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Dear Classmates
,Pat, Dan and Jones are not alone, am I so saddened by Ed's passing!! Being a big public figure, Ed was yet a very private person. This might have taken a toll on him as he might have known his illness 3 to 4 years back which would have given him much needed time to possibly cure it if he would have made it known to us.? Alas!!
Inspired by the film of World Cup Soccer 1966 of British Goalie Gordon Banks, Ed and I became close in the later college years when he was interested in becoming a goal keeper. He invited me to stay in his parents' house where I witnessed his wayward artistry firsthand and his artistic sister's superb piano interpretation of Chopin. We together watched a soccer team from Hong Kong playing at Taipei Soccer Stadium. We used to sit back in one of those boring classes, we kidded around as he drew a bold design pattern on the left arm of my T-shirt which I now most regretfully misplaced. Then he did that on his tennis shoes as well. He did not wear socks and without shoe strings at the time which was eye-opening to me from my "conservative" background in Tainan.
He brought me to meet his friends, female and male alike, in a smoke filled cafe at a street corner in Taipei. It was eye-opening to me again as his female friends were smoking a lot. I could tell they were very talented people, thinking unconventionally, joking a lot and participating proactively in wide topics at the time. This might foster his desire of film making of free and independent thinking down the road.
Ed's tantrum throwing was well-known in the college time, not to any indi-vidual but to what was assigned to him. Although he did superbly well in the tests, he did not like Control Engineering at all. He once said he did CE because his parents wanted him to. I sympathized with him based on different reasons due to my priority of playing soccer in the day and practicing violin at night over my college courses. In the end, God made him shine so well in the path he had chosen and did absolutely brilliant on the world stage as Pat mentioned being the best film director at Cannes Festival. In this world, there has been only
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person claiming the best film director at Cannes with Control Engineering by training under his belt.
Life is like riding a time train, we get on at our birth and get off in matters of time. Ed just got off and we remember and miss him so much for his giving us much inspiration and great pride when we relate him as our good old 1969 classmate, thanks to his parents.
Attached please find our first picture together March 2005 long after the graduation. I knew he wanted light cuisine like Japanese but he did not elabo-rate exactly why. Who would have ever thought this now becomes our invalu-able last!!
Ed, may you rest in peace as you had fought a brilliant fight. Kelly and your son are in our daily prayers.
Max S
58 alumni-voice.nctu.edu.tw Gordon Banks 1966 T- S h i r t T- S h i r t 5 8 2 0 0 5
