About the Poet Paul Shapshak, PhD, attended the public High School of Music and Art in Harlem (New York City). He studied music, conducting, violin, and piano. The entire class of 500 students received high school graduation diplomas from Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. He attended the Henry Street Settlement Music School, Lower East Side (NYC), with a full scholarship, studying violin and chamber music (teacher, H. Kwalwasser), orchestra (conductor, P. Vermel), conducting, music history, harmony, musicology, and counterpoint composition. He previously studied harmony with H. Hyams and conducting with A. Hartman. He won several annual Eisteddfod competitions for piano and violin. His first piano teacher was E. Klempmann. His first violin teacher was Nikolai Nikolaev, who had played violin in the Tsar's orchestra in the early 1900's, and was a classic teacher, tea samovar, jam and tall glass with metal holder, as well as staff to keep time. Upon arriving in NYC, a family friend, the Irish poet-playwright, Brendan Behan, walked him to the subway station, several mornings, until he got the hang of safely getting to school. He participated in orchestra and chamber music concerts at the High School of Music and Art, the Henry Street Settlement Music School, radio WNYC, and played the Mozart fifth violin concerto at the Lower East Side Park Amphitheatre in 1958. In High School senior year, he built a Wilson Cloud Chamber and photographed particles traversing an internal electric field. He started the high school math club, wrote its constitution, and helped set up a tutoring schedule for classmates. In the summer of 1956, he studied French at the public Stuyvesant High School. In the summer of 1957 he worked at Mangel Stores Corporation as a book-keeper and bank liaison. In 1958, he received a summer-school full scholarship to study mathematics at the Rhodes School (NYC). In the summer of 1959, he turned down an invitation from a Wall Street firm to work for them, since he received a full scholarship to participate in the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado. At the Aspen Music Festival, he studied violin with Szymon Goldberg (World War II concentration camp survivor with numbered tattoo), chamber music with Ralph Hillier (Juilliard String Quartet), orchestra (Salomon conductor), as well as musicology. With full scholarships, he attended Harvard College (BA), New York University Medical Center, NYU Washington Square Graduate School, and then Princeton University Graduate School (PhD). During the summers of 1962 and 1963 he worked at the Massachusets General Hospital, in the Biochemistry laboratory. While attending Harvard College, he worked at the Waltham Massachusetts State Mental Hospital for Children for a semester, under the auspices of Harvard Phillips Brooks House and the State Psychiatry Board. [His weekly job with several children at the Waltham State Mental Hospital was to discuss and teach Art - drawing and painting and as a potential therapy, he promoted non-objective art forms. He was on the college fencing team and had previously studied fencing at the Montecelli Fencing School. He was invited to be producer of the play, 'Bodas de Sangre' by the Spanish playwright, Federico Garcia Lorca, which was staged at the Harvard President Pusey Student Theatre. During 1962-1963, he co-chaired a Ford Foundation Cultural Grant Committee at Kirkland House. Guest speakers included Shelley Winters, William Golding, Yalta Menuhin, Paul Doktor, and Jao Martins. His courses included an English literature survey course taught by Professor William Alfred and a course on molecular biology taught by Professors James Watson, Sir Francis Crick, and Sidney Brenner. In his senior year 1963 departmental exam, he predicted that neutrinos have mass. He played violin and viola in the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, Bach Society Orchestra, Cambridge chamber music groups, and also conducted chamber music groups at Kirkland House, as well as open-air concerts at exam-time on the steps at Widener Library. In 1962, playwright Arthur Miller, a family friend, reviewed with him what his career choice would be. He became a Resident Fellow at Princeton University graduate school, attended math meetings (headed by Gilbert Baumslag) at the Institute for Advanced Study, and once ran into Kurt Gödel. He is ever thankful for the many gifted fellow-students, colleagues, teachers, and friends.
