My Parents and Grandparents.

My maternal grandfather Harvey Chess was the owner of a steel mill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that was later sold to Wheeling Steel. He made a number of inventions in structural steel. He died just after World War I, likely from Spanish influenza. His wife survived him, but lost most of their wealth in the depression.

My mother Jane Reif has born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1921. She grew up in Pittsburgh during the depression in a large family with another sister and four brothers. She attended college at Hollins College, University of Wisconsin, and Carnegie Tech and majored in physics among other topics. She worked as a probation officer at Allegheny Court Juvenile Court, and as an administrative assistant for various educational, medical and social work organizations. She retired in 1995.

My paternal grandfather Heinrich Reif was a lawyer in Vienna, Austria specializing in copyright law. He married Margit Gestetner from Bratislava in 1913 and they had three children (see 1929 and 1932 photos): Evy Featherstone-Witty, Charlotte Alice (Mucki), and my father Arnold E. Reif. Heinrich Reif served as an officer of the Austrian-Hungarian Army in World War I and was captured by the Russian Army and was for 3 years at a prisoner of war camp in Siberia. The camp was on the sea and in the winter he was allowed to walk out onto the ice for exercise. Once he walked too far out, and a Russian Cossack guard rode out on horse back onto the ice to punish him with a whip. My grandfather glared down the Cossack so fiercely, that he turned around and rode back to the camp without hitting him. Later, during the chaos at the beginning of the Russian revolution, my grandfather escaped across Russia back to Austria. Heinrich Reif wrote several books and for his book on legislation for Austrian coal mines he received Austria's highest civilian decoration, Knight of the Austrian Order of Merit (a white medal the baron wears in the movie “The Sound of Music”). Tragically, in 1934 his wife Margarita died of a kidney shut-down caused by an autoimmune reaction to a drug at age 42. Just before World War II, In 1938 Heinrich Reif escaped to England just prior to the Nazi annexation of Austria, but was imprisoned by the British on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien. In England, he was not able to practice law. A few years after his release he died in London from bladder cancer contracted from chain-smoking.

My father Arnold E. Reif was born in 1924 in Vienna, Austria. His mother died when he was ten. He was very devoted to his governess. Starting when he was about 12, his governess took him skiing at Kitzbuhel, Austria; at that time there were no ski lifts, and the ski bindings used leather straps. In 1936 his English great-granduncle entered him in a boarding school, Giggleswick in Yorkshire, England. During World War II Arnold went to Cambridge University, graduating in 3 years with a BS and then received a MS. After the war, he worked for 3 years at Sheffield University, then went to Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh to earn a D.Sc. (Doctor of Science) in Physical Chemistry. My parents met and were married there, and my older brother Bertrand was born there. Four years after my grandfather died of cancer, my father decided to switch to Cancer Research, and did postdoc work in Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin.

I was born in the University Hospital, Madison, Wisconsin in August 4, 1951. My younger brother Joseph was also born there.

We moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1954 where my father became a Research Associate at the Lovelace Institute. While there, he raced on the 5-man team for Albuquerque in the Southern Rocky Mountain Ski League. This included Santa Fe's team, then run by Ernie Blake, who later founded Taos ski area. In 1957 my family moved to Wellesley, MA, when my father joined Tufts Medical School, where he became an Research Associate Professor of Surgery. His lab was at Boston City Hospital, and when it became part of Boston University Medical School in 1974, he was asked to stay on as Research Professor of Pathology. My father discovered the first T cell marker, an antigen he named Thy-1. He edited 3 books and published over 100 articles on cancer topics including immunology, viruses and causation, and several articles on sports medicine. He chaired the Ski Committee of the Appalachian Mountain Club, was founding chairman of its Music Committee, and for thirty years participated in the club's white-water kayaking trips. My mother divorced him in 1968 and he remarried in 1979. He retired in 1989, then entered Harvard Divinity School where he earned a master's degree, MTS. He has finished a book on Smoking, and is working on books on Cancer Prevention and on Forgiveness.