It’s been 42 years since Arnie Kamen left high school. Since then he’s made his mark at the Merc, helped sell millions of dollars in Israeli bonds, and raised a family. But in some ways he never got away from high school.
Few of them stay in touch with the tenacity and enthusiasm Kamen shows, however. He made a few phone calls to old classmates and raised in excess of $4,000, which has helped buy new backboards for the gym and uniforms for the boys’ basketball team. He hopes to create a $100,000 athletic fund that will support all the school’s teams.
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Aside from raising funds, Kamen’s foremost ambition is that Roosevelt students know the fight song.
His ultimate goal, he says, is to heighten the confidence of Roosevelt students.
“Our whole universe was Albany Park,” says Manny Weincord, a 1950 graduate who now teaches gym at Roosevelt and coaches the boys’ basketball team. “We belonged to social athletic clubs. I was in the Ovikitahs. Arnie, I recall, was a Seneca. We were sports crazy. I would have stayed at the Strauss Center all night, if my mother would have let me.”
In 1989, when he retired from the commodity business and started visiting the school regularly, Kamen discovered that Roosevelt had changed a great deal. Because of open enrollment, students came from neighborhoods across the city; they were no longer concentrated in Albany Park. They confronted problems of gangs, crime, and drugs that his generation had never even imagined. These students weren’t basking in the glory of U.S. victory in a world war or anticipating unlimited growth. Roosevelt was still a gateway to life, but the future wasn’t as bright as it had been 40 years earlier.
The song has been playing since December, and so far reviews have been mixed.
