Recalling My Encounter with Peter Yarrow

 They walk among us.

No, not zombies. Rather, actors and other notables going about their daily business, walking streets, eating in restaurants, attending events. 

One such celebrity was the singer/songwriter/political activist Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary fame. Yarrow died Tuesday, January 7. He was 86 (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/arts/music/peter-yarrow-dead.html?smid=url-share).

I have a problem remembering names, offset by a talent recognizing faces. Often I press pause while watching TV to point out to Gilda an actor’s role in a different show we’ve seen. I’ve observed numerous notables, most often while I worked in Manhattan, including Steve Allen and his wife Jayne Meadows, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Neil Simon, Johnny Damon, Richard Lewis, David Wells, Jackie Onassis. Usually, I shake their hand, thank them for their work, and try to do so without causing a stir that might alert other pedestrians to their proximity to the famous. 

As a fan of Peter, Paul and Mary since the early 1960s, I had no difficulty recognizing Yarrow as we stood in line during an intermission of a play on, and this is truly eerie, January 8, 2011, one day shy of exactly 14 years before his death (I know the date as I posted a blog on January 9, 2011, about meeting him the night before).  

During intermission of “A Little Night Music,” I wrote, I literally ran into Yarrow. I thanked him for being one of my cultural heroes and told him of the time in 1968 I sat in the first row of a PP&M concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center and distracted bass player, Dick Kniss, into missing a beat in one of their songs.

Peter was most gracious, seemingly pleased to be recognized but not revealed to the throngs surrounding him. Ten minutes later, as he passed me on the way back to his seat, he said hello to Gilda and our friends and remembered my name. 

Magic Johnson Owes My Wife a Big Thank You

Magic Johnson accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden Saturday. Perhaps, probably, Johnson and the rest of the NBA, indeed all athletes on all levels, from amateur to professional, in all sports, owe my wife Gilda a resounding, “Thank You.”  

For it was Gilda who devised and conducted a study between July 1987 and May 1989 proving the HIV virus was not transmitted through eccrine sweat, thus enabling Johnson to resume his Hall of Fame basketball career. He and athletes from all sports could compete without fear of transmitting or contracting AIDS through contact with another person’s eccrine sweat, the type of moisture found on epidermal skin meant to cool down overheated bodies. 

Serving as the research coordinator for the division of Infectious Diseases and Departments of Medicine, Pathology and Microbiology, New York Medical College, Valhalla, under Dr. Gary P. Wormser, Gilda was tasked with undertaking a study on whether sweat contributed to HIV transmission. She recruited HIV positive and control subjects. 

Her challenge was to formulate a way to make them sweat so she could collect their droplets in a sterile fashion. 

Serendipitously, one of the bathrooms used by her colleagues had a shower. By running extreme hot water that raised the bathroom temperature and humidity, subjects standing outside the shower were induced to sweat. Each subject wore long sterile plastic gloves up to their upper arms. Sweat dripped into the gloves, collecting in the fingertips not touched by each subject. Gilda extracted the sweat with a sterile syringe. 

No HIV virus was found in any of the samples. Results of the study were published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases in January 1992. Dr. Wormser was the lead author. 

Magic Johnson had retired in the fall of 1991 after announcing he had tested positive for HIV. After Gilda’s study was published, Johnson played in the February 1992 NBA All-Star game, even being named MVP of the game, before taking several years off to undergo treatment. He resumed his playing career in 1996 for 32 games before his final retirement.

Fear of HIV/AIDS persisted, even to this day among parts of the population, but Gilda’s involvement in the groundbreaking study debunking the role of sweat in the transmission of the disease has kept athletes on their respective playing fields and surfaces.