Help us honor the life of Alvin Charles Goetz III
Remembering Charles Goetz 1951-2007
“If Charlie was your friend, you had a bunch of friends, and that bunch kept growing exponentially, new people added with each new adventure. They were exotic, interesting, fascinating people who spoke with accents or even in other languages, and you felt smarter and more interesting yourself because you were among them.”
Terry Greiss
What is Irondale? The Irondale Center is a place. The Irondale Ensemble Project is a permanent company of actors and theater people. Our arts-in-education program is renowned, and supported by the likes of Con Edison, Brooklyn Community Foundation and J.P. Morgan Chase. We’re a world-class organization with big dreams. We’ve accomplished a lot, and in the year since we opened the Irondale Center, we’ve done everything we promised we’d do. But we opened the week Lehman Brothers collapsed. Fund-raising has been very difficult. We need friends, friends like Charlie.
Charles Goetz was a friend to Irondale from its beginnings - as a dream in our heads - until the day he died, and the dream lives on. He was a supporter, fan, critic, trustee, and, as he would put it, a gadfly “It’s my job to harangue the board.” He was alive when the opportunity to take the space presented itself, but he didn’t live to see the opening of the Irondale Center. Yet his spirit is here, and the gumption that underpinned every life-decision he made is here too. Helping Irondale is helping the memory of Charlie
Please help us raise $100,000 so we can honor him by naming Irondale’s Gallery/Mezzanine in his memory. His wife, Ellie, his mother Dorothea and his brother and sister, Nick and Laura join me in this effort. Irondale was important to him, and we think his contributions merit this honor. To all his friends around the world, his classmates, his students and his business associates, this is a way for you to commemorate him and give him recognition he deserves.
Click here to help create the A. C. Goetz III Gallery at the Irondale CenterAt the time of his death, Mr. Goetz taught physical science at Warren G. Harding High School, in Bridgeport, Conn. 
He is survived by his wife, Eleanor L. Major-Goetz; his mother, Dorothea S. Goetz, of Palm Harbor, Fla.; his sister, Laura L. Goetz, of Indianapolis; his brother, William Nicholas Goetz, of Palm Harbor, Fla.; one niece and one nephew. A memorial service was held Saturday, May 12, 2007 at 1 p.m., at United Congregational Church, 275 Richards Ave., Norwalk, Conn. A reception followed at the Ledgebrook Condominium Clubhouse, Gillies Lane, Norwalk.
Charles Goetz III, 56, of Greenwich, Conn., died suddenly April 16, 2007 in Eastham, MA. He was born in Toronto, and spent his early years in Manila, Philippines. Upon his family’s return to Canada, he completed his elementary and secondary education in Port Credit, Ontario. He spent a year abroad at St. Stephen’s School in Rome and attended Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, N.Y., where he earned his BA in 1974. He went on to do graduate work at the University of Victoria, British Columbia and the University of Ghana in Accra.
His career took him to Rome, where he taught at St. Stephens’ School; and Singapore and London, which served as his base while he worked as a geophysicist for several international offshore exploration companies. He did graduate work at the University of London, focusing on marine geology and later taught at Rydens School in London.
Mr. Goetz loved books, history, science, music, theater and travel. He had a life-long respect for nature. His love of adventure led him to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro during an African safari, trek through the Borneo rainforest, and explore the Attu Islands. Throughout his adult life, he was involved in work with Amnesty International and animal rights groups and was a volunteer at the Mid-Fairfield Hospice in Norwalk, Conn. He was a private pilot and a certified SCUBA instructor as well as a member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers.
Click here to help create the A. C. Goetz III Gallery at the Irondale CenterTerry Remembers Charles
It’s hard to know what to say about Charles, because there were so many different Charleses, and there’s so much about him that I want to remember. I have spent the past few weeks trying to burn memories into my brain, because I don’t want to lose them and still it’s hard to believe that he’s not going to be on the other end of our answering machine or walking through the door with a shopping bag filled with 3 years of belated birthday presents, because he’d been on some ship exploring some ocean off of some island on the other side of the planet.
I never believed that friendship was random. We choose our friends because in some way they add something to our lives that we don’t have, or they represent something we want to be. Charles was my friend for more that 36 years. I was 18. I knew Charles in my teens, twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. And the friendship grew and deepened each year.
From the very first day Charles was larger than life to me and he remains that way to this day. He had climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, lived in Italy, the Philippines, crossed the Sahara. He was a Canadian Indiana Jones before the character was ever created. If there was a part of the world he wanted to see, he found a way to get there He was my friend and my role model at the same time. I wanted to do the things he had done—to see the places he told me about in the stories he told. Knowing him and being his friend was romantic. The spirit of adventure was so deeply ingrained in Charles that it made you understand that anything you could imagine, was possible. I think in some way he knew that and wanted to share those adventures, he always stayed connected. He used to send our son Liam hand written letters from his ship, illustrated with pictures of flaming oil derricks, portraits of the crew, birds, and filled with stories of real-life, modern day pirates.
Charles was a magnet for people. Not too many people who crossed his path stayed strangers. He was truly fascinated by everyone he met and that fascination was infectious. So, if Charlie was your friend you had a bunch of friends, and that bunch kept growing exponentially, adding new people from each new adventure. They were exotic, interesting, fascinating people who spoke with accents or even in other languages and you felt smarter and more interesting yourself because you were around them.
For years it wasn’t Christmas until I got off the train in Westport with my little dog, Touchstone and Charlie meet me at the station, saying I think you’ll like the people coming for the party this year. Some of them he’d just met himself.
As I think about it Charles was there for of every major undertaking in my life and in some ways made many of those undertakings possible. The first one, our first major adventure together was during Freshman or Sophomore Year at Sarah Lawrence when we decided to avoid the cafeteria food. We bought a used refrigerator, painted it fire engine red and cooked dinners together – mostly spaghetti sauce and couscous. I had never had couscous before, but as I said Charles was exotic.
When I started a theater company, Charles was there at the beginning, planning how to raise money (not successfully, but always enthusiastically)—he was my biggest fan, even when he hated a particular play, he loved what I was doing and was excited and anxious to share my adventures. He joined our board of trustees, where his self-appointed role (as he put it) was to harangue other board members.
In his obituary one reads: He was a science teacher in Bridgeport. On first reading that doesn’t seem to correlate with the life of adventure that Charles had lived for so many years, but those of us who knew him well knew how much he prized being a teacher of children. In some ways it was his Everest. He always talked about the day he could leave the oil biz and teach—and he wanted to teach high school kids. He brought the same idealism, the same nobility, the same dignity that signified his life to teaching. He made it noble.
Whenever our friends die, we say it is too soon. It has nothing to do with how old or young they were— It’s always too soon for us, no matter what their age, because we miss them. But when we lose the integrity and goodness, the passion for knowledge and for knowing, that was all part of Charles, then the world becomes a smaller, sadder place and the world knows: it’s too soon.
I have learned a lot from Charles, even in his passing— and I know how important it is to tell those we love how much we love them—how much their friendships mean to us— and I know that the way, perhaps the only way that Charles will continue to live will be in the stories we tell about him, and in the we keep him alive. That will be easy.
So I’ll end this with one more story: during the time we lived together on 98th street in Manhattan, Charles slept on the sofa bed in the living room, except for the period of time that Francine was there when we both slept on the sofa bed in the living room. (We were very chivalrous.) He was doing 6 million jobs, most of which he hated and would come home exhausted. I was trying to start a theater and was exhausted all the time. BUT since the TV was in the living room, the rule was that he couldn’t go to sleep until I watched Start Trek. Now you all know how much he loathed television or pop culture of any kind. He hated the idea of Star Trek and the more he hated it, the more I tried to elevate it to high culture and teach him about the finer points of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. I tried very hard to educate him as to the Brechtian overtones or the correlations to Joseph Campbell, but he wasn’t buying it. (He was very biased.) Yet… and this is the important part, he did watch it. I like to think that it was not just because I sat cross-legged on his bed while it was on. I like to think that it had to do with friendship.
Click here to help create the A. C. Goetz III Gallery at the Irondale CenterThe A. C. Goetz III Gallery at the Irondale Center
Contributors
Betsy & Digby Cook
Lynda Crawford
Frances David
Sue and Gertrude Elswick
Dorthea Goetz
Dorthea Goetz: In Memory of Curtis Long
Laura Goetz
William Goetz
Alice N. Levin
Dolores Morisseau
Richard T. Peebles: In memory of Peggy Peebles
Sue Pellowe and Gordon Major
Lars Egede-Nissen & Nancy M. Egede-Nissen
Anne B Poole
Alis Robinson
Ralph, Barbara and Cynthia Shifflett
Trig Treadway
Francine Webb
John Edward Johnson & Sharon K. Vance