"Keep Smiling" At Marymount Manhattan College
By Joan Baum

Recently, at Marymount Manhattan College "Keep Smiling,” the watchwords of 94-year old philanthropist Mortimer Levitt's life and philosophy of life, needed no prompt: to be elicited. Smiles came naturally from him and from the five happy New York City high school students who gathered in the College's Mezzanine to celebrate their having been finalists in the first Mortimer Levitt Essay Contest on the theme of “what else! “ Keep Smiling. Asked where the phrase came from, the irrepressibly upbeat, nattily dressed bon vivant flicked a black-gloved hand, looked over at his admiring wife Mimi, and replied with a mischievous grin, "you could kill yourself if you don't.” He then quickly launched into a flawless nonstop short disquisition on the (usually less than admirable) interests of college students today, noting that one of his recent projects has been fashioning syllabi for culture in the classroom. After all, he noted, it was he who over 30 years ago had suggested to the Met that the way to increase the size of the opera-going public, especially young people, was to bring in subtitles “an inspired idea that James Levine was not yet ready to embrace. He shrugs his shoulders in bemused recollection. Mortimer Levitt is a man of discreet charm and fixed determination. A high school drop out himself, he looked around with pleasure at the eager high school juniors who had gathered on that rainy afternoon, beneficiaries of his select caring and largesse, and there was no doubt: Mortimer Levitt had more than earned an advanced degree or two in smarts.

Education Update, Inc., P.O. Box 20005, New York, NY 10001.
Tel: (212) 481-5519. Fax: (212) 481-3919.Email: ednews1@aol.com.
All material is copyrighted and may not be printed without express consent of the publisher. © 2002.