professor Meyer Schapiro ’24CC, and it
allowed Columbia to provide four years of
housing to College and undergraduate
SEAS students.I was lucky enough to get
a single,but even luckier that I met Caryn
Shalita ’90CC,an English major and aspir-
ing actress who lived on my hall.Soon we
became friends,and one of the things we
shared was sunbathing in front of the
library.A lot of people spent time on the
steps, but no one to the extent that we
did.We brought blankets and towels as if
we were at the beach,and we started post-
ing a “Low Beach Weather Advisory”sign
on Alma Mater, reporting winds, clouds,
or clear skies and good tanning.

Caryn and I went on spring break that
year with our friends, first to Florida to
lie on the beach,then to New Hampshire
to ski.On the way back to school we hit
a Grateful Dead show in Albany.

When
graduation rolled around we put our
gowns and caps on and,of course,headed
to the steps. Joe DiMaggio received an
honorary degree,and even though Caryn
didn’t know a thing about baseball, she
got a picture of him with her and her
family.

I wasn’t there, because I sat with
the engineering students, but later she
told me that just as they were posing for
the camera, they saw an elderly woman
struggling to make it down the stairs.
DiMaggio excused himself and escorted
her all the way to the bottom — and then
came back for the photo.Nearly ten years
later,Caryn wrote an essay about it,call-
ing him a gentleman and remembering
the moment as a reminder of how she
wanted to be when she grew up.

Shortly after graduation, I moved to
Silicon Valley to work at a computer
company, and Caryn traveled around
Europe with a plan to return to New
York and pursue acting. We stayed in
touch, and by January 1991, our close
friendship blossomed into a romance.She
moved out west and we settled in Los
Angeles, where the film jobs were.We
were married in August 1993. In our
wedding video, one of my fraternity
brothers joked about how I was always
hanging out in front of Low, and that I
had a singularity of purpose — a certain
girl in a blue bikini.

Caryn and I were married for 12 glo-
rious years before she passed away in
November 2005 from complications due
to a skin disease that doctors were never
able to diagnose.The steps are very spe-
cial to me.They were not only part of my
daily life for my four years at Columbia,
but also where the most important rela-
tionship of my life began.

Last April, I was in New York on a
beautiful sunny day.I took the train up to
Morningside Heights, wandered around
a bit,and stopped at Schapiro,which still
looks the same.Then I grabbed a slice of
pizza at Koronet and had lunch on my
spot next to Alma.